Hoi! It is that time of the year to revive the almost-annual Silklist tradition of sharing our book recommendations. I would love to hear your recommendations.
The books I loved reading in 2023 are: 1. Mofussil Junction by Ian Jack; What a delight to read. Jack paints the sights, sounds and smells of India with prose. I especially enjoyed his pieces (paeans?) on the Indian Railways, particularly the rapidly disappearing (as he was writing these pieces) steam locomotive stock. 2. Smoke and Ashes: A Writer's Journey through Opium's Hidden Histories by Amithav Ghosh: Colonization and Capitalism told through Papaver somniferum. The beginning chapters are excellent. The last chapters become a little repetitive. 3. The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov: A fantasy novel about the devil and his henchmen visiting Moscow during the Stalinist years. 4. Hit Parade of Tears by Izumi Suzuki: Great second wave Japanese sci-fi. I'm so glad I got to read this. 5. Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler: Scarily prescient book written in the early 90's and set in the mid-2020s. I cannot believe how much Butler got right about today. 6. The Travel Writing Tribe: Journeys in Search of a Genre By Tim Hannigan: Hannigan originally wanted to write travel books like the ones he grew up reading since he was a teenager, but the gradual erosion of the genre, and the critical questions being asked about the veracity of famous travel writers meant that Hannigan had to re-do his plans. He ended up writing this book - a travel book exploring not so much a region or a country, but the whole field of travel writing and the critical discipline of travel writing studies. If, like me, your bookshelf is filled with travel books, you would love this book. Every year I read a book or two which I love so much that I would even consider buying a few copies to give to friends. This is one of those. 7. Free: A Child and a Country at the End of History By Lea Ypi: An excellent book that manages to balance criticism of totalitarian communism of Hodja against the painful fictions of neoliberalism. The painful transition that Albanians experienced was only theoretical to me before. Now it is embedded in my mind through the lives of this Ypi family. 8. The Trees By Percival Everett: Blaxploitation set in Trumpian times. 9. Victory City By Salman Rushdie: A return to old form for Rushdie. Unlike some of his work of more recent vintage, this one was an easy (and very entertaining) read. It is no Midnight's Children or Satanic Verses, but it is on-par with Shame and Haroun and the Sea of Stories. The book is purported academic tract about a newly discovered work of a South Indian woman (Pampa Kampana) who lived for 250 years during, and whose life was inextricably intertwined with that of, the Vijaynagar (literally, Victory City) empire. 10. Ōoku: The Inner Chambers By Fumi Yoshinaga: An interesting manga series. Imagines a Tokugawa-era Japan where two thirds of men are dead from a mysterious illness and gender roles are flipped. The Shogunate passes down through Women and Men are kept as objects of desire and value. Thaths -- Homer: Hey, what does this job pay? Carl: Nuthin'. Homer: D'oh! Carl: Unless you're crooked. Homer: Woo-hoo!
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