The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company by William Dalrymple

Wowee, what a book. I read this in preparation for my trip to India. Originally I had planned to fly into Delhi because that’s where the plane went. I’d have a look around and then move on. Now I know I will be visiting the hub of the Mughal Empire. Before this book I knew nothing about the Mughals, this proud dynasty of Muslim warrior emperors with their vast wealth and political and battle prowess. Nor did I know much more than the name of the British East India Company. Tom Hardy’s TV series Taboo hinted at their dark dealings but that was about it. Little did I know: this was the world’s first stock holders company, a company that used its financial and political influence to gain a trading monopoly in India, where they essentially bankrupted the entire country to satisfy the greed of their shareholders. Bengal has been the richest region in the world, home to the wealthiest man in the world, responsible for something around thirty percent or more of the world’s wealth. England was responsible for less than 5 per cent. Through political influence, the raising of armies, warfare, betrayal and corruption, the EIC completely turned the tables. William Dalrymple tells all this in his fabulously conversational story-telling style. Not only do we learn about the action-facts, but there is also a load of detail about the daily lives and predilections of the people we meet. For my tastes there’s altogether too much detail about the wars, blow by blow in all their gory misery, but for true history buffs that’s probably essential. This was a great preparation for India and I’ll be looking at the Red Fort in Delhi through entirely different eyes because of it.

Priestdaddy by Patricia Lockwood

Oh what a joy to read! I loved, loved, loved this book. This is the true so-far life story of the writer and poet Patricia Lockwood, whose father is a married Roman Catholic priest. She and her husband Jason move back home while they are regrouping both financially and emotionally and she uses that time to write a book about her family and upbringing. The book is wicked and hilarious, deeply moving, poetic, philosophical, angry, thoughtful and satirical. And did I already say it? HILARIOUS. Lockwood lays herself bare, with all her vulnerabilities and self doubt mingling with a wonderfully observant wit and irreverence for the culture in which she finds herself. Her characters, with all their flawed eccentricities, are both recognizable and memorable. And her language and metaphor is that of a poet. This is one of the best books I’ve read in years, beautifully balanced, filled with moments of extreme hilarity mixed with reflection and at times pain.

Noughts & Crosses by Malorie Blackman

Such a disappointment. This was one of the Guardian’s best 100 books or something, but it was just rubbish. The plot itself is obvious and heavy handed. The noughts are the white people and the crosses are the black people. And they have reversed roles so that the noughts are victimized by the racist crosses. There’s nothing more to it than that, all tied up in a first person teenage love story that reads like a thirteen year old’s dear diary. Ordinary writing, no characterization to speak of, no nuance, no surprises: really, really disappointing. Blah. I want my money and my time back!

Light by M John Harrison

This is one of the trickiest books I’ve read in a long time and I struggled to understand it. However I was utterly compelled to keep going with it. It’s a science fiction novel in three strands. In the twentieth century we have Michael Kearney, a physicist who is investigating singularity (which I have no idea about) and his ex wife Anna. Hundreds of years in the future we have two people who are living on planets that are part of the Kefahuchi Tract, which is a singularity. I looked this up and found this: ‘In the center of a black hole is a gravitational singularity, a one-dimensional point which contains a huge mass in an infinitely small space, where density and gravity become infinite and space-time curves infinitely, and where the laws of physics as we know them cease to operate.’ First we have Ed Chianese, a ‘twink’ ie someone who lives their lives in a virtual reality tank, who was once an ace space ‘surfer’ and then there is Seria Mau who is a female who allowed her body to be fused with her spaceship and has become a freelance assassin. Kearney is on the run from a creature called the Shrander which he believes he can only keep at bay if he murders women. Ed is deeply in debt and on the run from his creditors until he is recruited to join a circus as a soothsayer. Seria is trying to find the meaning of a box that she has obtained. So the story moves from one strand to the other. Surprisingly, although I spent a lot of time frustrated because I couldn’t understand the science behind what was happening, it was the detail – the mathematics (an entity which runs the ship) and shadow operators, and cultivars and the ‘new men’ with their gangly limbs and red hair and the genetically engineered rickshaw girls and the ‘tailor’ who is a genetic engineer and all the other wonderful invented creatures, and the development of the characters - that make this such compelling reading. I think the more you read this book the more you get out of it. There are threads of imagery that run through it, and once you are confident enough to forget to worry about the science, then you can immerse yourself in this fabulous detail and also in the wonderful imagery on Harrison’s writing. And in the end, all is explained – and though I wasn’t sure what that explanation entirely meant, a book as rich as this has left me thinking about all its other aspects instead

Visitation by Jenny Erpenbeck

This is a strange almost ghostly story about place. A landscape, earth and water, is formed over millennia. And then a house is built on the shores of the lake. As the politics of the German twentieth century unfold, the house changes hands. The Jewish family are forced to sell, for half the market value, to the German architect who works with Speers on the Germania project. He renovates the house with love. At the end of the war, it is occupied by the Russians. Under the GDR, the architect must also flee because he has done business with the west and faces imprisonment. Returning exiles from Siberia claim the place. There is a court case over illegal possession. And they then sell the house. Through all of this the character of the gardener appears, going through is routine of lovingly managing the grounds and the boatshed and the woodshed, opening and closing the house as summer moves in to winter, dismantling and re-erecting the wharf for the summer season. There is a sort of poetic movement about all this, and of course that’s reflected in the lovely language. Erpenbeck tells the story of the house as a detached observer, describing the thoughts of her characters but never allowing them anything other than an internal life, as it were. What is horrifying though are the vignettes of utter, despicable violence, the no holds barred cruelty of humankind, which are all the more searing because of the tranquility of the setting. This is an old book, published in 2008 I think, but a classic.

One Hundred Years of Dirt by Rick Morton

Journalist Rick Morton really exposes his belly in this honest and arresting memoir. Born into a family who owned millions of acres of land beyond the dingo fence, (we’re talking Birdsville Track territory here), Morton grew up in the shadow of a violent, unpredictable father. His mother took the three kids and left when he was about seven, and then began years of living below the poverty line in a small town an hour and a half inland from the Gold Coast. He talks about why poverty is endemic, about how and why the poor have very little hope of escaping, about the role of luck in life, and about the role of desperation. He addresses issues that most people are shy of confronting – his brother’s ice addiction and his surprise that he escaped the same fate. It’s not as if he made wise decisions about his life, he says, it’s simply that he responded to the horrors of their lives in a different way from his brother. He talks abut the marginalisation of ‘other’ groups, such as homosexuals, about the latest research showing the genetic makeup can be altered by poverty, about depression, about the traumas of childhood that mould who you are and your behaviours as an adult. His thesis is that most people cannot and do not escape poverty and his arguments are compelling, to say the least. Yet there’s no self pity here. And it’s certainly not a misery memoir of the kind so popular a couple of decades ago. But he’s certainly angry about the type of society that institutionalises poverty, all the while looking the other way.

Good Muslim Boy by Osamah Sami

I had never heard of this actor/comic/writer before I read this memoir. But now I’ll be looking out for him! Throughout this story I kept checking how old I was and what I was doing in my life while all this was happening to this boy. It was shocking to compare my life, lived in comfortable ignorance, bringing up my kids, hanging out with friends, going on nice holidays, all that stuff, while this kid’s little brother was being blown up on the roof of their house. And that was only a sentence, a mere aside to Osamah’s story. I marvel that he survived Iran, and then I marvel again that he managed to make the life he has done for himself here in Australia. I marvel at his resilience, his honesty and his warmth. The memoir is shocking, sad, heart warming and hilarious. It’s written by a charming, intelligent, funny man, who has lived through things we can only imagine. So many adjectives describing this book! It’s a must read.

Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman

This is a sweet novel that reminded me a little of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time. This time the protagonist is not someone with autism. It’s told in the voice of a damaged human being, Eleanor, and tracks her progress as she begins to unpick her personal history and come to terms with what has happened to her and to heal herself. Satisfyingly, this is of course achieved through human connection and friendship. And just to keep things moving, there is a healthy and quite skillfully devised set of unexplained events that gradually unfold. I was genuinely surprised by the ending, which impresses me! I powered through this charming book in just two or three sittings.

Kim by Rudyard Kipling

My dad gave me this book when I was about eight years old. I remember struggling to read it, and it did take me a couple of years before I managed it. Rereading now, I’m amazed that I managed it even then! It’s a fascinating insight not into India so much as into the attitudes of the British and colonists. Kipling is wordy and difficult for the modern day reader, used now to plainspeak and plot driven stories. The book itself doesn’t actually have much in the way of plot – the child is recruited by the British rulers as a messenger/spy in their battle to stop the Russians gaining a foothold in Afghanistan. He travels through India as a disciple to a Buddhist lama gathering and disseminating information along the way. The real joy of this book is the characterization, with wonderful rough diamond horse traders and eccentric lamas and bumbling yet somehow highly effective spy masters who can take on any disguise and speak any native dialect. It’s harder work than a modern novel, but a classic.

Pachinko by Min Jin Lee

I’m not all that keen on long family sagas, spanning three or four generations. There’s never enough room for proper character development or any kind of thoughtful analysis or detail around the events that happen. There’s just too much to cram in so the whole thing degenerates into ‘and he did this and then she did that and a year later this happened and another five years later we’ve suddenly all moved on and something else has happened and all the kids have grown up in the meantime …’ But having said all that, I quite enjoyed this book because I knew nothing at all about Korean history or about their relationship with Japan. So this book charts the story of various generations of Koreans who were colonized by the Japanese, moved to Japan, lived through the war (which barely rates a mention in the book!), got involved in running pachinko (gambling) parlours and then all more or less died. The theme of the entire thing is the struggle Koreans had, and possibly still have, with the extreme racism of Japanese towards them, even if they have been born in Japan. So I found it worthwhile reading the book, even though I don’t think it was particularly well written.

Rules of Civility by Amor Towles

I’ve read this book before but I so much enjoyed rereading it almost ten years later. This time, I took the book slowly, reading just a few pages at a time instead of greedily gulping the story down as I so often do. Amor Towles is a magician with words and imagery. There were times where I just stopped and thought about how he had phrased things, how original and clever his metaphor is. This time too I felt that I recognized a distinct Great Gatsby influence, which I don’t think I was aware of before. The book is set in roughly the same period, and charts the entry of a working class girl, Katey Kontent, into the upper echelons of New York society. Its characters are thoughtless and hedonistic, and at times as arguably corrupt as Mr Gatsby himself. And of course a love story runs through as the backbone of the novel. I think I still prefer A Gentleman in Moscow, but both books are thoughtful observations of a class system – albeit one in the US and one in Russia – seen through the eyes of characters that you can warm to. Lovely, lovely, lovely. My favourite book(s) at the moment. I can’t wait to see what Amor Towles produces next.

Dark Emu by Bruce Pascoe

The second in our non fiction group’s series was also disappointing. We all felt that Pascoe’s subject could have been presented in a much more succinct way. Having completed an undergraduate degree majoring in anthropology and had some experience working with Indigenous people, nothing in this book really surprised me. It all made so much sense. The development process of Indigenous culture is not dissimilar to many cultures around the world and it was no surprise that Indigenous peoples farmed land, managed animal stocks, saved seed, created art, travelled widely for ceremonial gatherings and so forth. Of course there were many details that we didn’t know – that Aboriginal people built stone dwellings in alpine regions, for example. I was especially interested in the records that the early white explorers kept, in which they observed the agricultural practices of the Aborigines. Of course, once settlers marauded across the land with their destructive farming practices, all that evidence was wiped out. I also found the sections about governance very interesting. But there was also a lot of unsubstantiated opinion in this book – what white settlers were thinking when they made certain decisions, for example. Unless Pascoe had access to records of these people’s thoughts, then it’s not wise to make assertions. We can imagine, but we can’t claim anything as fact without some sort of evidence. Having said all that, it’s a worthwhile book to read and different people will learn different things from it.

Golden Hill by Frances Spufford

This guy is in love with Henry Fielding – wordy, lush prose, swashbuckling and sometimes ribald adventure, innocence abroad in a big bad city….. The story is set in 18th century New York, a dark and dangerous place populated with thieves and drunkards at one level and political manipulators and spies at another. The protagonist arrives from London with a secret personal mission, not revealed until towards the end of the tale, and is thrown into this maelstrom of humanity. I didn’t love the plot as much as the telling, and it did take some concentration to get into the swing of the language – yes, pretty much like Fielding! It was an absorbing, entertaining read and really a terrific first novel for this writer. I’ll be interested to see what he comes up with in the future and whether he develops another authorial voice to match his subject.

Capital by Thomas Piketty

I read this for my newly formed non fiction discussion group. Or at least I read the first half of it! The theme of the book is that inherited wealth is the foundation of inequality. It’s a Marxist viewpoint. So, when a person inherits wealth, then they can invest those additional assets into further wealth producing assets. And thus wealth inequality not only continues but increases. It’s not a new story. His solution is taxation, specifically death taxes I think, but as I said I didn’t get to the end. Friends who know these things are quite critical of the book and his theories, but I am not well enough educated in the area of economics to do much more than observe the arguments. The group stopped halfway through because we all felt overwhelmed by the content, including all the formulae etc, but then we are all from a humanities background and chose this book to challenge ourselves. It sure did!

The Runaways by Fatima Bhutto

I heard Fatima Bhutto speaking at the Sydney Writers Festival this year, about both the problems that beset Pakistan and specifically about this book. She attempts to open people’s eyes to the phenomenon of young people leaving their homes to fight with militant Islamist groups through the medium of fiction. The book deals with three young people who leave their homes running from problematic lives, where they feel they have no place. You get both the back story and the story of their journey, in all its horrifying detail as they become ever more deeply embroiled in their situation. I didn’t enjoy this book particularly. I found it a very depressing read, not surprising when the real life situation is exactly that.

No Friend but the Mountains by Behrouz Boochani

This is a very hard book to read. It’s hard because of the story it tells, the flight of this brilliant Kurdish journalist, thinker and poet from persecution in his homeland and his incarceration by Australian authorities on Manus Island. Where he still is. It’s hard because he wrote his story as texts on his phone and sent it out via WhatApp. So what he talks about is the unremitting banality and boredom of daily life, interspersed with the horror of the third world conditions of mundane things like food queues and toilet filth, and then the flashes of hideous violence, torture and death of the inmates. Yet the language is beautiful, just beautiful. He escapes, in a sense, into philosophical musings. And there is something about Farsi that translates as poetry, probably the structure of the original language itself, which the translator has allowed to retain itself. This is a book that makes you angry, that you don’t want to read because it is true and it is wrong, but that you must read.

The Mongol Empire: Genghis Khan, his heirs and the founding of modern China, by John Man

Everybody has heard of Genghis Khan, and anyone familiar with Coleridge will recall his grandson Kublai Khan: ‘in Xanadu di Kubla Khan a stately pleasure dome decree…’. And by the by, Kublai also conquered and united tribes like the Jin and the Song to create what we know as modern day China. John Man’s book about the Mongols who built an empire greater than the Romans, yet lasted only about 150 years before their line failed, is conversational and readable. I got more than a bit lost with the names of all the khans and their generals, their powerful and politically manipulative wives and the groups they led and those they conquered. However, the big picture emerges of a fierce and driven warrior group, who relentlessly invaded, murdered and pillaged all that lay before them. Man’s book looks too at the legacy of the Mongols, not so much anything cultural, because apart from their belief in a god called Blue Heaven in a sort of shamanistic religion, they did not impose any cultural values on the states they conquered. They were nomads, herders and warriors, not poets and musicians. Their legacy, rather, was how the world developed as a result of their empire building, to begin with their presence in the genetic makeup of 16 million men today, probably, Man says, because of their constant movement and the habit of giving beautiful women to the generals as booty. Second, Man believes the Mongols may have played a critical role in spreading the Black Death along what he describes as their ‘pony-express’ travel routes and because of their tactic of hurling plague infested bodies over the walls of an Italian port town they were besieging, from where it may well have been carried back to Europe. Third he believes that the Travels of Marco Polo, who visited China when the Mongols were in power, influenced Christopher Columbus and the rulers of Portugal and Spain, who were keen to find sea routes to the east once Constantinople had been captured by the Turks, closing the overland trading routes. He talks too about how a distant relative of Genghis, Timur (or Tamburlaine as the English know him), had a descendant called Babur who seized power in India and founded the Mughal dynasty that only ended with the British in 1857. And so it goes. There’s so much detail in this book that it’s impossible to remember most of it but it is nevertheless fascinating and I’m hoping remnants of what I’ve learned will pop up at the appropriate times.

Machines Like Me by Ian McEwan

This book had outstanding reviews. But from a pleb’s point of view, it was a difficult and depressing read. Ian McEwan has always tackled difficult subjects that raised impossible moral and ethical questions. His people are never particularly likeable. It’s not really fiction, it’s more philosophy. So this one is about a thirty something bloke called Charlie, his upstairs neighbour Miranda and a robot he has bought, called Adam. There are shades of The Tempest here. The robot has to be ethical but it puts into contrast the behaviour of the humans. At one point Charlie tells Adam it’s not always important to tell the truth, but of course this is what the whole novel revolves around and this is the point of difference between the humans and the robot. Perhaps it was me, but I felt I was wading through all these depressing ethical debates when I really wanted to be uplifted by something. And that just didn’t happen. There was no hopeful resolution. Having said all that, this wouldn’t be a bad book for book clubbers because there is just so much to debate in it.

Georgiana Duchess of Devonshire by Amanda Foreman

This is my second ‘serious’ book for the month, one of those tomes where you read a chapter at a time in order to take it all in with time for reflection. Amanda Foreman is a terrific biographer, someone who does excellent in-depth research but is capable of writing in an accessible, extremely readable style. There’s nothing dry about this biography at all – indeed I found myself itching to get back to it to discover the next chapter in the remarkable Duchess of Devonshire’s life. So, how about this woman, born in 1757 and active socially and politically and romantically for 49 years? What a personality! What influence. This is period where there’s a lot going on: the American War of Independence, the French Revolution, the Regency crisis and the madness of George III, the Napoleonic Wars, the ascendency of the Whigs. This is a period of really much greater female power, just before the ascendency of the Victorians, which put a stop to all that with pursed lips. Georgiana is in the middle of all of it, deeply involved with the Whigs, best buddies with the Prince, and moving in political circles as possibly the greatest influencer of the time. But wait there’s more: her lover and/or best friend, Bess, who moves in and becomes Georgiana’s husband’s lover as well, then a whole slew of other lovers and consequent illegitimate children for Georgiana, Bess, Georgiana’s sisters, the Duke. Oh yes, she’s a writer as well. It’s as engrossing as a soap opera but all of it is true. I read this after seeing The Favourite, the outrageously entertaining film about Queen Anne and the struggle for power between her two favourites/lovers. At the time I thought the director had been taking a bit of dramatic licence, but after reading about Georgiana’s world, I’m not at all sure! This is an unmissable read for anybody who is interested in history and this remarkable woman.

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari

It took quite a while to get through this book because I needed to stop after each chapter to try to process what I’d learned. I’d describe this book as popular science, in other words, scientific thought made accessible with clear writing, good story telling and examples, and patient logical explanations of complex issues. It traces the rise of humankind through revolutions: the cognitive revolution (put simply, the emergence of complex language that gave us the ability to imagine), the agricultural revolution, the unification of humankind (who said globalization was something recent?), and the scientific revolution. While I know the detail won’t stay with me – indeed most of it has disappeared already :( - what has stayed with me is the sense of human beings as mere animals who have exploited evolution to rise to dominance. There is no guaranteed future for us. I’ve often described myself as a humanist but although it is obvious if you think about it, I’ve never before considered that this puts homo sapiens on a pedestal above other life forms. As a humanist I am saying that the individual is the centre of all things. I’m really not sure how comfortable I am with this. So this is a book to get you thinking about all sorts of things about the human condition. It warrants re-reading.