Skip to main content

Books and 2017

My little library

2017 was a relatively bad year for me where books are concerned.  First of all, I couldn’t read as many as I wished.  Secondly, quite a few of the books I read don’t deserve a second read. 

Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness disappointed me.  “The socio-political activist in the author has superseded the literary artist,” as I wrote in my review.  I concede that we live a painfully fragmented world and writing fiction is a highly challenging job.  How does a writer fathom the depths where too much debris of fragmented things and people, fragmented gods and legends lie scattered in utter chaos?

PaulaHawkins’ The Girl on the Train is thelast book I reviewed in 2017.  “The Number One Bestseller” is a good entertainer and not serious literature.  Evil reeks heavily in every page of the book.  I was left gasping for fresh air by the time I reached the last page of the book.  Once again I was left longing for good literature.

Two of the best history books I read during the year are Christians, a Malayalam book and Sapiens:A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari.  The former traces the history of Christianity in the world and in Kerala with the dispassionate authoritativeness of a historian.  The latter is a brilliant look at mankind, its evolution, follies, achievements, and possible future.

Jose Maliekal’s Standstill Utopias? is a book with a difference.  Written by a Catholic missionary priest, it questions the nature of much religious activity carried out in the country with a particular and academic focus on the Madiga people of Andhra.  Teesta Setalvad’s TheFoot Soldier of the Constitution: A Memoir could have been a much better work with a little more editing.

The best book I read in the year (end of 2016, in fact) is MyName is Red by Orhan Pamuk.  Uniquely crafted, intellectually challenging, imaginatively stimulating, the novel is wonderful though it won’t extract a second read from me. 

I look forward to a better year as far as reading is concerned.  I hope to discover some good works in 2018, works that explore the human dilemmas and agonies with breath-taking imaginativeness.   


PS. Written for IndiSpire Edition 201: #Books2017

Comments

  1. Pranju chakrapaniDecember 28, 2017 at 10:20 AM

    I have read three of the novels mentioned here. I found the ministry captivating,didn't find it bias, and although raw at the start, the novel went ahead to create a literary piece, with questions that still persists in my mind. With more experience, perhaps, I would be able to get the answers to those questions.

    Of course, Sapiens is the best book in non fiction category which had a tremendous impact on me. The history of mankind through evolution both biologically, intellectually and politically revealed the dynamics of why our world is so and what can we expect to converge into in the distant future.

    The girl, as you have mentioned is entertaining and I really don't mind reading such thriller once in a while.

    I am keeping my name is red on my to be read shelf for the coming year.

    Right now, based on your suggestions in multiple blogs, I am reading Zorba the Greek. And my, my! That is a novel! Simply loving it. The contrast between buddhu and zorba is evident. And am eager to see what zorba does after making the slop on the mountain, and how the narrator comes in piece with his inner buddha. Such a masterpiece. I am awed.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalDecember 28, 2017 at 9:33 PM

      I missed you here for quite a long while.

      I never said Ms Roy is a biased writer. Far from that, she is a committed writer. As committed as a religious person. Every leftist is as committed as any religious person. A good novel rises above that commitment. Rises to the level of deeply learnt personal truths. Ms Roy does not seem to have learnt those personal truths.

      Zorba remains my favourite even now, years after I read it first.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Pranita a perverted genius

Bulldozer begins its work at Sawan Pranita was a perverted genius. She had Machiavelli’s brain, Octavian’s relentlessness, and Levin’s intellectual calibre. She could have worked wonders if she wanted. She could have created a beautiful world around her. She had the potential. Yet she chose to be a ruthless exterminator. She came to Sawan Public School just to kill it. A religious cult called Radha Soami Satsang Beas [RSSB] had taken over the school from its owner who had never visited the school for over 20 years. This owner, a prominent entrepreneur with a gargantuan ego, had come to the conclusion that the morality of the school’s staff was deviating from the wavelengths determined by him. Moreover, his one foot was inching towards the grave. I was also told that there were some domestic noises which were grating against his patriarchal sensibilities. One holy solution for all these was to hand over the school and its enormous campus (nearly 20 acres of land on the outskirts
12 comments
Read more

Machiavelli the Reverend

Let us go today , you and I, through certain miasmic streets. Nothing will be quite clear along our way because this journey is through some delusions and illusions. You will meet people wearing holy robes and talking about morality and virtues. Some of them will claim to be god’s men and some will make taller claims. Some of them are just amorphous. Invisible. But omnipotent. You can feel their power around you. On you. Oppressing you. Stifling you. Reverend Machiavelli is one such oppressive power. You will meet Franz Kafka somewhere along the way. Joseph K’s ghost will pass by. Remember Joseph K who was arrested one fine morning for a crime that nobody knew anything about? Neither Joseph nor the men who arrest him know why Joseph K is arrested. The power that keeps Joseph K under arrest is invisible. He cannot get answers to his valid questions from the visible agents of that power. He cannot explain himself to that power. Finally, he is taken to a quarry outside the town wher
19 comments
Read more

Queen of Religion

She looked like Queen Victoria in the latter’s youth but with a snow-white head. She was slim, fair and graceful. She always smiled but the smile had no life. Someone on the campus described it as a “plastic smile.” She was charming by physical appearance. Soon all of us on the Sawan school campus would realise how deceptive appearances were. Queen took over the administration of Sawan school on behalf of her religious cult RSSB [Radha Soami Satsang Beas]. A lot was said about RSSB in the previous post. Its godman Gurinder Singh Dhillon is now 70 years old. I don’t know whether age has mellowed his lust for land and wealth. Even at the age of 64, he was embroiled in a financial scam that led to the fall of two colossal business enterprises, Fortis Healthcare and Religare finance. That was just a couple of years after he had succeeded in making Sawan school vanish without a trace from Delhi which he did for the sake of adding the school’s twenty-odd acres of land to his existing hun
10 comments
Read more

Levin the good shepherd

AI-generated image The lost sheep and its redeemer form a pet motif in Christianity. Jesus portrayed himself as a good shepherd many times. He said that the good shepherd will leave his 99 sheep in order to bring the lost sheep back to the fold. When he finds the lost sheep, the shepherd is happier about that one sheep than about the 99, Jesus claimed. He was speaking metaphorically. The lost sheep is the sinner in Jesus’ parable. Sin is a departure from the ‘right’ way. Angels raise a toast in heaven whenever a sinner returns to the ‘right’ path [Luke 15:10]. A lot of Catholic priests I know carry some sort of a Redeemer complex in their souls. They love the sinner so much that they cannot rest until they make the angels of God run for their cups of joy. I have also been fortunate to have one such priest-friend whom I shall call Levin in this post. He has befriended me right from the year 1976 when I was a blundering adolescent and he was just one year older than me. He possesse
8 comments
Read more

Nakulan the Outcast

Nakulan was one of the many tenants of Hevendrea . A professor in the botany department of the North Eastern Hill University, he was a very lovable person. Some sense of inferiority complex that came from his caste status made him scoff the very idea of his lovability. He lived with his wife and three children in one of Heavendrea’s many cottages. When he wanted to have a drink, he would walk over to my hut. We sipped our whiskies and discussed Shillong’s intriguing politics or something of the sort while my cassette player crooned gently in the background. Nakulan was more than ten years my senior by age. He taught a subject which had never aroused my interest at any stage of my life. It made no difference to me whether a leaf was pinnately compound or palmately compound. You don’t need to know about anther and stigma in order to understand a flower. My friend Levin would have ascribed my lack of interest in Nakulan’s subject to my egomania. I always thought that Nakulan lived
15 comments
Read more