The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy

I don’t read much fiction, which makes me a very slow reader.

When I started reading The God of Small Things, I had no idea what to expect. I had read some of Arundhati Roy’s essays, but none of her books. I was prepared to be surprised and stunned, but not this… There was something approachable in this book that kept me going. There was honesty that kept me coming back. Through the last few months, this book was my casual read. And then my sorrow read. And then my intense read.

I’m amazed at the fluidity with which it moved back and forth in time, the simplicity of the language, the layers in the story, and the depth and thoroughness in the details.

Life is in the small things, indeed.

Dum dum.

The Three Languages of Politics by Arnold Kling

Now that I think about it, it is not at all surprising that I picked up and read this book.

• I have been intrigued by language (so much so that getting machines to understand language is my day job!) for as long as I can remember.
• Observations that change how I see the world intrigue me.
• How people perceive, understand, decipher and involve themselves in politics has fascinated me over the years. (Go read any of my posts from yesteryears.)
• For the last few years, the breakdown of communication between myself and my family and friends who hold contradictory political ideologies has bothered me.

‘The Three Languages of Politics’ is a short book that I got through in under 2 hours. However, it is an insightful book. Within the first few pages, Arnold King introduces a rather simple framework for interpreting any political argument around you, and boiling it down to a probable set of bases that the person making it is coming from.

In the couple days between when I read the first half and the second half, I started breaking down opinions I saw floating on Twitter, in email newsletters, on blogs and in articles, into not just the ideologies of the person, but in a way that helped me make better sense of what was being conveyed.

Buy it, read it. There isn’t much to lose, but a lot to gain. I’ll leave you with a precious quote:

The only person you are qualified to pronounce unreasonable is yourself. You are qualified to tell other people that they are wrong. You are just not qualified to tell other people that they are unreasonable.

P.S.: I listen to Amit Varma’s The Seen and the Unseen voraciously and this has been recommended across multiple episodes.

Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari

Over the years, one thing that consistently bothered me was my inability to read and finish books. I started a lot of books, but finished rarely any. Over time, I lost interest in reading books. I read a lot of articles, blogs and news stories, some tens of thousands of words long, but I never got around to reading books.

In late November, I decided that I wanted to change this about myself and that I wanted to read more. For that, I needed a book that would keep me hooked, keep me interested. Over the last year, I had read and heard a lot of praise for Sapiens, and I was certain that that was the book I wanted to read. And so, it was.

I just finished reading the book last night, and to say it was an eye-opener, is an under-statement. It is an astute account of the rise of homo sapiens, the various revolutions that have occurred over the last several millenia, and goes on to lucidly describe the dominant (and other theories) surrouding each one of them.

One of its primary gifts to me was a new perspective. I had accepted humanity as it exists today (capitalism, social structure, religions, agricultural practices, etc.) without sufficiently understanding how they came to be. I now understand a little more about the story of the homo sapiens than I ever did.

Harari helped me learn more by questioning the why, which I hadn’t earlier, out of my arrogance, ignorance or both.

One of the most profound quotes of the book appears in the ‘Afterword’ and summarises everything the book goes over ever so succintly:

Seventy thousand years ago, homo sapiens was still an insignificant animal minding its own business in a corner of Africa. In the following millenia it transformed itself into the master of the entire planet and the terror of the ecosystem. Today it stands on the verge of becoming a god, poised to acquire not only eternal youth, but also the divine abilities of creation and destruction.

Here’s to the next book, and then a few more .