'I Am Legend' by Richard Matheson

Dire, this is, almost without respite from horror. Tiny buds of optimism pinched to death by a horrific alternate reality

It is the tale of a lone man remaining alive amongst a horde of infected, fighting them and his own mind. The book has a rare focus not on action and strength but on psychology and shifting perspective.

The development of the story toward the end throws doubt on the protagonist's and the reader's conceptions of morality and normality.

A brilliantly architected and cleanly executed book. A classic, and a very good example of the truth of the adage that one should never judge a book by its movie. 

'2 States: The Story of My Marriage' by Chetan Bhagat

The book has a gripping start, marred by an off-putting smattering of clichéd attempts at humour. The love story begins without any build-up of character, and the protagonist seems a thinly veiled representation of the author.

In an acknowledgment before the book starts (the first, longest, and most emphatic acknowledgement), Bhagat thanks his readers for making him “India’s most loved writer”. Such an expression of gratitude confers little worthiness on the thanked, other than to be susceptible to a fad and able to buy a book, but it is a heart-felt compliment for the author himself, a malodorous waft of arrogance with which to begin a book. These days, Bhagat describes himself as a ‘motivational speaker’ which is an unsurprising trajectory for an author with a penchant for oversimplification and a paucity of modesty.

Krish, the protagonist, starts as a smarmy MBA graduate who joins Citibank in a highly prestigious position, but wishes to be a writer. By chapter 3 he is defined by hubris and a lack of nuance.

My impressions are clearly clouded by cultural ignorance. I’m unable to identify with the characters or able to tell if the literary representation of his parents and relations and fiancé’s relations are realistic depictions of the various cultures, or whether they are, as they seem to me, superficial caricatures designed primarily for humour and narrative ease.

“...Well if the daughter can’t resist me, neither can the mother…” is the sort of immodesty that pervades, unmodulated by irony, undiluted by any sincere self-deprecation. This style may well not be individual but cultural, if his depictions of his relatives are to be believed, with their proclivity to flagrantly brag about their wealth and material attainments.

I am enjoying this book: it reads easily and develops many little conflicts and resolutions and portrays a colourful array of personalities across the pages, but I do not identify with any of them, and that doesn’t seem merely cultural. The way Krish handles himself reminds me not of Indians I’ve met in engineering or science but of North American management consultants. His writing seems designed to achieve maximum publication income, rather than convey emotional truth or strive for profundity.

The culture being portrayed here by Bhagat seems very much like the USA’s exultation of individual immodesty in which it is expected, and even appreciated, to preen one’s self, without irony, loudly and at every opportunity. Such behaviour in Australia or the UK or Germany invokes nausea and distrust and invites ridicule rather than reverence… I would be surprised if it weren’t so also in India.

'Prophets of Doom' by Dan Carlin

This is a departure from the written word, but the way in which Dan Carlin weaves a tale into its historical context is literature at its best.

I've listened to many of these podcasts, but the one that hooked me was the first I heard: the story of the Anabaptists in Munster who took over the city in months, instituted a reign of ISIS-style religious terror, and who were besieged and destroyed by the surrounding Catholic establishment. The subsequent torture and execution of the ring-leaders is still present in Munster as the empty cages swinging menacingly from the church spire.

In a postscript to the production of the Anabaptists' story, he expresses disappointment in it - they apparently prepared an entire 4hr podcast already and discarded it as inferior, but he is not sure he likes the released version more. An endearing admission, which boils down to a sense of inadequacy in explaining, even proximally, the insane behaviour of sane humans. His lament reminded me of the inadequacy of Drakulic's amateur psychology in trying to come to terms with the grotesque acts in the Bosnian war, and Carlin's self-effacement and awareness of inadequacy were part of what I found missing in Drakulic's book.

Carlin uses the theme of an intellectual contagion, which is very much related to the 'meme' idea popularised by Richard Dawkins, and used by Daniel Dennett to explain religion as a psychological phenomenon.

What I learnt:

• Anabaptist means 're-baptised' and their primary tenet is that one must be cognisant of all that the religion entails to be meaningfully baptised - which the babies and children of Catholics clearly are not.
• Religious terror of the form exhibited by ISIS, even their exact methods, are nothing new or inventive.
• Capitalism has been aligned with both class-based hierarchies as well as individualistic societies in which all are considered equal in rights.
• Anabaptism was a form of early communism.
• Martin Luther was actually moderate with respect to social order, he just wanted certain religious practices changed.
• Alexander Herzen wrote "History is the autobiography of a madman".
• There was significant controversy, and well-reasoned worry, about translating the bible into a language the peasantry could read.
• Martin Luther was well protected in society.
• It was probably more his translation of the bible and his idea that everyone should interpret the word for themselves than his grievances nailed to the church door that made him such a revolutionary heretic.

'In Cold Blood' by Truman Capote

Worthy of every accolade it has received.

The book is incredible. It is truth and reads like the most honed, racy fiction.

Capote generates genuine empathy for all characters, they are full, real. A character in it can be distinguished just from the nuance of a single line of quotation.

'Homicide' by David Simon

There are places in the book in which Simon uses his descriptions of the physical facts and events as bricks upon which to stand and survey the society. It feels apt to speak of transcendence, but it is misleading: Simon does not transcend the prosaic or the physical; he builds upon it. And the occasional deliberate phrase of wisdom he imparts do transcend the context of Baltimore homicide. He has written a book about American poverty, about internal metropolitan politics, about some of the best and worst aspects of human society. As with all good literature, the ephemeral and eternal is made tangible in the prosaic and specific .

This is a book for which I sacrifice sleep. A book that completely transplants me into another world, into a world far removed from my comfortable life and yet which is rendered immensely life-like to me.

The book is not about any individual, nor any single criminal case. It is centred on the homicide detectives of the Baltimore Police Department. Simon manages to make the story more gripping than a crime show and yet avoid sensationalising. He renders the detectives’ lives with grit and portrays the boring grind, without making reading about it a boring grind. He describes the painful, dispiriting, dis-enchanted-ness that must be the predominant daily emotion of police investigating murder in one of the most violent and impoverished cities in the industrialised world.

'The Dispossessed' by Ursula K. Le Guin

She has created a world of true high-functioning anarchy. The book is excellent. It is a gripping tale of indivviduals, with little futuristic paraphernalia. It is a well-informed, advanced imagining of realistic social structures, a genuine exploration of large-scale anarchist communes and conflict with a capitalist and sexist society.

The depictions are not extreme in their portrayal of individual behaviours – the book is populated by characters not merely caricatures. The sociological concepts that Le Guin explores are also realistic despite being taken to their extremes. The conception of the anarchistic society and the theories underpinning it (attributed to a female hero of the past, Odo) are consistent and well thought-through. They come to the reader through the story, not as didactic spoon-feeding. Many of the musings of the more intellectural characters are worth quoting in their own right, rare for science fiction, rare indeed for any fiction especially that which is so easy to read.

The book is a worthy journey of the mind. Anarchy is presented as an attainable good, but it is presented harshly, with great difficulties and a sense of uncertainty in its longevity despite its 170 years of past success. It is presented with the negatives, the hardships, the lack of prosperity, and the possibility of reversion to primitive behaviour. The restrictive bureaucracy that develops, as well as the small-minded dogmatic parochialism in the general culture, are presented as almost inevitable consequences of the social structure. The tall-poppy syndrome is not avoided, the negative as well as posisitve aspects are not shied away from in a fundamental opposition to individual ego, and the inherent contradiction of such a system that attempts to maximise individual freedom as well as cement social cohesiveness are all present.

As they also are in the portrayal of the capitalist society on Urasti, to which Odo’s anarchism is contrasted. The life on Urasti is also portrayed realistically and fairly and forms a real opposition to the ideals of a raw form of communism or anarchy. The capitist structure, the world itself, the pervasive but largely physically benign sexism are not flights of dystopian fantasy nor simplistic straw men, but could easily be an accurate account of Western life on Earth, if not now then in recent past, especially in the USA. In fact, Urasti is arguably superior to much of our modern society in its achievement of environmental stability, powerful and widespread riches, and a lack of extreme debilitating poverty.

This makes it all the more interesting and convincing when the anarchist elements spring from within the relatively privileged commoners and revolt against the very principles of ownership, materialism, and the right of one human to rule another.

Le Guin presents the contrasting societies thus in a way in which the opposing views on social structure can be seen as fundamentally opposed – not pragmatic differences of opinion on the likely concequences of structures, but on deep, philosophical and ethical stances on how a society should be structured.

The science in the book is similarly well informed though much less intricately developed, to the great benefit of the work. The science and technology is described at a sufficiently vague level as to avoid obvious inconsistency or impossibility, but it is advanced, inventive and concrete enough to provide a thoroughly plausible background and motivation for the coming about of the worlds and the actions of the protagonists.

'Gut Feelings' by Gerd Gigerenzer

I picked this book up randomly in the St. George book-store in Prenzlauer Berg, and flipped it open randomly and read a few pages. In those few pages I found, distilled into clear and patently true critiques, all the vague distaste I had felt for Dan Ariely’s brand of behavioural economics and the essentially arrogant attitude that humans are ‘irrational’ - an attitude that has pervaded the discipline since Kahnemann declared people logically impaired for rating a woman more likely to be a vegetarian banker than a banker.
The book has weak points, conceptually, and it is also written with the slightly clumsy amateurish prose of an academic writing for the lay populace, but for that it is quite remarkable among pop science for being quite clearly founded upon a deep regard for the intelligence of humans and for the immense complexity of this intelligence in the decisions they make.
The title of the book, and its subtitle (‘Short Cuts to Better Decision Making’) make for a first impression of a self-help guide. And indeed, there are a few forays in this direction in the weaker chapters , but in fact this book does not belong in the self-help aisle, nor even necessarily in pop-science. It is a book about psychology and its primary drive is to reclaim respect for intuition.
In it are several items of common sense which are not at all common, and only common sense in hindsight. The first and foremost is that what we call gut instinct is, of course, a set of finely honed cognitive processes, adaptive and crucial to allow any decision making at all in an infinitely complex world. Second and more subtly is that these instincts are not merely necessary compromises that can always be improved upon by careful scientific - ‘rational’ - analysis but quite often actually superior to a detached logical approach.
A point that occurred to me in the reading of this book, was that many of the claims of Ariely, Kahnemann and clan, are examples, essentially of observation bias : nowhere in their writing will you find examples of where a rational analysis of a particular decision is inferior to that of a human embedded in that decision making context. How laughable it would be to collect such examples, because they are infinite. Most mathematical models of human behaviour are not only wrong but hopelessly ridiculously wrong. Of course, in amongst the myriad of different decisions people make every day, there will occasionally be one or two which can be found to be systematically suboptimal compared to a carefully formulated algorithm. Mostly these are only inferior in very restricted contexts such as the laboratory of the rational scientists, and even granting the existence of some very particular examples of ‘irrational’ behaviour, these examples are woefully overwhelmed by the examples where a ‘rational’ approach would be so stupid a 2-year old would recognise the folly.
Much of this critique can perhaps be condensed into the point that Ariely and co. simply confound two homonyms: rational, as a very precise concept of game theory; and rational, as an almost-synonym for sensible in common speech. By reducing a particular decision’s context to that which is readily describable in terms of mathematical rationality, they suck out the nuance and complexity within which the human brain evolved over the ages. Then, if the subjects do not conform to the strictly defined game-theoretic rational choice – as evidence of common-speech irrationality: look how silly we can be, they cry!