aishwarya

hi! these are my favourites for light reading —

intimations by zadie smith: six essays written during early pandemic; it's a short swift take on things happening then, weirdly comforting now

rain in the mountains by ruskin bond: stories and essays about writing, living in the mountains and so on. also check his notes from a small room, which is more about writing; but also, just pick any ruskin bond really

the anthropocene reviewed by john green: essays from the podcast that are about being human at an individual and a larger communal level; really really well done

a man called ove by fredrik backman: about a really grumpy old man that follows him over the course of three weeks and really just builds a character portrait of him. this is light reading because it's wholesome and the sweetest thing really, but it is also not light (for me) because everytime i read backman i just obsessively let the books consume me. anxious people is also same.

good omens by neil gaiman, sir terry pratchett: this is one of the funniest and the most wholesome-est books i've read; follows an angel and a demon working together to stop the apocalypse; they both share one brain cell between them, and i love them for that; also check gaiman's coraline (be warned, it is creepy); and pratchett's small gods

the hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy by douglas adams: this is the first part, and i would totally recommend them all; it starts with the earth being demolished to make space for an intergalactic highway, only one human escapes, he hitches a ride on a spaceship nearby; utter chaos of a book (affectionate), also very funny

round ireland with a fridge by tony hawks: it's a travelogue, where hawks takes a trip around the perimeter of ireland with a small fridge after losing a bet; it's absurd and engaging, and wild that this really happened

shadow of the wind by carlos ruiz zafon: it's a very very cool literary mystery/thriller that follows daniel, who works in his father's bookshop and who discovers a book by an author no one seems to have heard of and around whom there are only rumours and more mysteries. he starts digging into the author and his work and, as happens with thrillers, it turns into a lot he doesn't expect

Franz Kafka, letter to his father

Maya Angelou, from Letter to My Daughter

07/01/21

there are bookstores that ship across the country

The Bookshop (Delhi)

Bahrisons Booksellers (Delhi)

Champaca Books (Bangalore)

Kitab Khana (Mumbai)

and for used books, there are a bunch of stores on instagram and they're good

baskingbooks

secondtimereads

tinypacketsofhappiness

thrift.cleanse.reuse

bombaybookcleanse

there's also chapterone. my experience hasn't been that great with them, but do check them out for yourself.

14.05.21 - jung and chain of gold.

24th May 2021: I’m working on my bibliography today to ensure that everything is present and correct before I submit my PhD thesis next week.

Here’s a (non-exhaustive) list of essays I like/find interesting/are food for thought; I’ve tried to sort them as much as possible. The starred (*) ones are those I especially love

Literature + Writing

Godot Comes to Sarajevo - Susan Sontag

The Strangeness of Grief - V. S. Naipaul *

Memories of V. S. Naipaul - Paul Theroux *

A Rainy Day with Ruskin Bond - Mayank Austen Soofi

How Albert Camus Faced History - Adam Gopnik

Listen, Bro - Jo Livingstone

Rachel Cusk Gut-Renovates the Novel - Judith Thurman

Lost in Translation: What the First Line of “The Stranger” Should Be - Ryan Bloom

The Duke in His Domain - Truman Capote *

The Cult of Donna Tartt: Themes and Strategies in The Secret History - Ana Rita Catalão Guedes

Never Do That to a Book - Anne Fadiman *

Affecting Anger: Ideologies of Community Mobilisation in Early Hindi Novel - Rohan Chauhan *

Why I Write - George Orwell *

Rimbaud and Patti Smith: Style as Social Deviance - Carrie Jaurès Noland *

Art + Photography (+ Aesthetics)

Looking at War - Susan Sontag *

Love, sex, art, and death - Nan Goldin, David Wojnarowicz

Lyons, Szarkowski, and the Perception of Photography - Anne Wilkes Tucker

The Feminist Critique of Art History - Thalia Gouma-Peterson, Patricia Mathews

In Plato’s Cave - Susan Sontag *

On reproduction of art (Chapter 1, Ways of Seeing) - John Berger *

On nudity and women in art (Chapter 3, Ways of Seeing) - John Berger *

Kalighat Paintings  - Sharmishtha Chaudhuri

Daydreams and Fragments: On How We Retrieve Images From the Past -  Maël Renouard

Arthur Rimbaud: the Aesthetics of Intoxication - Enid Rhodes Peschel

Cities

Tragic Fable of Mumbai Mills - Gyan Prakash

Whose Bandra is it? - Dustin Silgardo *

Timur’s Registan: noblest public square in the world? - Srinath Perur

The first Starbucks coffee shop, Seattle - Colin Marshall *

Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, Mumbai’s iconic railway station - Srinath Perur

From London to Mumbai and Back Again: Gentrification and Public Policy in Comparative Perspective -  Andrew Harris

The Limits of “White Town” in Colonial Calcutta - Swati Chattopadhyay

The Metropolis and Mental Life - Georg Simmel

Colonial Policy and the Culture of Immigration: Citing the Social History of Varanasi - Vinod Kumar, Shiv Narayan

A Caribbean Creole Capital: Kingston, Jamaica - Coln G. Clarke (from Colonial Cities by Robert Ross, Gerard J. Telkamp

The Colonial City and the Post-Colonial World - G. A. de Bruijne

The Nowhere City - Amos Elon *

The Vertical Flâneur: Narratorial Tradecraft in the Colonial Metropolis - Paul K. Saint-Amour

Philosophy

The trolley problem problem - James Wilson

A Brief History of Death - Nir Baram

Justice as Fairness: Political not Metaphysical - John Rawls *

Should Marxists be Interested in Exploitation? - John E. Roemer

The Discomfort You’re Feeling is Grief - Scott Berinato *

The Pandemic and the Crisis of Faith - Makarand Paranjape

If God Is Dead, Your Time is Everything - James Wood

Giving Up on God - Ronald Inglehart

The Limits of Consensual Decision - Douglas Rae *

The Science of “Muddling Through” - Charles Lindblom *

History

The Gruesome History of Eating Corpses as Medicine - Maria Dolan

The History of Loneliness - Jill Lepore *

The Anti-Che - Jay Nordlinger

From Tuskegee to Togo: the Problem of Freedom in the Empire of Cotton - Sven Beckert *

Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism - E. P. Thompson *

All By Myself - Martha Bailey *

The Geographical Pivot of History - H. J. Mackinder

The sea/ocean

Rim of Life - Manu Pillai

Exploring the Indian Ocean as a rich archive of history – above and below the water line - Isabel Hofmeyr, Charne Lavery

‘Piracy’, connectivity and seaborne power in the Middle Ages - Nikolas Jaspert (from The Sea in History) *

The Vikings and their age - Nils Blomkvist (from The Sea in History) *

Mercantile Networks, Port Cities, and “Pirate” States - Roxani Eleni Margariti

Phantom Peril in the Arctic - Robert David English, Morgan Grant Gardner*

Assorted ones on India

A departure from history: Kashmiri Pandits, 1990-2001 - Alexander Evans *

Writing Post-Orientalist Histories of the Third World - Gyan Prakash

Empire: How Colonial India Made Modern Britain - Aditya Mukherjee

Feminism and Nationalism in India, 1917-1947 - Aparna Basu

The Epic Riddle of Dating Ramayana, Mahabharata - Sunaina Kumar *

Caste and Politics: Identity Over System - Dipankar Gupta

Our worldview is Delhi based *

Sports (you’ll have to excuse the fact that it’s only cricket but what can i say, i’m indian)

‘Massa Day Done:’ Cricket as a Catalyst for West Indian Independence: 1950-1962 - John Newman *

Playing for power? rugby, Afrikaner nationalism and masculinity in South Africa, c.1900–70 - Albert Grundlingh

When Cricket Was a Symbol, Not Just a Sport - Baz Dreisinger

Cricket, caste, community, colonialism: the politics of a great game - Ramachandra Guha *

Cricket and Politics in Colonial India - Ramchandra Guha

MS Dhoni: A quiet radical who did it his way *

Music

Brega: Music and Conflict in Urban Brazil - Samuel M. Araújo

Color, Music and Conflict: A Study of Aggression in Trinidad with Reference to the Role of Traditional Music - J. D. Elder

The 1975 - ‘Notes On a Conditional Form’ review - Dan Stubbs *

Life Without Live - Rob Sheffield *

How Britney Spears Changed Pop - Rob Sheffield

Concert for Bangladesh

From “Help!” to “Helping out a Friend”: Imagining South Asia through the Beatles and the Concert for Bangladesh - Samantha Christiansen 

Gender

Clothing Behaviour as Non-verbal Resistance - Diana Crane

The Normalisation of Queer Theory - David M. Halperin

Menstruation and the Holocaust - Jo-Ann Owusu *

Women’s Suffrage the Democratic Peace - Allan Dafoe

Pink and Blue: Coloring Inside the Lines of Gender - Catherine Zuckerman *

Women’s health concerns are dismissed more, studied less - Zoanne Clack

Food

How Food-Obsessed Millennials Shape the Future of Food - Rachel A. Becker (as a non-food obsessed somewhat-millennial, this was interesting)

Colonialism’s effect on how and what we eat - Coral Lee

Tracing Europe’s influence on India’s culinary heritage - Ruth Dsouza Prabhu

Chicken Kiev: the world’s most contested ready-meal *

From Russia with mayo: the story of a Soviet super-salad *

The Politics of Pancakes - Taylor Aucoin *

How Doughnuts Fuelled the American Dream *

Pav from the Nau

A Short History of the Vada Pav - Saira Menezes

Fantasy (mostly just harry potter and lord of the rings)

Purebloods and Mudbloods: Race, Species, and Power (from The Politics of Harry Potter)

Azkaban: Discipline, Punishment, and Human Rights (from The Politics of Harry Potter) *

Good and Evil in J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lengendarium - Jyrki Korpua

The Fairy Story: J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis - Colin Duriez (from Tree of Tales) *

Tolkien’s Augustinian Understanding of Good and Evil: Why The Lord of the Rings Is Not Manichean - Ralph Wood (from Tree of Tales) *

Travel

The Hidden Cost of Wildlife Tourism

Chronicles of a Writer’s 1950s Road Trip Across France - Kathleen Phelan

On the Early Women Pioneers of Trail Hiking - Gwenyth Loose

On the Mythologies of the Himalaya Mountains - Ed Douglas *

More random assorted ones

The cosmos from the wheelchair (The Economist obituaries) *

In El Salvador - Joan Didion

Scientists are unravelling the mystery of pain - Yudhijit Banerjee

Notes on Nationalism - George Orwell

Politics and the English Language - George Orwell *

What Do the Humanities Do in a Crisis? - Agnes Callard *

The Politics of Joker - Kyle Smith

Sushant Singh Rajput: The outsider - Uday Bhatia *

Credibility and Mystery - John Berger

ig: lostpalette