<div style="text-align: center; margin: auto;"><ahref="https://i2.wp.com/instascribe.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/World-Book-Tour-Nigeria-01.jpg?w=630&ssl=1"/>By Worth A Read</a></div>A random set of readings in this blog post…
Amshuman read Something Rich and Strange by Ron Rash, an esteemed author and poet and winner of many awards. His writing is evocative of the gloomy Virginia landscape and his short stories chronicling the grief of an illiterate state rife with meth- addiction assume a universal aspect. The landscape permeates the population of Rash’s stories and defines the nature of their lives. The grief Rash describes illuminates the soul, rather than bringing it down “It’s not the grief of a death in a Harry Potter novel, It is a beautiful sadness. Kind of like the sadness you feel when you watched the series True Detective,” Amshuman said.
A discussion ensued on the question of the necessity of grief in literature. Be it ‘Sadness’ as a crucial character in the movie ‘Inside Out’ or how grief can be plotted in an unappealing way as it seemed for Apurba when she read The Lowlands by Jhumpa Lahiri, grief is an essential component of the cathartic aspect of art and writing. Grief can also be featured in a graphic novel as is the case in the book Safe Area Goražde by Joe Zacco, which is an account of the Bosnian War. Another book that carries grief in a way that is not overbearing is The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.
Sunny preferred to get away from the sadness of it all and spoke about The Complete Sherlock Holmes:All 56 Stories And 4 Novels by Arthur Conana Doyle. The novels in this collection are The Valley of Fear, The Hound of the Baskervilles, The Sign of Four and A Study in Scarlet. The 56 stories have been divided into five books: the Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, the Return of Sherlock Holmes, the Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes and His Last Bow.
Everyone knows about Sherlock Holmes and his adventures. Sunny spoke about how Holmes managed to solve mysteries with his remarkable observational skills in spite of being a victim of addiction (can’t help comparing the idea of addiction as reason for grief in Ron Rash’s novel and the way addiction is not viewed as a hindrance by Doyle). It is simply impossible to judge Sherlock Holmes and the reader is left to let him be Holmes with his own ‘Holmish’ skills, inimitable and capable of making the whodunit aspect of Doyle’s work take a backseat. Conversation veered to who the better Sherlock Holmes was- Robert Downey Junior or Benedict Cumberbatch? Incidentally read this about the Cumberbach-Sir Arthur Conan Doyle connection.
Anurag spoke about a book by Nassim Nicholas Taleb called Fooled by Randomness, a standalone book from his Incerto series. The book talks about his favorite subjects-chance and human error, and demystifies the idea of luck. Success, for instance, is greatly over-rated, and patterns are often gleaned where there really none. Randomness, of course, leads you to think about what makes a Youtube video go viral. The book is a find if you are inclined towards understand economics in a day to day set-up. Anurag also mentioned how he benefited from the book Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt.
More books in Part 7.
The party ended with conversation about women in books, and democracy.
Renu spoke about a book called Princess: A True Story of Life Behind the Veil in Saudi Arabia. The story revolves around Sultana, a Saudi Arabian princess, who is immensely wealthy but is a prisoner in a gilded cage. The story has been told anonymously and recorded by Jean Sasson. For Renu, the trilogy is not as heart wrenching as A Thousand Splendid Suns but she still thinks that the book has great aspirations and talks about some very important issues like women’s rights. Where Sultana lives, young girls are forced to marry men five times their age and victims of unreasonable punishments. Baraa believes that while the discriminatory practices of Saudi Arabia are well-known, not all Arabic speaking nations are the same and Arabian history has been forgotten too easily. Anurag mentioned how the ideas that people have about anything, including women’s rights, is governed by the society we live in. In China, for instance, it is not surprising when women technicians come home to fix the air-conditioning. In India, this would still raise eyebrows.
Keeping with the woman-inspired book series theme, I’ve been reading one of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels, the first one of the series My Brilliant Friend. The story is a translation and focuses on the friendship of two women spanning four books. It is hard for you not to order the subsequent parts of the series as the friendship between Elena Greco and Lila is absorbing, filled with the conflicts and rivalries of any close friendship. Simultaneously, Elena’s circle of friends reveal the socio-political milieu of Italy during the 1950s.
Abhaya spoke about Democracy: A Very Short Introduction, a short account of democracy published by Oxford University Press. The book speaks about the origins of democracy from ancient Greece and Rome. While democracy entails the concept of liberty, there are no specific duties associated with it, except or jury duty in the US. So participation, which is a defining feature of democracy, is not an absolute necessity. Another contradiction is how in some situations human rights limit democratic claims. It is a good idea to understand democracy, Abhaya said and he quoted: “Man’s inclination to justice makes democracy possible, but it is our capacity for injustice that makes it necessary.”
And with that we wound up the BYOB Party. The next stop was the food.
Baraa spoke about a book called Being in Balance: 9 Principles for Creating Habits to Match Your Desires by Dr. Wayne W. Dyer. The book is an inspirational one that offers nine principles to realign your thoughts so that you can achieve your goals. Baraa liked the way the author stressed on not even ‘being’. Just be, he says. The idea sounds very Buddhist, Jaya said.
Baraa emphasized how a language like English is far too dry to express the myriad emotions that languages like Arabic could express. This conversation on languages led to the understanding that language can influence the way people think.
Pratyush got a book called The Price of Altruism by Oren Harman. The book is steeped in the idea of Hamilton’s law of Kin selection. Is altruism or kindness part of evolution? Harman examines the lives of insect societies to understand altruism as it exists in other species. He then talks about the eccentric genius George Price who solves the mystery of altruism. If you think that altruism is reserved for living things, you may want to read about Altruism and Robots here.
There was a counter-view that altruism does not exist at all. Adi spoke of the strange case of the Murder of Kitty Genovese and what is now known as Genovese syndrome or the bystander effect, where each witness of a crime assumes that someone else will take responsibility, thereby resulting in no one helping at all. Baraa found the idea of behavioral altruism dry but as Jaya pointed out science and morality rarely meet and though Genovese could have been helped, the fact remains that she was not and this was why such studies of behavioral altruism or the lack of it are so important. Studies prove that pointing to a specific person while asking for help is a better alternative to calling for help.
On a lighter note, the idea of diminished responsibility exists in corporate offices where each one thinks the other will do a task and also in politics when in a democracy shared responsibility leads more to negligence than shared action.
More books in Part 5.
There was a dash of sci-fi at the BYOB Party this time.
Adi read the famous satirical novel Slaughterhouse 5 by Kurt Vonnegut. The protagonist Billy Pilgrim is the ultimate time traveler. Vonnegut himself was part of the military at Dresden during WWII and the book focuses on the fire bombing there, only to have the protagonist abducted by aliens. The prisoner of war enters another dimension where ‘all moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist.’ Time is unstuck and the narrative is fluid moving through different moments in time in no particular order. In the world Pilgrim inhabits free will is a myth. The idea of the fourth dimension is a well spring for fiction, philosophy, sci-fi and mathematics. It’s the blind spot that can’t be seen and so from a void comes interpretation.
The idea of aliens led to a discussion on the Sapir Whorf Hypothesis (The hypothesis states that the way people think is strongly affected by their native languages. It is a controversial theory championed by linguist Edward Sapir and his student Benjamin Whorf), the movie Arrival, the reasons behind the ancient Aboriginal individual’s innate sense of direction, Richard Feynman’s experiments, an app for the hearing impaired and language as a means to lie and obfuscate.
Speaking of dimensions, Akshay spoke about a book available online, one called Flatland by Edwin A. Abott. Check out the movie trailer here.
Dinesh got a sci-fi book by Orson Scott Card called Speaker for the Dead. This is the sequel to the famed Ender’s Game, a book that attained cult status in the US (take the song: Ender will save us all) and was even studied to understand classic military strategy. In the second installment, a second alien race has been discovered and only Ender remains to confront the truth. This book is the winner of the 1986 Nebula Award for Best Novel and won the 1987 Hugo Award for Best Novel. But it hasn’t been all rosy for Orson Scott Card. Read more about the controversy he has been mired in here.
More books in Part 6.
Welcome to a very mathematical BYOB Party session.
Akshay has been attempting to read a book called Meta Math by Gregory Chaitin, the famous mathematician, for a long time. The book is mathematically dense and deals with the idea of discovery of omega or incompleteness. Akshay thinks the best way to get around this book is to have a notebook and pencil to solve proofs as you read. This slows down the reading process but the book is a goldmine for the mathematically inclined. Akshay found Chaitin’s opinionated statements delightful, particularly his disdain for Newton.
This book reminded Pratyush of Roger Penrose’s The Emperor’s Last Mind, a book that addresses different questions but uses a similar path. Penrose talks about physics, cosmology, mathematics and philosophy in an attempt to demystify Artificial Intelligence. Books like these make subjects that are seen as dry, such as math, seem extremely interesting. They strengthen the idea of education as questioning and retaining curiosity.
Abhaya mentioned that Logicomix, a graphic novel by Apostolos Doxiadis, humanizes mathematicians and deals with their personal struggles and mental health issues. Another mathematical graphic novel that Akshay mentioned was The thrilling adventures of Lovelace and Babbage by Sydney Padua, winner of the British Book Design and Production Award for Graphic Novels. This graphic novel deals with an alternate version of the collaboration of Ada Lovelace, daughter of Lord Byron, and Charles Babbage, the inventor of the computer.
If mathematicians interest you try reading Men of Mathematics by Eric Temple Bell. Mathematicians are famed for their eccentricities and mental health issues more of which are lucidly described in A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines by Janna Levin.
More books(unmathematical, I’m afraid) in Part 4.
It was Sumit’s first time to any book-related group and he made his entry with a non-fiction New York bestseller called Dead Mountain: The Untold True Story of the Dyatlov Pass Incident by Donnie Eichar. The story is set in 1959. Nine experienced hikers mysteriously die in the Ural mountains in Russia. Their story has been documented. So there are diary entries, photographs, government case files, and interviews. “Those nine people turned into nine distinct persons. I connected with the hikers and felt for them. I didn’t want them to die in the end,” Sumit said. The mystery of their death remains unsolved.
“Literature humanizes people beyond your circle of experience,” Jaya said. “This makes a good case for historical fiction as it gives history a different persepctive.”
In the context of stories being more poignant than statistics, Anurag spoke about A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James. The story begins in 1976 before the Jamaican general election. Bob Marley and his family were wounded by assassins. James traces the lives of the murderers and tells the story of Jamaica simultaneously. He uses a large canvas and multiple points of view to paint a richer tale of the past.
Apurba is a fan of historical fiction too and spoke about her favorite books including Gone with the Wind and the Ibis trilogy by Amitav Ghosh. She was reluctant to start The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver but she is glad she read it as it is the kind of book that stays with the reader a long time after it is read.
The Poisonwood Bible is a story where the wife and four daughters of the Price family are the narrators, each chapter being alternately told by on of the five narrators. Nathan Price is a fierce, evangelical Baptist. When he moves with his family to the Belgian Congo in 1959, they are uprooted, shocked and transformed. Apurba speaks of an instance when the stubborn Price wishes to continue with baptisms but is faced by logistical problems like crocodiles in the river.
Conversation veered to the function of historical fiction in throwing light on ways of life and times entirely foreign to readers. For Apurba, Kingsolver provided a very different view of Africa as compared to the ideas of Africa narrated by writers like Chinua Achebe and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
History could be made richer by historical fiction. Do you agree or disagree? More books discussed in part 3.
The BYOB Party in December kicked off in December with the question of education. Ralph has a penchant for online PDFs that deal with academic subjects. The last time he had got a book with 23 words sentences, as he called it– Philosophy of Intellectual Property by Peter Drahos.
This time he talked about The Educated Mind– by Kieran Egan. The book discusses the problems with education and provides alternatives by way of practical proposals. Unfortunately the book is peppered with huge words and while it talks about simplifying education, it is a difficult book to read. Ralph, however, recommends the book.
The book reminded Jaya of a book called Hindi Nationalism by-Alok Rai, Premchand’s (the famous Hindi writer) grandson. Topically the books are dissimilar but what the books have in common is a tendency toward obscurity. Though both books deserve to be read, the difficulty of prose and repeated use of hard words can be a setback for an earnest reader. Hindi Nationalism deals with ideas like the separation of Hindi and Urdu, the history of language in India and Hindi as a national language. Many people consider Urdu to be exclusively poetic though writers like Manto wrote Urdu in its prosaic form.
More books in Part 2.
