February has been a tough month for reading. I picked up Satanic Verses in January and it took me at-least 4 weeks to slog through that dense, dry, oft confusing body of work. While I enjoyed parts of it, I am still trying to make sense of it.

Future of Humanity came next.

I think Michio Kaku is amazing. I was lucky to attend his talk on the future of humanity at Google I/O 2019. He left me v.inspired. This book has been on my shelf ever since and I couldn’t have picked it at a better time when despite everything - the world is once again looking towards the stars rooting for Perseverance

What makes a science fiction story really good, in my estimation, is when it gets the science right - which is, surprisingly, not the case for a number of works. (side note: Andy Weir is among the few authors who gets is right). This book is not a science fiction story but a foreshadowing of what the future would look like if we were to become a multi-planetary species and what would be expected of us to make it happen.

Humanity cant be expected to live on earth forever. If global warming and wars wont end us then the next solar flare, stray meteorite, sleeping super volcano under Yellowstone national park or the sun evolving into a red giant will. We were meant to be a multi-planetary species.

“Why go to the stars? Because we are the descendants of those primates who chose to look over the next hill. Because we won’t survive here indefinitely. Because the stars are there, beckoning with fresh horizons.
—JAMES AND GREGORY BENFORD”

Michio Kaku begins the book with our current obsession - Mars. The first few chapters attempt to answer some of our collective burning questions - How will we reach Mars? How will we terraform it? What will we trigger greenhouse effect in a freezing planet with an atmosphere that is 95% Carbon dioxide. How will it be sustained?

“Terraforming Mars is a primary goal for the twenty-second century. But scientists are looking beyond Mars as well. The most exciting prospects may be the moons of the gas giants, including Europa, a moon of Jupiter, and Titan, a moon of Saturn. The moons of gas giants were once thought to be barren hunks of rock that were all alike, but they are now seen as unique wonderlands, each with its own array of geysers, oceans, canyons, and atmospheric lights. These moons are now being eyed as future habitats for human life.”

He also writes about the efforts of NASA and other space programs and how ambitious billionaires like Bezos and Musk are stepping in to bridge the gaps that government programs cant. My favourite part is how this book isn’t just limited to Mars or even our solar system but the larger universe beyond that as-well. How can we harvest rare metals on the rings of Saturn or have fuelling stations on the moons of Jupiter. How will we venture beyond this solar system? Where humans cant go, robots and AI most certainly will.

Most of it is all speculation but Michio Kaku uses physics to support his theories. His love of science is evident in his writing and is very contagious. The book is highly readable and endlessly fascinating. It is very easy to grasp the ideas and examples. If you enjoy Astrophysics, Cosmology, Terraforming, Science Fiction, or anything about Space this book is a winner and i would highly recommend it.

“For the Earth, the future lies in fire. In five or so billion years we will have the last nice day on our home planet, then the sun will exhaust its hydrogen fuel and expand into a red giant star. Eventually the sun will set the sky on fire. The oceans will boil and the mountains will melt. The Earth will be engulfed by the sun, and will orbit like a burnt-out cinder within its fiery atmosphere. There is a biblical reference that says, from ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Physicists say, from stardust we came, to stardust we will return.”

Saima

The book opens with the story of Ruqia Hassan, a Syrian woman who was living in Raqqa when it was controlled by ISIS. Ruqia was a citizen journalist who secretly reported on the crimes of the terror group from the inside. She was no ordinary reporter by mainstream standards - not employed by any news outlet or mainstream media and un-trained in wartime reporting. Her medium was online. Under the pen name of ‘Nissan Ibrahim’ she wrote about the atrocities ISIS was waging on the people of Raqqa. She posted on Facebook, sometimes, several times in a day and gathered a huge following. Her posts were defiant, harrowing, authentic and heartbreaking. When ISIS closed the internet around the country side she wrote

‘without the internet we will lose our only way of communicating. Dear God: Emigration is a loss of dignity and a form of humiliation, while staying here is hell. Dear God: where should we go?’

What Ruqia gave the world were authentic accounts of on ground reality at a time where few people from the western or eastern world could report from within Syria. One of Ruqia’s final post on Facebook was about receiving death threats ‘ When ISIS soldiers arrest and kill me it will be okay, because ill still have dignity which is better than living in humiliation’

She was abducted shortly after and never heard from again. The terror group informed her brother a few months later that she had been killed. Her body was not returned.

Our women on ground is a collection of intimate and rarely heard accounts of what its like for a woman to report on a region she hails from. These stories from nineteen Arab women journalists not only give the reader an understanding of what’s happening on ground in some of the most dangerous and war torn regions of the world but also crush stereotypes about what it means to be an Arab or a middle eastern woman today.

Arab women are misunderstood, victimized and pitied by outsiders who think them as submissive, oppressed or subjugated. They are frequently boxed into one identity (for example Arab identity is incorrectly conflated with a Muslim one). This book disrupts such stereotypes. The journalists contributing come from different generations, faiths and nationalities. These women have been sexually assaulted, threatened, propositioned, detained and even shot at while at job, but they’ve contributed to dispelling many myths that saturate a monolithic description of their regions and identities.

These are stories of women caught in the cross-fire. These are a stories of resilience, hope and defiance. These are stories worth reading

"There is a special kind of resilience and beauty in those tucked-away spots of life. I want you all to see the true beauty of my suffering country. With my camera, I strive to empower, not victimize, the people in my images." ~ Amira Al-Sharif

I read a ton of epic/high fantasy whenever I get the time. This has perhaps been my only consistent genre over the years, while Ive flipped in and out of others. One of my favourite (pretty high on the list) fantasy authors is Brandon Sanderson. His world building and character development is stunning and unlike any Ive ever read.

Ive read a LOT of books by Sanderson - Most of his series take place on different worlds with uniquely creative powers and ecosystems but they are all loosely connected to a universe, a Cosmere. The one thing Ive always been at a loss over, after finishing his books, is collecting my thoughts and writing about them. Something about the larger-than-life universe overwhelms me.

Original Trilogy

I read the original Mistborn trilogy around 8 years ago and very successfully introduced most of my class-fellows to Cosmere fandom. I decided to re-read the original trilogy this year in order to be all primed (and caught up) to read the next books in the series. At a glance, after stripping it of all fantastical and magical elements, Mistborn seems like a classic tale of good versus evil and the struggle of the oppressed against the high powers. But evil is a very simplistic term as you begin to read this book unraveling secrets, questioning long held perceptions and wondering - maybe evil is necessary?

*curtain rises* The Mistborn world is that of darkness, despair and mystery. During the day there is a perpetual ash-fall from the skies and at night mists envelop the land. The oppressed class of Skaa toil in their fields and factories under the iron grip of the noble houses who play powerful politics in their keeps and carry powers of Allomancy in their bloodlines. The Allomantic powers manifest upon ingesting and burning different kinds of metal - each metal is tied to a unique power. Burning steel allows you to push against metals, pewter enhances your physical strength, zinc lets you inflame emotions and so on - there are a number of other metals with different properties - but not everyone has these powers which makes them so much more coveted and feared. The few people who do have these powers can burn only one metallic attribute. But there are even fewer among them who can burn all metals - Mistborns.

The story follows a crew of Skaa thieves and rebels and they plot to throw the last emperor, a despot who grants Allomantic powers, and has been ruling for nearly a millennia. They build armies, spy on noble houses, plot, conspire and scheme. Sanderson crafts an unforgettable cast of characters that grow with you as you revel in their success and despair in their failures. Over the next three books, the one thing that remains consistent is the realization that there is always another secret and nothing is as it seems.

Sequel Trilogy

The Wax and Wayne Trilogy takes place 300 years after the original Mistborn trilogy. It is very interesting to see how the characters from the original trilogy find their place in the subsequent books as figures of religion, theology and legends. It also offers you an insight into how history is distorted over time with minor changes in truth translating into major deviations over centuries. The Misborn world 300 years later is on the cusp of an industrial revolution where allomancers are trying to craft their powers around a changing world.

My first impression of the sequel trilogy was western gunslingers meeting allomancy. It’s very interesting to see urban fantasy, epic fantasy and allomantic powers colliding in the new world. The secrets of the past are still there and catching up with the times. You get a new cast with appearances from some old characters heading out into new quests and adventures. Unlike the original trilogy, these books have a more standalone nature with some threads connecting the books together. They’re also shorter, with a lot more witty banter and incredible female lead characters.

If you want dip your toe sin Brandon Sandersons Cosmere - I would recommend the reading order given in this list. It has multiple series in order of events/overarching plot. It’s no small undertaking, but if you’re an enthusiast like me with a love for world building - it will blow your socks off.

I am off to the read the Rhythm of War so I can finish this year with a bang (or vice versa depending on how the book ends)

See you next year and all that jazz,

Saima

Turning and turning in the widening gyre   
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere   
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst   
Are full of passionate intensity.

-W. B. Yeats

Things fall apart is the first book in Chinua Achebe’s bestselling African trilogy. It is set in a precolonial Nigeria of late nineteenth century as the europeans begin to arrive.

In Things fall Apart the Igbo tribes increasingly find their cultures, long held beliefs and traditions caught at crossroads with not just the white colonisers but also the new religion and culture they bring from the west. 

The protagonist, Okonkwo, is not a very likeable character. He epitomises everything I dislike in a man - beats his wives, has bad temper and little patience, holds toxic notions about masculinity and has little tolerance for the weak. Despite all his faults, it’s impossible not to pity him a little because all the life he knows is that of his ancestors and it is being taken from him slowly and inexorably by the colonisers and settlers. It is a testament to the writing prowess of Chinua Achebe who develops the protagonist strongly enough for the story to remain compelling. Okonkwo’s story is divided into a before and after with the demarcation line being an act of violence. The second half of the book covers the emergence of Christian missionaries in the area and how their growing influence affects the local tribes. The injection of christianity is not violent but its rejection and invalidation of tribal religions is brutal.

On the margins of Okonkwos narrative we are introduced to the ordinary lives of the Igbo people. Their culture, religion, practices and beliefs are all very fascinating. I especially enjoyed the folklore. The Igbo culture is rich with superstition and storytelling. Each aspect of life is rife with African proverbs, folktales and clan rituals. Its one of the few books that opens a window into how the African tribal communities operated and despite lack of so-called civilised institutions/tools managed to run pretty smoothly. Community spirit, rules and importance of ancestors played a very important part in their daily lives.

This book was unusually difficult to understand in the beginning but quickly became quite engaging. It’s a comparatively short novel of 200 pages with a turn of the century story told with great mastery and authenticity. 

-Saima

Postscript 1: Ive been reading the Stormlight Archive Series by Brandon Sanderson - each book is 1.3k pages long and its very very high fantasy so I am at loss on how to write about it. Probably I wont

Postscript 2: December is miserable. It’s the three damn Ds dark and damp and distressing. I have never disliked a month so much before. I relish the chill but BRING BACK THE SUNLIGHT!

I have a confession - I didn’t exactly ‘read’ this book in the strictest sense of the word because Becoming by Michelle Obama was the first audio book I listened to in entirety (not counting Douglas Adams original BBC productions of Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy). I’ve always been too fidgety to listen to anything sitting still which is why audio books have never cut it for me but I stumbled upon the this audiobook online quite by chance and it was a..

..Win.

Surprisingly the autobiography narrated warmly by Michelle herself is highly readable (listenable?) and has been fueling my runs since the past 2 weeks. The book is divided into three parts. Becoming Me, Becoming Us and Becoming More. The first two parts were my favorite.

Former First Lady of the United States, Michelle Robinson Obama writes a deeply personal, human, and intimate memoir, charting the course of her life, starting from humble but determined beginnings in the South side of Chicago. She writes about her childhood which was as much shaped by the values drilled in by her working class parents as much as it was by her neighborhood and surroundings. She writes about her grandparents and aunts who carried a frustrated bitterness in their hearts having lived a lifetime being denied opportunities to advance in life just because of racial discrimination. She writes about her father who went to work every morning with determination despite battling Multiple Sclerosis. With great detail, she writes about her experiences and what they meant to her. It was really interesting reading about the Southside of Chicago of the 70s through her observations.

Michelle had the singular privilege of having parents who were deeply invested in the education of their children despite financial burdens. Both she and her brother excelled at their studies and graduated from Princeton.

She writes about pursuing paths that would impress people and her family instead of following her own desires. She went to Harvard law because that was the impressive thing to do. She worked in a prestigious law firm because it was the appropriate thing to do after an expensive law degree. But it brought her no joy. This led to a sense of emptiness that would haunt for years later before influencing her subsequent career switch to public sector and social impact.

In Becoming Us and More, Michelle talks about married life. The trials and tribulations of long distance relationship, miscarriages and adversity. She talks about her role in Baracks political career from being a wary spectator on the sidelines to becoming a force in his presidential campaign. Her involvement in the campaign threw the harsh glare of media and national spotlight on her which was not always pleasant. She dedicates some portion of the chapters on how the unjustified-criticism of her voice, appearance and being tore through her esteem. Her ability to weather these storms and continue moving was nothing short of admirable.

Michelle humanizes White House by writing about her time there during Obamas presidency. At the heart of it she turns out be just like like every other woman who worries if she’s doing enough, if she is giving her daughters a normal childhood and if its all worth it at the end of the day. She worries like a mom and empathizes like a human. Her fears, insecurities and concerns paint a tapestry of human experience that is not dissimilar to ours.

Since the audio book was narrated by Michelle herself it came across as more genuine, heartfelt and intimate. This is a book I really enjoyed listening to - good time spent.

-Saima

PS: 2020 is ending. What is the one book you wish you had read this year? Drop in your messages. Ill try sharing them.

There are so many reasons why this quirky and heartwarming book will go down as one of my favourite reads of 2020. I remember catching myself unexpectedly smiling and sighing while reading it and any book that does that is my favourite kind.

The House in the Cerulean Sea is as funny as it is profound (these two words together bring to mind a cheeky Gandalf). It is warm, beautifully written and kind, much like a grandmas hug. (I am killing it with metaphors today. Bear with me). Years from now maybe someone will pick this book up and think, hey, what a unique plot - this must be adapted into a movie. I hope that happens because I loved everything about this beautiful, remarkable, extraordinary story. 

Linus Baker is a caseworker at the ministry in-charge of magical youth. His work requires him to visit various orphanages, that house magical children, and evaluate their performance and standards. He is fastidious and objective at his job even if it means shutting down orphanages at times. He lives a quiet, solitary existence, worrying about his weight, eating salads and sticking to a predictable routine. All of that changes when he is assigned a highly sensitive case to investigate an orphanage on a distant island that houses six highly powerful and dangerous supernatural children. Linus’s mission is simple: Spend 4 weeks evaluating if the Master of the house has everything in control and if the kids pose any threat. Linus makes the journey only to discover that nothing is as it seems, and the next four weeks are going to change his life entirely. TJ Kline (the author) introduces a charming and eccentric cast of characters that make this book so lovable. From a wyvern who loves hoarding buttons, a gnome who is obsessed with the latest tech in gardening equipment, an antichrist loves classic music records and dry humor, a green blob who desperately wants to be the best bell hop in the world, a boy who turns into a Pomeranian when he’s scared, to an enigmatic caretaker who is the embodiment of compassion. The characters while powerful and peculiar are just looking for love and nurturing. This is among the most powerful messages in the book. In our haste to judge those different from us, we forget that at the most basic level everyone is alike and people just want to be loved and be treated with kindness. It’s as much about that as it is about conquering fears and standing up for others.

This is an enchanting story, written masterfully about finding a family in an unlikely place and discovering unexpected love among individuals on the margins - who are otherwise written off by everyone else. It warmed my heart. I’ll give all the stars in the galaxy to this book.

-Saima

Sylvia Plath once said:

“I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life. And I am horribly limited.”

We have often wondered how differently things would have turned out if we had made certain decisions differently. If we had done things differently. Said certain things, not said certain things. Sometimes in despair we feel sure things would’ve been better if we had made different choices.

Every choice/action/decision is like a fork in the road that is our life. We forego an alternative that has an opportunity cost. We make decisions thinking we know where the foregone path leads.

What if we got a do-over? What if we could go back to a life where we had made different decisions. Would we be happier? Would things be different? Would we be satisfied?

Nothing is working out for Nora Seed. Her life has devolved into a state where nobody needs her. Her cat died in a road accident in the morning, her job is gone, her brother does not want to talk and her best friend is distant. Nora feels her life is unnecessary. She writes a rambling post on Facebook and then decides to die.

Between life and death there exists a grey space. That is the midnight library where Nora ends up. She gets handed her book of regrets while the librarian explains that Nora has the opportunity to revisit an infinite variations of her life in which she has taken decisions differently. The midnight library will hold until Nora ticks off all her regrets by visiting parallel lives and decide afterwards if she still wants to live or die.

And thus begins a chain of life hopping. Nora regretted she quit swimming so she pops into a life in which she didn’t. In that life Nora is an Olympic swimmer and a motivational speaker who battles with depression and abandons her mother. Doesn’t sound good. In another life her cat still dies from a heart condition even when she does not let him outside the house (so its dying was not her fault after all). In another life she marries her boyfriend and finds out he is cheating on her. She visits thousands of parallel lives seeking the one in which she is happy/satisfied.

The more lives she lived the harder it was to feel at home anywhere

But while she is undertaking these many journeys she is beginning to wonder: maybe everyone feels like this? No matter how successful or perfect on the outside maybe all everyone feels, on the inside, are acres of disappointments, hurts, rivalries and monotony but with flashes of wonderment and beauty.

Maybe is wasn’t the lack of achievements that made her and her parents unhappy but the expectation to achieve in the first place.

The more lives she slips into the more it becomes increasingly evident that you can choose the choices but not the outcomes. It is impossible to live without hurting people despite best intentions.

Its hard to predict isn’t it? The things that will make us happy

She has lives in which she partakes in the finest restaurants, achieves heights of fame, travels the worlds, enthralls millions but all of it, turns out, is meaningless without love

The universe tended towards chaos and entropy. That was basic thermodynamics. Maybe it was basic existence too

This is a beautifully written book with a deceptively sci-fi, surreal plot that has philosophical undertones. It is easy to mourn the lives we aren’t living, easy to wish we had worked harder, loved better or handled our finances more astutely. But its is not the lives we regret not living that make us shrivel and wither and make us feel like our own and others people worst enemy. It is the regret. We cant tell if any of our alternate lives would have been better or worse. But our life is still happening as we meander in regret and its what’s happening that we need to focus on. This book is a gentle reminder that we only need to be one person and we only need to feel one existence.

Of course we cant visit everyplace or meet every person or do every job, yet most of what we’d feel in any life is still available

A thought that struck me while reading the midnight library:

According to a Oxford University professor Roger Dunbar, humans were wired to know only a hundred and fifty people as that was the average size of hunter gatherer communities. That is the Dunbar Number

Social media is increasingly making us miserable and I’ve often wondered why. Is it too much stimulation? Feeling of vacantness after pointless scrolling? Or maybe why we hate each other so much these days is because we are loaded with so many non-friend friends on social media? More than 150 people.

These books are awesome too:

1) The Travelling Cat Chronicles (makes you laugh, smile and cry a little)

2) The 7½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle (an enthralling larger-than-life murder mystery that fans of Agatha Christie will love)

3) The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse (short, beautiful, heartwarming and highly quotable pick-me-up picture book)

-Saima

I had a vague idea of who Ranjit Sigh was. We read about him in connection to Koh-I-Noor but very little else. I feel like the history books made a liberal jump from battle of Plassey and Panipat to the 1857 mutiny. Naturally the trailer fired up my curiosity to delve into that epoch of history. Among a number of books on Ranjit Singh and his conquests I choose one written by Khushwant Singh.

In the 1790’s Punjab looked like a jigsaw puzzle of fourteen pieces with 5 arrows piercing it from the sides. 12 of those 14 pieces were Sikh Misls (Territories under protection of local Sikh lords/families) and of the remaining 1 was controlled by Pathans (Kasur District) and the other by an independent English adventurer (Hansi District). The 5 arrows stabbing these 14 districts from the sides were Afghans in the North west, Rajputs of Kangra in the North, Gurkhas in North East, British in the East and the Marathas in the South East.

Punjab was in a precarious position. The misls were not a united fraternity. Repeated incursions by the Afghan invaders had sowed seeds of dissent among territories.

Ranjit Singh by Khushwant Singh is the story of a young boy who rose to power following the untimely death of his father. With an ambition that knew no bounds he went on to not only unite a fragmented Punjab but also command a Sikh Empire that at its height extended its domain from the Khyber Pass in the northwest to the Sutlej River in the east and from the Kashmir region at the northern limit of the Indian subcontinent southward to the Thar Desert.

Khushwant Singhs lucid style of writing makes this an exciting book to read as he works chronologically through Ranjit Singhs life and conquests while carefully painting the socio-political backdrop of the early 19th century Indian subcontinent. Explaining the life of Ranjit Singh in terms of the historical movements of that time is important because it explains the meteoric rise and equally meteoric collapse of the Sikh Empire as a culmination of a historic movement. Punjabi Nationalism was the deceptively still undercurrent beneath the swell on which Sikhs and Ranjit Singh rode to power. Similarly the fall of the Sikh Kingdom was not simply due to misfortunes in the battle but akin to a wave crashing on the sands completely spent when its driving force was gone.

Ranjeet took over Punjab by bringing together territories under the protection of a central power - the Durbar. Once Punjab was consolidated he secured its borders by countering and eliminating threat of Afghans from the west. In doing so he became the first person in almost a thousand years to turn the tide of foreign invaders from the north west frontier. It was during his reign the Attock fort, a gateway to India for the Afghan invaders, was conquered.

It was not the story of a mere conqueror but of a sharp and shrewd tactician. From a band of intrepid horsemen and matchlockmen he raised a disciplined formidable army that recruited soldiers from a number of nationalities and had units trained by veteran French and Western commanders. However, it was not just armies that fueled his ambitions but equal parts political savvy as well. As his empire stretched into Peshawar, Kashmir and south into Multan he secured the eastern fronts through the Treaty of Amritsar ensuring the British would not interfere in lands west of Sutlej.

His life was fascinating. He built a vast empire without engaging in wanton revenge or bloodletting as one would expect. Time and again his allies engaged in betrayal followed by seeking forgiveness that he gave gracefully. He never ordered the death of a king or general that he defeated. His rule marked decades of peace between the three dominant religion of the land. It was remarkable.

On that note this book, while historical, is also hagiographical. It extols many virtues of Ranjit Singh without going into the negative aspects (no man, a conqueror no less, can be a saint which is why when it comes to reading history - a pinch of salt is important)

I wanted to read more about this personal life as well however this book is not very detailed on that account as it is on his military and political life. It ends right at his death so I had to do some extra reading online trying to understand more about what happened afterwards that fractured this once powerful empire so violently.

“History has not been fair with Maharaja Ranjit Singh because he was a Sikh.” In this Tedx Lahore Talk, Mr Fakir Syed whose ancestors served the Durbar Government talks about the Sikh Rule in Lahore during Ranjit Singhs lifetime.

-Saima

Persepolis is a memoir as a graphic novel spread over two volumes by Marjane Satrapi.

The first volume is an incredibly poignant and intimate memoir of a young girl in a revolutionary and wartime Iran when it is on the crossroads of democracy and fundamentalism. A lot of things narrated from the perspective of a child are heartbreaking and bleak interspersed with unexpected humor that is so unique to the naivete of children. Blending history with personal experiences is no easy task but Marjane does it exceptionally well in comic format. The book concludes with a teenage Marjane moving to Europe to escape the devastation and emotional toil of the Iran-Iraq war.

The second volume picks up from where the first ends. Marjane is in Austria, far from home and loved ones, dealing with culture shock and the emotional upheavals of adolescence. She recounts her experiences and struggles with wit and thoughtful insight. She also gets her first taste of racism and discrimination because of her nationality. She returns to Iran when the Islamic brotherhood is on its peak and illustrates vividly how drastically life has changed for everyone.

Persepolis is not an easy book to read because it delves intimately into many subjects that make people uncomfortable. It is easy to think of war as south Asians because our media/state glorifies it. The reality of war is ugly and has heavy collaterals/suffering. Resistance and rebellion are easy to romanticize but those who are a part of it pay a price. And much of this book weather subtly or bluntly illustrates that price. It is a searing condemnation of the human cost of war….

….and the cost of fundamentalism.

Marjane Satrapi uses the "memoir as graphic novel" theme to great effect. In the first book her illustrations capture the whimsical childhood outlook, the a child’s perception of horror and war. In a story of return her illustrations are poignant and say more in images than words ever could. In both book she shows how radicalization inflicted heavy sufferings on the country and its people while concurrently breaking down the monolithic image of Iran most of us have now come to hold.

Even if graphic novels/comics are not your thing id highly recommend you read Persepolis (both volumes - or one combined book). It is a highly readable memoir that humanizes not just the Iranian struggles but also those of immigrants and people displaced out of life by war.

You can read Persepolis on this site.

Persepolis Movie Trailer

Persepolis - World Heritage Site

The Persian Empire was one of the most formidable and powerful empires at its peak. Persepolis was a place of ritual and worship built by Darius the Great during 6th Century BCE. Persepolis means "the Persian city" or "the city of the Persians". To the ancient Persians, the city was known as Parsa which is also the word for the region of Persia. It was destroyed by Alexander (nothing great about him in my books) in 330 BCE although its ruins prevail to this day as a world heritage site. Even today the remains of the site are breathtaking and awe-inspiring their magnitude and beauty . It is situated 60 kilometers northeast of the city of Shiraz in Fars Province, Iran

To learn more about the site: listen to this BBC ‘In Our Time’ podcast on Persepolis

-Saima

“You have no responsibility to live up to what other people think you ought to accomplish. I have no responsibility to be like they expect me to be. It's their mistake, not my failing.”

Richard Feynman, was an American theoretical physicist who is widely regarded as the most brilliant, influential, and iconoclastic figure in his field in the post-World War II era. He is famous for remaking quantum electrodynamics, which describes how light interacts with matter and how charged particles interact with each other. His work altered the way science understands the nature of waves and particles and won him the Nobel Prize. He was also handpicked by Oppenheimer for the Manhattan project that produced the first nuclear weapons in WW2.

This book is about none of that.

In a collection of loosely held together autobiographical anecdotes Richard Feynman invites the reader to see the other side of a colourful life that was never published in press or papers. In this book you meet him as a very curious character whose inquisitiveness takes him from cracking safes, playing bongo drums, selling art, deciphering Mayan Codex, learning languages, figuring out the numbers behind gambling and more. He is a bold, colourful personality who has no time for societal rituals or formalities. He has no notions of false dignity or excessive self importance. His faith in natures simple truths, skepticism and impatience with mediocrity left a deep impression on all those who knew him and continue to learn about him

What struck me was his unrelenting passion for learning new things and asking questions. You would think a Nobel prize winning physicist would only be passionate about physics or science but Feynman was curious about everything that snagged his interest. Most memoirs are self serving and aggrandising but this book is unique because it appears to have no agenda at-all - Feynman just happens to be really interested in sharing his stories rather than how they make him look. And he has a lot of stories to tell for he is a man who has built his entire life doing what interested him and exploring what he wanted.

The book works its way from his childhood to university years. It gives a good few chapters to Los Alamos where he worked on the Manhattan project before moving on to Cornell, Brazil and Caltech decades. Since it’s a collection of anecdotal stories there is no order to the timelines. Between the pages he leaves the reader with very important lessons that he learnt on the crossroads of science and life. Experiment, question, explore and never take data for granted.

This book will have you laughing unexpectedly at his antics like when he makes up Italian just to confuse people, or when he play pranks on his fellow colleagues in Princeton and MIT. It shows that life as a scientist can be interesting and adventurous - you just need to have the attitude for it.

Best way to close the weekend? Watch David Attenborough: A Life On Our Planet

Our planet is headed for disaster and we need to quickly learn how work with nature rather than against it and he’s going to tell you how. It’s available on Netflix.

-Saima

Originally published in 1985 this iconic book has gained popularity over different periods of time as a striking symbol of female defiance. It surged in popularity in 2016 after Donald Trump was elected and became an international protest symbol. Dozens of women marched in silence through cities: Heads bowed, dressed in red cloaks and white, wide brimmed bonnets. Margaret Atwood’s novel seared this image into the minds of reader with its depiction of a near-future dystopia in which women are forced into reproductive slavery – and wear this uniform to as a sign of their subservience.

The handmaids tale is a chilling tale set in the USA that is toppled in a coup establishing the theocratic government of Gilead. You’re never quite sure about the nature of the force in power. Is it the Army? The Church? or the two combined? It is a totalitarian regime set in an era where birthrate has nosedived and many of the ruling elite have been rendered infertile due to environmental toxins. Still-fertile women are rounded up for the job of reproduction. The fertile women are kept as handmaids in the houses of high ranking officials where they’re expected to bear a child for the family and once that is done they are promptly packed off to another house to do it all over again. It is a highly oppressive, dictatorial theocracy that disregards the fundamental liberty and freedom of women who are drawn and quartered into categories. Handmaids who will bear children, Marthas who will do housekeeping, Wives who will, well, just be wives and Aunts who will train, preach and maintain discipline among women.

Picture this state: You are a woman but you have no name. Your identity, property, job everything has been taken from you. Your name is now ‘Of’ followed by the name of your Master. You are Offred, Ofglen, Ofkyle - a nobody. If you fail to provide a child, you are banished to the Colonies to die cleaning toxic waste.

It is written in a first person narrative of a handmaid, Offred, whose real name is not shared throughout the book. She narrates the story in a series of flashbacks that are divided between her life in Gilead and her former life before the coup. There is a clear demarcation of before and after.

The writing is quiet, powerful and the story is always bubbling under the surface of the prose. Atwood doesn't waste words - she writes with subtlety and richness.

This book is speculative fiction - a body of work that proposes a future which could conceivably happen without necessarily any advances in technology . While science fiction has aliens and spaceships; speculative fiction could really happen. Almost Every aspect of the book was inspired by social and political events of the early 1980s, when she wrote it.

In some ways to think of this work as fiction at-all is a sign of privilege. In many parts of the world the handmaids tale is, more or less, still the reality for many women.

Nolite te bastardes carborundorum.

Don't let the bastards grind you down.

(Testaments is a sequel published in 2019 - 34 years after the handmaids tale. It was the winner of the 2019 Booker prize. I am presently reading it and its every bit as gripping and brilliant as I expected)

Saima

Truth, Love and a Little Malice is Khushwant Singh autobiography and lives up to its title in every manner. Khushwant Singh wrote and published it in the mid-nineties when he was biting his 80’s, assuming there wasn’t enough time left, but much like his long memory, life gave him another 20 years before ending in 2014. He was 99 at the time and on the topic of death he had quoted a couplet of Iqbal:

 “You ask me about the signs of a man of faith? When death comes to him, he has a smile on his lips.” 

I did not know much about Khushwant Singh before this book. I knew he was somebody - but for the most part of my life I thought he was a comedian because I read one of his bawdy comic books as a kid (not age appropriate at all).

Khushwant Singh belonged to a fading generation of people who had grown up in the pre-partition India, witnessed the partition, and lived through the years of tumult as the two nations struggled. Born in 1914 in the village of Hadali in Punjab (now in Pakistan) Khushwant recounts his journey from childhood, adolescence, adulthood and following years while covering cities and hopping countries. The book is divided into chapters that cover various decades of his life.

Writing with candor, recalling with wit and reminiscing with sentiment - he remembers so much that at occasion his memory leaves the reader stunned. You see him rubbing shoulders with some of the most eminent and/or notorious people of those times (some already famous and some not yet). He is brutal and honest in his assessment/recollection of people and events (Turns out he had trouble initially publishing the book for this very reason - Indira Gandhis daughter-in-law slapped a lawsuit on the book for character assasination). He belonged to a small group of influential people on both sides of the border that believed in peace and wanted peace (which I find admirable)

“I believe I did succeed in making Indian Muslims look upon me as a friend: when I was nominated to be a member of the Rajya Sabha many said, "We have another Muslim in Parliament." Others who disliked my views called me an unpaid agent of Pakistan. I treated both views as compliments.” 

But my admiration is not unequivocal. When reading someone’s autobiography you end up becoming acquainted with their personality a little too well. Khushwant had his shortcomings - most glaring was his attitude towards women and how he predominantly viewed them as objects of desire. While he makes no secret of that - this admittance of it is not an absolution.

Why read: Khushwant Singh is someone who neither spared man or God. His life is fascinating - he writes about a good 80 years which covers some of the most important events that we read now as history. His wit and recollection of amazing urdu poetry is a delight as well.

Trigger warnings: rape, violence, murder, abuse.

Ice Candy Man is one of Bapsi Sidhwas most remarkable works. Set in the decade of the India-Pakistan partition, the book is written in a first-person narrative of a young girl. Perhaps the finest way to write about the partition, before and after, was through the eyes of an innocent child with an infirmity (polio) belonging to a minority Parsee community.

Lenny grows up in a pre-partition Lahore which is a melting pot of culture, faith and community. One of the central figures in her life is the beautiful ayah who looks after Lenny and takes her out to different parts of Lahore. Ayah is alluring, beautiful and kind. She turns heads where ever she goes and collects admirers from all walks of life. In the gardens and bazaars of Lahore, Lenny spends many idyllic afternoons and evenings in company of a collection of odd characters and admirers that flutter around ayah like a swarm of moths : the masseur, the ice candy man, a knife sharpener, a gardener. All men of different faiths (Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, Christian) forced into acquaintance and friendship by their mutual admiration of ayah. Lenny is a passive participant in their company, growing frustrations with the raj, solid convictions that people of subcontinent will look out for each other and trivial everyday banter.

There is much disturbing talk. India is going to be broken. Can one break a country? And what happens if they break it where our house is? 
I ask Cousin.
‘Rubbish,’ he says, ‘no one’s going to break India. It’s not made of glass!’

Their conversations sets the background for a subcontinent that, after centuries of harmoniously nurturing many faiths, is now growing increasingly polarized. When Lenny travels to her cooks village in Punjab she first hand witnesses the strength of co-existence among the Sikhs and Muslims who avow to protect each other from the increasingly radicalized Sikh and Muslim groups in east. As a reader, you can sense these are people forced by their circumstances, the same way you realize groups are becoming radical due to the divisive policies set up by the British during their last decades in India. The books ends not with partition (because it wouldn’t that be too convenient) but goes on to paint the aftermath.

This book humanizes the partition. By writing from the perspective of a child who has no stake in the event, the reader witnesses the cracking and disintegration a community. Religious identities implode into the stark horror of the partition violence. Lenny ends up witnessing and experiencing all sides of the coin. Violence suffered by and perpetuated by all faiths. These were parts that chilled and horrified me. I have tried not to go into the specifics of the characters or the plot because I want this to remain spoiler free.

Why read: It is a neutral, bleak, unsentimental and spontaneous story set on the crossroads of a brutal epoch in subcontinent’s history. This book humanizes everyone - it tells you there were no villains. Everyone was a product of circumstances and fears. It reminds me of a famous shair by the poet Ustad Daman

Akhan di laali payi dassdi hai, roye tusi vi ho, roye asin vi haan

-Saima

Girl, Woman Other By Bernardine Evaristo is the winner of 2019 Booker Prize. Written incredibly engagingly, this book follows the lives of 12 women/non-binary characters in 12 chapters, all loosely connected, all of colour, and all a part of the African diaspora in Britain. Spread over a century, we meet women of different ages, socio-economic backgrounds, educational levels, class & sexual persuasions. All navigating through the turbulent waters of this thing called life and finding the answer to an overarching unsaid question: What does it mean to be a woman?

You follow the journey of Amma, a black lesbian art theatre director who made a place for herself in the industry by starting from the bottom and representing all the way through. There is Carole who was gang-raped at 13 and in an educational and social system that gives up on her she musters the courage to reinvent herself and rise beyond her circumstances. You read about Megan who is at odds with her gender and embarks on a journey deconstructing the difference between gender and sex and discovering who she really is. You meet Harriet, mother to two, grandmother to 8 and great grandmother to scores. At her old age she reflects backs on her life, its triumphs and regrets. Some of these stories are eye opening to the history of prejudice and bias there are against not just people of colour but also women and some of these stories are poignant.

Bernardine Evaristo writes a vibrant narrative connecting past, present and future with a seamless feminist narrative that goes back and forth in time. Her ability to write a completely new personality and perspective in every chapter is remarkable. The characters come alive!

Girl woman other is an incredible book. I rarely read books twice, but I can see myself re-reading it. It is hands down my favourite read of 2020.

-Saima

Homo-Deus By Yuval Noah Harari (author of Sapiens and 21 lessons for the 21st century) is a journey through the human history and an inquiry into the present that builds up to a picture of an inevitable future. The tagline of the cover can be misleading depending on your interpretation of it. This is not a book of prophecies on what the future holds, but is a discourse on where we are headed, why we are headed there and how we will get there.

Divided in three parts, Homo Deus deconstructs the human existence right down to its consciousness. It begins with the cognitive revolution that sparked 70,000 years ago setting homo sapiens on path apart from its Neanderthal cousins and other animals. This is how sapiens conquered the world. In the last 10,000 years it has tried to give meaning to the world by creating religions, laws, dogmas and rules. For the longest time humans have ruled over the earth being particularly merciless gods towards other living beings on the planet. But on this trajectory, in the third part of the book, is where humans are going to lose control to technology. This is no fanciful scifi dystopia where technology kills the human race and spins out of control. Instead it is a fusion of humans and technology into a new evolutionary race - homo deus.

Along the way it also discusses ideas like liberty, capitalism, communism and humanism that shaped much of global politics leading up to 20th century. Capitalism and democracies thrive in the 21st century because global conditions are uniquely positioned in their favour (just like they were positioned to favour autocracies and dictatorships in ancient Rome) however all of that is already beginning to change in an age of decentralised data and tech. New techno-religions like techno-humanism and dataism are emerging from research labs and tech hubs. These religions have very little to do with God and everything to do with technology. They promise all the old prizes: peace, prosperity, happiness and even eternal life but here on earth with the help of technology rather than after death.

I enjoy works of Yuval, but this was a difficult book to read. It was a dense dialogue and it took me more than 3 weeks to finish (with liberal gaps). It is a bomb of information that explodes in your face - while it doesn’t force the readers acceptance of certain realities and opinion it does make very compelling arguments.

If you want to read it - don’t rush through it like I did. Homo Deus requires concentration and contemplation at every page turn. I may just read it again.

In 1920, during the depression, a few odd and mismatched women join a state initiative of mobile libraries to encourage reading and literacy. They set off on horses delivering books around their hillside town and surrounding areas in Eastern Kentucky. This book is a story of their experiences and efforts. Unlike regular fiction plots that build to a peak before cresting down into a happy ending, reading this book felt like moving through episodes. It reminded me of a life time TV dramas.

The characters in Jojo Moyes’ The Giver of Stars are rebels and outlaws, though of a social rather than legal kind. Their weapons are not guns, but books. The Giver of Stars is a twist on the traditional Western. It’s about the power of female solidarity and independence. Each of its characters is escaping from various 20th century suffocations. Loveless marriage, stigmas, discrimination, classism and oppression. With modern themes of feminism and environmentalism stories from back then are still relevant today. It also helps that Jojo Moyes writes beautifully (the first book of hers that I read was Me Before You and that was a verifiable tear jerker)

This was a quick read, despite being more than 400 pages long. Fiction is easier to consume than non fiction especially when most of it is dialogue.

If you enjoyed the Umbrella Academy Seasons 1 and 2 you have to read the comics because they’re NOTHING like the Netflix adaptation - which is an opportunity to dive into something entirely new and equally entertaining. I have to warn you though the comics are dark, grisly and have way more chimps (although they’re less bizarre among other things). Also Luther aka Sapceboy looks like this in Vol-II Dallas:

August 21 was the birth anniversary of celebrated author Ismat Chughtai. Here is a recording of a live session of the Joy of Urdu Lahore Chapter held at Hast-o-Neest in which Dr. Arfa Sayeda Zehra reads Ismat Chughtai's heart-rending story: "Nanhi ki Naani". This story is comparable, in emotional devastation, to another story by Ismat “Chauthi ka Jora” .

I have had the fortune to attend a few of Arfa Sayeda’s sessions on Ghalib in Faiz Ghar Lahore. She narrates and explains in beautiful urdu and listening to her in person or online is always a treat.

-Saima

I spent an entire week on a book that part aggravated and part fascinated me. The Empires of the Indus by its back cover summary alone is supposed to be a journey upstream on the river from the Delta in Sindh to its source Mount Kailash in Tibet. It is also supposed to be a journey from present day all the way back into 50 million years covering the empires this river birthed, nourished and destroyed.

Incredible premise so far right? Anyone would be keen to pick this book.

Reading this book, I was surprised to find it was not a 100% historical account of the river. It was a travelogue of a British author who was journeying along the river while liberally throwing in equal parts history and personal experiences/narrative.

Alice speaks some Urdu and clothed in local attire she looks Afghani or Pashtun which allows her to blend in (in her own words). She undertakes a journey in several parts as she travels upstream indus while steadily writing about the empires of the past - the timeline stretches backwards as she moves up further north. The river takes her through Sindh, Frontier, Afghanistan, Baltistan, Ladakh and Tibet. The history she narrates covers the Colonial efforts to conquer this river by overthrowing the the ruling elites in Sindh, the Sindhi saints like Uderolal who brought faiths together, the Sikh gurus, Buddhism on the banks, Aryans, Alexander, Alluvial Cities all the way to the neolithic and paleolithic cities and cultures in Ladakh and Tibet. The history is incredible and it underwrites that, like Nadeem Farooq Paracha said, Pakistans Identity is a convergence of multiple points of entry in history.

(if you want you can quit reading here-on - because rest is all all criticism)

This would have been a very enjoyable read if the author had not decided to narrate in a complete biased, condescending and censorious manner. Alice represents the worst of western travel writers who come to Pakistan to exploit its hospitality, not bother to learn about its cultures or customs (especially when they’re so different from theirs) and neatly package their narrative to serve western audiences. From time and again she shows up on door steps of locals who take her in without question (because that is how hospitality works here) while she lambastes their culture and practices in her writing. In KPK particularly when she wants to hike through mountains, she disrespects her hosts opinions and fears by laughing in their face pg188 and writes about their warnings as “the horror stories started again” pg196. She does illegal border crossings multiple times wearing a burqa and based on the tone of her writing expects the reader to give her a medal for it. She dubiously quotes people that borderline Raj Nostalgia - Sikh individual is quoted “still today every Sikh would lay their lives for the Britishers” pg124 and a Sindhi is quoted “things were so much better during British time”. Ill not lie - these made me sick.

She never stays in a place long enough to understand it or its cultural nuances but uses a shitload of second hand opinions (likely from some armchair commentators she stayed with in Islamabad and Delhi) to paint the customs, people and geopolitics in terrible light. Her present day knowledge is half baked and inaccurate- some examples are: fair and lovely made in swat pg174, Alexanders story is written in the Quran pg215, Prophet avowed to invade India pg136, Sohni from Sohni Meharwal drowned in Indus pg90, Prophet in his last sermon said no white has [priority] over black except in righteousness pg56 to quote a few. She makes dangerous and offensive generalization and judgements like: Pashtuns in KPK and Afghanistan are child molesters and homosexual pg142 , Pakistanis are inherently paranoid because of dictatorship pg192, Going up Khyber is a hackneyed rite pg140. Pakistanis secretly pine for India pg117 (no, we pine for peace and I am sure the folks across border wish the same), She quotes convenient history - i.e where there are multiple sources and theorie for something she sticks with the ones she prefers instead of being objective - for example she writes: Sehwanistan derives form Sivistan city of Shiva pg97, Ismailis hail Hazrat Ali as the 10th Avatar of hindu God Vishnu pg95 (I had to ask a few Ismaili friends about this one).

I read somewhere that this book helps in realizing that Pakistan is not the monolithic country people outside have come to believe but Alice through her narrative reinforces over and over again that while the history may be vibrant the current state is along the lines of the same monolithic narrative that is spewed everywhere.

If you can manage to separate the authors personal narrative from the history this book is a good read - other wise I’ll conclude with this: One of the dangers of ignorant writing is that it engenders and re-enforces ignorant opinions. We already see when some folks skewed perspective of Afghanistan is fleshed out through Khalid Hossieni’s writings.

-Saima

My immediate reaction after finishing The High Mountains of Portugal was ‘maybe I missed something’ because so much did not make sense in that moment. I hope through the process of writing this review I can make sense of what I’ve read. The book is spread out over three stories - the whole is more than the sum of the parts here, since each story picks up power from the others. It follows three grieving men, spread out over the 20th Century.

In 1904, Tomas, who has lost his lover and child to plague, starts walking backwards – literally. People assume its his way of dealing with the loss but Tomas isn’t grieving – he is objecting. When the universe takes away everything you love from you – what can you do but object?

“Love is a house with many rooms, this room to feed the love, this one to entertain it, this one to clean it, this one to dress it, this one to allow it to rest, and each of these rooms can also just as well be the room for laughing or the room for listening or the room for telling one’s secrets or the room for sulking or the room for apologizing or the room for intimate togetherness, and, of course, there are the rooms for the new members of the household. Love is a house in which plumbing brings bubbly new emotions every morning, and sewers flush out disputes, and bright windows open up to admit the fresh air of renewed goodwill. Love is a house with an unshakable foundation and an indestructible roof. He had a house like that once, until it was demolished.”

Tomas embarks on a journey to search for a religious artefact in the high mountains of Portugal. All sorts of mishaps and misadventures chase his tail culminating in something that goes on to set the base (if not precedent) for the remaining two stories

In 1939, a pathologist, Dr. Lozora, works late, occasionally visited by ghost of his dead wife. They talk about religion and Agatha Christie and all manner of connections between the two. One-night Dr Lozora performs an autopsy that is all sorts of bizarre. He cuts up and extracts various trinkets and objects resting inside the cadaver. Is it a metaphor? or the hallucinations of a grieved mind? I never figured it out. This chapter is perhaps the only that left me annoyed till the end because it and and its consequent implications did not make sense. 

In 1981, Peter buys an ape on an impulse and decides to move de-trench his life from Canada to the high mountains of Portugal where his parents immigrated from. He begins to live a solitary, peaceful and ‘in the moment existence’ with his chimp. With Peter in the high mountains of Portugal is where all the stories spanning a decade converge and meet their end. 

“While Odo has mastered the simple human trick of making porridge, Peter has learned the difficult animal skill of doing nothing. He's learned to unshackle himself from the race of time and contemplate time itself. As far as he can tell, that's what Odo spends most of his time doing: being in time, like one sits by a river, watching the water go by. It's a lesson hard learned, just to sit there and be.”

The book does not contrive to give you direct answers but it encourages you to think. What helped me were the themes and features that were common and recurring in all three stories – the high mountains of Portugal, Chimpanzees, the village of Tuizelo and the loss of loved ones spurring the protagonists. Individually the stories are thoughtful and wonderful – connected they create a bizarre chain of events scattered with metaphors, allegories and fables.

In conclusion I don’t think its supposed to completely make sense. It’s a fun read if you do it carefully and you do get sucked into the stories absurd, strange and bizarre as they may be. I also don’t understand the hate this book gets – sure some parts were unfulfilling but as a whole it wasn’t terrible. 

Some of my favourite quotes from the book

“Because to suffer and do nothing is to be nothing, while to suffer and do something is to become someone.”

“That's the nature of grief: It's a creature with many arms but few legs, and it staggers about, searching for support.”

“The sad fact is that there are no natural deaths, despite what doctors say. Every death is felt by someone as a murder, as the unjust taking of a loved being.”

“His heart is expended that way, of loving the single, particular individual. He loved Clara with every fiber of his being, but now he has nothing left. Or rather, he has learned to live with her absence, and he has no wish to fill that absence; that would be like losing her a second time. Instead he would prefer to be kind to everyone, a less personal but broader love.”

Great Expectations [Charles Dickens]

Great Expectations is one of Dickens last works and more famous among his other books. This Bildungsroman is considered by many to be a coming of age story that tackles multiple themes such as family, ambition, money, social class, crime, guilt and innocence. Dickens was one of the few authors back in his day who could stitch a vast universe that addressed all these themes.

“Great Expectations” follows the story of a young, blacksmiths apprentice, Pip who dreams of a better life where he would not be thought of as coarse and common. After coming into unexpected good fortune, Pip travels to London to become a gentlemen. There he faces a very different world that has its own insecurities, ambitions and costs. Pip’s journey is that of a chase - as he runs after material wealth hoping it would open the doors that his poverty couldn’t. Towards the end of the book Pip's experiences and circumstances have taught him better. This is where Dickens genius in writing shows how poverty has such a crushing effect on the spirit and how actual happiness lies nowhere near material gains but in goodness, forgiveness and love.

To me this book was a perfect example of a full circle (as is the case with most works of Dickens). Every character is accounted for and has a part to play towards the conclusion that ties all ends. In a very characteristic Dickens fashion this also means its full of conveniences and contrivances.

Why read? Why does anyone read Dickens. His works are rich in characters, complexity, symbolism and polished breezy prose. But Great Expectations makes you question “are appearances more important than the morals and ideals a person holds dear?” while traveling with the characters throughout the story until they become someone in the world. The writing is engaging and has humor both sharp and subtle. But if I am being honest, it is not the company of his characters, or the humor that will keep you flipping till the last page. The suspense, plot and mystery is the sell.

Great literature can change your life. Most of us read the abridged versions in school as a part of our coursework. Id highly recommend reading the original classics. They’re going to be wordy and demand a lot of slow patient reading but always get better with time and experience.

Find of the week:::

-Saima

Writing exhaustion thankfully did not interfere with my reading. I was uncertain regarding what to write on from a selection of four recently finished books. So I went with the easiest solution - lazy reviews of all.

The Woman Destroyed - Simone de Beauvoir

This book is a collection of three novellas by one of my favourite authors Simone De Beauvoir. All three stories are about women past their youth struggling with the uncertainties of age, life and future.

My favourite among the three novellas is ‘Age of Discretion’. It follows the lives of two academics at the end of their careers. The main protagonist has to deal with themes like fear of irrelevance as she grows older, marital tension over disagreements and stunted communication, and emotional fallout with children. I took my time with this novella - appreciating the many powerful messages conveyed through the protagonists internal monologues as she struggled with her inner emotions. It showcased the emotional turmoil of ambitious mother finding out her son had decided to leave academia, a path she carefully groomed him for, in pursuit of a stable job that paid well. She dealt with disbelief, anger, apathy and eventually acceptance. In so many ways I feel like a lot of parents should read this - It will begin by resonating with their expectations but then slowly start deconstructing them (hopefully in the process helping them understand children eventually grow up to make their own decisions for themselves and there is point after which parents have to let them be) The other themes it explores are of letting go, acceptance and introspection.

The novellas are a true example of literature that devastates you but that is exactly what makes The Woman Destroyed such a necessary read.

I read this book online - Found a link with a downloadable PDF version, incase anyone is interested in reading.

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Jerusalem: A Biography by Simon Sebag Montifore

Ive been reading this book since three weeks now. That alone should say a lot about it. It is a history of the city not through time but through the people that lived in Jerusalem, raising it and razing it alike.

Honestly the book wasn’t so difficult to read from David in 1000 BCE till the Mamluks in 1300CE but after that it became an incredibly tough ride. It is partially why I’ll knock off 1.5 stars and give it a rating of 3.5/5.

Jerusalem is a city holy to Jews, Christians, and Muslims. It has at times been the center of countless prayers, reverence, aspirations, international intrigue, conflict and and at other times a forgotten pile of rocks. Its history, stretching over thousands of years, is the account of East meeting West and of religion and politics. It is a tragic, complicated bloodstained city that has at times been Pagan, Jewish, Christian, and Muslim. It is, simply put, as complicated a place as it is holy.

While the story of Jerusalem is tragic and bloody, exhilarating and uplifting; Simon tells all of it with an eye for detail. This is a city that has been torn down and destroyed and rebuilt far too many times to count. History has been laid down here layer by layer, one civilisation building on the foundations of another, one religion after another laid down on the beliefs of another, the sediments of time and faith. This book is an achievement given the range of time and the wide expanse of detail that has been covered.

I won't try and summarise all 600 pages into a couple of paragraphs - that would be near impossible, but Montefiore has filled his pages with immense amounts of detail and history of the lives of the people that have occupied this city. But this amount of detail along with a cast of thousands over a millennia is also what makes reading this book so difficult and hard. As mentioned earlier, at times, reading felt like wading through a thick sludge.

Skepticism: Montifore claims to have written an objective history but if you read carefully there are hidden biases. There are parts where I feel he relied more heavily on certain sources for historical accounts instead of weighing other sources of that period equally. He rushes through some epochs at times which makes it difficult to keep track of. He ends the book right after the Six Day War of 1967 post which it would be very hard to write anything without picking a side.

Why read?: Depends on what you want from it. If you’re genuinely curious about the history of Jerusalem and are willing to invest the time and mental energy - this is a very comprehensive book to read. Otherwise there are easier less chunky books on the subject that can be read.

I bought this book from Saeed Book Bank Islamabad. Last I checked they still had it in stock.

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Lahore: A Sentimental Journey by Pran Nevile

This book was Pran Nevile’s pilgrimage to the past - to the city of his birth where he spent his childhood and youth before the partition of 1947. Decades later, a chance meeting with a Lahori in Switzerland triggered a maelstrom of nostalgia that prompted him to write this book.

This book is in no way a early 20th century biography of the city of Lahore. Rather it is a romantic retelling of the city Pran grew up in and fondly remembered. Pran in his own words belongs the the fading pre-partition generations that were forced to leave their homeland but carry it in their hearts like the cherished memories of first love. He writes fondly on multiple topics such as shopping in Anarkali, Tonga Rides on mall road, splendors of Heera Mandi, early cinema, changing world of women, food, drinks, clothes, government college, transport and politics.

In some ways Pran’s Lahore still survives in the culture of local festival celebrations, cuisines, and arts. Its public spaces remain as masculine as they were back in the 30’s and 40’s. But in so many ways the idyllic syncretistic Lahore of pre-partition is no longer there. Most traces of its non-Muslim past have faded away over time and it has witnessed occasional violence over the years against its minorities. Regardless, this book is a heartwarming and beautiful journey into the past. This is a book our parents and grandparents will enjoy even more. There is nothing more powerful than a text evoking long forgotten memories.

Pran ends the book with a chapter on his first visit back to Lahore, 40 years after the partition which opens a whole floodgate of memories for him. He meets some of his old friends reminiscing their shared past. He goes on a self guided tour of the old city searching for traces of his childhood haunts in the bazaars. Fortunately, this was not his last visit. Pran has been invited to Lahore multiple times over the years to talk at conferences. He ends the book with

‘I hope Lahore will continue calling me’

Through his book on Lahore, it is not the story of the city that is learned but the story of Pran Nevile, a story that came to an end when he died in 2018, days short of his 96th birthday

I bought this book from Readings Lahore. Last I checked they still had it in stock.

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پطرس بخاری - پطرس کے مضامین (Patras kay Mazameen - Patras Bukhari)

The powerful humor in Patras Sahab’s writing is timeless. Whether you’re a kid reading excerpts of it in your course books or an adult looking for a mood-lift - Patras kay Mazameen will never fail to leave you in smiles . The essays in Patras kay Mazameen feature everyday characters from his friends, mechanics, shopkeepers right down to the street dogs. He is self deprecating but genuine in his humor and that is what makes his writings so lovable.

An essay that had me in stitches was kuttay (Dogs): After combing the web I managed to find it online here incase you’re interested in reading it.

Urdu humor is in a class of its own, unrivalled and unparalleled. I am pretty sure no translation would ever do it justice. If you enjoy works of Patras Bukhari, I would highly recommend Bajang Amad by Col Muhammad Khan and works of works of Ibn-e-Insha.

I bought Pitras k Mazameen from an old book shop in Saddar Rawalpindi. You’ll have no trouble finding this book in Pakistan. A scan of this book is also available for download online. Its is unfortunate though there is no ebook rendered in an urdu font for this book.

On that note the web is an ugly place for Urdu readers and Urdu language speakers because most major websites like Google, Twitter and Facebook don't support the most readable Urdu font - Nastaleeq. Therefore, Urdu speakers/readers are forced to read poorly rendered Ariel or Naskh fonts.

Ive had below song on repeat all week - its ah-mazing!

August is the Women in Translation Month #WITMonth

WIT aims to promote women writers in translation, aswell as their translators and publishers. Translated literature notoriously accounts for only 3.5% of published literature in the English-language book market, and less than one-third of this is women-authored.

The goal of WIT is simple: Read, review, and discuss books by women writers in translation! Support women writers in translation!

Since so few books by women are translated - they receive little attention. If you find a woman writer’s book in translation, interesting - review and recommend it.

Words without borders has an excellent and diverse list if you’re interested in exploring translated works by women writers.

Eid Mubarak - Ghosht k sath sath eidi dena na bhuliye ga.

Saima

Kai-Fu Lee is the Chairman and CEO of Sinovation Ventures that manages a 2 billion dollar investment fund and develops the next generation of Chinese high-tech companies. He is the former President of Google China and founder of Microsoft Research Asia that trained many of the AI leaders in China, including those at Baidu, Tencent, Alibaba, Lenovo, and Huawei. He was also named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by TIME magazine. I got my hands on his New York Times bestseller AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order last year but only got a chance recently to dig into it.

In AI superpowers, Kai-Fu Lee reveals and discusses how China has suddenly caught up to the US at an astonishingly rapid and unexpected pace.

Decades ago AI was a field limited to academia, research labs and science fiction books. Today it has leapt to the forefront of human minds and conversation. People had an idea that AI was about making robots and machines think, but there was no connection between it and everyday life. That is no longer the case today.

From our internet browsing to shopping - AI is now a part of our everyday lives, whether we know and like it or not. It powers much of business and personal applications that we rely on.

In the 1950s, pioneers of AI set a lofty but well-defined mission of recreating human intelligence in a machine. This drew in some of the greatest minds to pour their expertise. In a few decades AI had divided itself into two camps (1) The rule-based camp that encoded a series of logical rules - if X then Y- and it worked well enough for simple and well-defined games but fell apart when the universe of choices became more complex and expanded. (2) The Neural Networks camp that tried to reconstruct the human brain itself. This approach mimicked the brain’s underlying architecture, constructing layers of artificial neurons that could transmit and receive data. You fed a lot of data of a certain phenomenon (such as cats) into the neural network and let the network figure out the patterns.

Neural networks did not gain much popularity in the past century but what resuscitated it in recent years were the two ingredients that were scarce in the previous century 1) Computing power and 2) Data

Deep learning is exciting because of its core power- the ability to recognize a pattern, optimize for a specific outcome and make a decision. Its application and success has left companies like Google and Facebook scrambling to hire more deep learning experts and left the rest of us with the sense that we are on the precipice of a new era. One in which machines will radically empower or/and violently displace humans.

Kai Fu Lee argues that many people think we are living in an age of discovery given the medias breathless reporting of breakthroughs every day but that is misleading. The reality is these are milestones that are the applications of the past eras breakthrough. We are now in an age of implementation. Much of the difficult abstract work of AI research has been done, and now entrepreneurs and businessmen are rolling their sleeves to get down to the dirty business of turning algorithms into business.

Turning Algorithms into business is where Kai Fu Lee goes into great detail about how the US and China have harnessed this new technological wave. Most of us look towards silicon valley and think that is the only ideal booming tech entrepreneurial ecosystem but Kai Fu redirects you towards china where some leading giants today such as Ali Baba, Tencent, Baidu had their origins. He writes in detail about how this culture developed in China. From the era of copy cats where Chinese would copy US apps and sites pixel to pixel to the era of modifying and pivoting products tailored to Chinese audience.

Below Screenshot of Kai-Fu Lee’s presentation at O’Reilly AI Conference 2018 shows how Chinese used Western design to leapfrog unique products and then innovated. Now we are beginning to look at an era where Western companies are creating local replicas of Chinese origin!

“In stark contrast, China’s startup culture is the yin to Silicon Valley’s yang: instead of being mission-driven, Chinese companies are first and foremost market-driven. Their ultimate goal is to make money, and they’re willing to create any product, adopt any model, or go into any business that will accomplish that objective. That mentality leads to incredible flexibility in business models and execution, a perfect distillation of the “lean startup” model often praised in Silicon Valley. It doesn’t matter where an idea came from or who came up with it. All that matters is whether you can execute it to make a financial profit. The core motivation for China’s market-driven entrepreneurs is not fame, glory, or changing the world. Those things are all nice side benefits, but the grand prize is getting rich, and it doesn’t matter how you get there.”

In Lee’s opinion, to successfully deploy AI, you need to align four assets or forces: Computing power, Data, Data science expertise and Policy - all 4 of which China has harnessed making it so well-positioned at the precipice of a new era.

According to Lee, there are 4 waves of AI development: Internet AI, Business AI, Perception AI and Autonomous AI. The first two waves are already with us. Internet AI has a powerful grip on our eyeballs and wallets. It is largely about using AI algorithms as recommendation engines. Ever noticed how amazon knows exactly what purchase to recommend, how you seem to go down into a rabbit hole of YouTube videos and how Netflix knows exactly the right thing to recommend for bingeing. Algorithms are deciding the ads we see, the videos we are offered and the news we read. The key is data. The more we interact with the AI through clicks, views and engagement, the more it understands and the better it gets at giving you what you want.

Business AI takes advantage of the fact that enormous companies have been labelling and storing data for decades, and it helps them exploit that data for better results. Issuing loans, catching frauds, insurance risks, diagnosing diseases, finding a correlation between symptoms and diagnosis. In some countries Business AI is now helping judges give out fair sentences based on evidence and studying all the past cases with similar evidence.

Perception AI is digitizing our world through sensors and smart devices. It is what blurs the lines between the offline and online worlds. Now you can order your takeout through amazon Alexa instead of punching the order on the phone. Ali Pay has pioneered pay-with-your-face services in some stores where your face is linked to your online wallet. Want to pay for that big bag of cheetos and forgot your wallet? Scan your face and before stuff it with cheesy cheeto dust goodness.

Almost all smart home applications fall under perception AI and their future potential is dizzying. Frankly I can’t wait the day my refrigerator will be able to scan all the groceries I am short on communicate it to my supermarket shopping cart. I just hope it can get Dhaniya and Podina right.

Autonomous AI is the culmination of all three previous waves. It will unite the superior thinking of machines with physical extensions. But lets not narrow our vison with just autonomous cars as an example. Robots carrying out harvests on farms, robots in Amazon warehouse picking and packing orders, and drones carrying out search and rescue missions are all powerful examples of autonomous AI.

The difference between autonomous and automated comes down to the ability to make decision and improvise based on changing conditions. By giving machines the power of sight, sense of touch and the ability of optimize form data we have dramatically expanded the number of tasks they can handle.

When we think of the consequences of AI - we picture robots taking over the world with humankind at risk. Much thanks to hollywood for that. Lee argues the actual imminent and long-term impact of AI will be massive unemployment. PricewaterhouseCoopers estimates AI will increase worldwide GDP by $15.7 trillion dollars by 2030 with 70% of that going to the US and China. Since AI comprises algorithms that are easily installed where needed and maintained remotely, this revolution can take place at unprecedented speed. Jobs that don’t require social interaction or advanced robotics are most at risk: both White collar and blue-collar jobs. For example, Radiologists are at risk, Psychiatrists are not. Insurance executives are at risk, Public Relations directors are not. Dishwashers are at risk, dog trainers are not. Companies are constantly investing in technologies that will save time and optimize operations during downturns, so a recession would speed that up.

Lee evaluates prescriptions for dealing with an AI world with too many people for too few traditional jobs. There are suggestions such as retraining, reducing work hours and guaranteed income. All three are sound suggestions but will eventfully reach their limits. There is a need for policies with which governments and industries can invest in human-oriented service jobs. AI will do the thinking, but it has no emotion.

My postgraduate was in Robotics and AI following which I pivoted into non-tech/blended roles. One of the questions I get asked most frequently is why Robotics or AI and why in Pakistan of all places. I tend to throw this question back, “Why not?”. It still surprises me how under prepared we are for the AI revolution. You’d think the private sector would be making some investments in the field, but most companies, even multinationals, are skeptical about its implementation in a traditional market. It becomes a vicious cycle where skepticism engenders reluctance to implement which continues to keep data scarce and that scarcity can’t improve systems or learn the features of a traditional market to be effective which fuels skepticism and so it goes all over again.

China was much like Pakistan in that regard, but one major factor they had going differently for them was its government support in the area. And that triggered something akin to a domino effect which kickstarted action all the way to private, entrepreneurial and investment arenas.

Why read?

Kai Fu Lee is a technical genius who has led AI research/adoption and efforts in both west and east. He understands the complexity of issues that will stem from the explosive development of AI. His insights into the diverse cultural, political and technical factors that will frame the future of a new world order makes this book a must read for anyone interested in AI.

• Kai-Fu Lee’s presentation at O’Reilly AI Conference 2018

• Kai Fu Lee on the Lex Freidman Artificial Intelligence Podcast.

The other two books I read this week were:

• The Silent Patient which I found disappointingly overrated. Avid readers of thrillers and mystery genres may find the writing and plot cliched

• Folding Beijing (a dystopian novella) which I found was a brilliant quick read

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  This theatrical audiobook of the hobbit is so much more than a person saying words. It is incredibly immersive and a joy to listen. Enjoy!

-Saima

My father likes to say ‘you can’t be a student of history if you don’t know geography’

The land on which we live has always shaped us. It has shaped wars, influence, politics and development of people inhabiting it.

Prisoners of Geography by Tim Marshall is about the physical realities that underpin the national and international policies of countries. Physical realities that are too often disregarded when writing about history or reporting contemporary affairs.

Take for example China and India - two massive nations with sizeable population, a very long border and little cultural and regional similarities. You’d expect the two giants would have fought multiple wars by now, but they haven’t, apart from a monthlong battle in 1962.

Why? Because China and India are separated by the largest mountain range in the world, the Himalayas, and it is impossible to advance large military columns through or over them. Ofcourse eventually technology can assist with that but the first deterrent will always be geography

Prisoners of Geography take you continent hopping while covering these regions in 10 chapters 1) Russia 2) China 3) United States 4) Western Europe 5) Africa 6) The Middle East 7) India and Pakistan 8) Korea and Japan 9) Latin America and 10) The Arctic.

With the latest maps (as of 2018) of each region, Tim Marshall writes candidly about the role of geography in the complex geopolitical strategies of these regions. How is China’s future and interests being driven by its geography? Why will Latin America never be united politically like EU? What makes America so difficult to invade? Why is Russia so interested in Ukraine? Where is the next big frontier race? (hint: Arctic)

My favourite chapters were on Africa and Middle East. Reading about their interwoven history and geography that shaped the present day geopolitical complexities was eye opening. We learn terribly little of this in the classrooms, and the news reported on media always lacks context and historical nuances. A common theme I spotted in both Africa and Middle East is the political destabilisation resulting from the Colonials carving up continents. Forcing otherwise unique communities to accept an idea of nation state and coexist together is not the best solution as history has shown us on multiple occasions. The West, in its colonial peak and eventual retreat, drew ink lines on maps of places they understood and knew little about.

With middle east these lines are now being redrawn in blood making the region unstable until its constituent ethnicities and religious groups find a sweet spot that everyone is happy with (spoiler - there isn’t one). I felt however the author had a decidedly narrow view of the middle eastern problem watering it down ‘they hate each other you won’t believe how much and they mean it when they hate’. I also think he downplayed the Israel-Palestine conflict as well and carefully avoided calling a spade a spade.

In Africas case - Great beaches, but terrible natural harbours. Rivers? Amazing rivers, but most of them are useless for transporting anything, given that every few miles you go over a waterfall. These are just two in a long list of problems which explain why Africa isn’t technologically or politically as successful as Western Europe or North America (although the first human originated from African continent and you’d assume by that merit alone they’d have a head start over others). Compounding their problems are the way their borders have been carved up into nations that ended up struggling with ethnic and cultural tensions.

But Africa and Middle East are not the only regions paying for the artificial borders drawn up by colonials. They echo all over the world such as in Korean peninsula, Central Asia and Latin America.

While he writes really well, Tim Marshall has biases that represent western military strategies and diplomacy. The bias in his writing is subtle and easily missed because he cherry picks information to state them as facts and uses the facts to make predictions about the suture (the insolence).

This book puts a lot of recent and historical events in context. If you’re an expert of geopolitics, you might find the analysis of the regions to be too shallow. But then again, if you’re a casual/curious observer of current affairs, the book will be illuminating. In a world full of opinions we seldom pause to consider some basic facts (which we rarely know) such as where the countries are and what are their people like?

While reading Prisoners of Geography, I also ended up finding about how the maps we used as a reference as kids during geography lessons were wrong in proportions.

Image1: Cartographer Gerardus Mercator designed The Mercator in 1569. You probably saw it hanging in your Geography classroom. However, this mapping style has been heavily criticised because it exaggerates the size of Northern powers like Europe and North America, and shrinks South America and Africa. The Mercator works for its straight line navigation accuracy, which was important back in the day for sea-faring but that no longer relevant today, especially from a geographical perspective.
If you look at the map and mentally glue Alaska on to California and then turn the United States on its head, it appears as if it would roughly fit into Africa with a few gaps here and there. In fact, Africa is three times larger than the United States. Look again at the standard Mercator map and you’ll see that Greenland appears to be the same size as Africa, and yet Africa is actually fourteen times the size of Greenland!

Image2: There is no north-south or east-west distortion on the Hobo-Dyer map and is a better visual alternative (but it distorts the poles). You could fit the United States, Greenland, India, China, Spain, France, Germany, and the UK into Africa and still have room for most of Eastern Europe. 
We know Africa is a massive landmass, but the maps rarely tell us how massive.

I happened to come across the visual comm thesis of BNU and it was really fun browsing through them. I really enjoyed scrolling through the Khandaan - e - Zombie and Microagressions (the process document behind microagressions is also worth reading - takes a bit to load though). You can view all of them here. Each thesis has a detailed abstract and process documentation at the bottom as-well.

It’s a good weekend to have a Back to the Future marathon. Be safe

-Saima

Let me share a story of a desert planet, an evil emperor, and a boy with a galactic destiny entwined with warring noble houses. Sounds a lot like ‘A New Hope’ no? But this is a story that came before Star Wars, Matrix or Enders Game.

The golden age of science fiction was ushered in by works of Frank Herbert (Dune series), Issac Asimov (Foundation and Robot Series), and Orson Scott Card (Enders Game Quartet). Dune, originally published in 1965, is considered by many to be the greatest novel in the Science Fiction canon and has sold in millions around the world. I wanted to read this book before the movie starring Timothée Chalamet is released (so I can painfully relieve Hollywood destroying another sci-fi classic)

Dune is set in the far future where the galaxies are controlled by a despotic emperor and multiple warring houses. The universe has three major powers keeping everything in check 1) Imperial House - throne of the galactic emperor 2) Landsraad - noble houses and 2) the Spacing Guild that controls travel through space. Amongst others, there’s also Bene Gesserit - a mystical school that only takes in women and teaches them superhuman physical and mental intuitive powers (let’s call them Jedi Knights - we now know where George Lucas got the idea). Bene Gesserit also undertakes selective breeding which is part of a larger agenda to birth a powerful prophet (the chosen one).

This is a futuristic technologically advanced era that has eliminated all computers after the bloody war between Man and Machines (passing a decree declaring "Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a man's mind"). Without computers, the operational premise of the galaxy is still medieval and feudal with heavy reliance on men and their abilities.

Lots of thriller potential right there.

Our story begins with the noble house of Atreides (at-ree-ayy-diz) moving to take control of the Planet Arrakis at the behest of the Galactic Emperor. Arrakis is a desert planet with incredibly scarce vegetation and water but also the only home to the spice: Melange. Melange drives intergalactic travel, prolongs life, bestows heightened awareness, and can unlock prescience. Safe to say melange is the modern-day equivalent of oil. It drives everything and everyone has vested interests in it.

But first a little something about Arrakis..

..Arrakis (also knows as Dune) is a desert wasteland with so little water that its inhabitants have to wear a full-body StillSuit that captures body moisture (perspiration/urine) and recycles reclaimed water for re-consumption. Arrakis is also marked by electrically charged sandstorms and sandworms that guard the spice in the desert. These sandworms are ginormous 200 meter long creatures that always come digging through the sand wherever spice mining happens.
The natives of Arrakis are the hardy warriors Fremen who are part of tribal culture living in the rocky formations that dot the sands of Arrakis. Their ethos is one of conservation, survival, and honor. They value water so much that crying for, or spitting on someone is an extremely high honor to bestow (because why would anyone waste body water like that) They’re looked upon by the foreign powers with suspicion and disdain.

Back to the plot..

..the house Atreides led by Duke Leto is beset by threats and conspiracies from all ends. The duke and his forces are at defensive from the day he lands on Arrakis. His rivals at House Harkonen want to destroy him and reclaim Arrakis along with its spice profits. Whats follows are political mind games and Machiavellian maneuverings that are reminiscent of the game of thrones (with a little less gore and a lot more lasers).

In the wake of treachery and tragedy, the duke’s young son Paul survives a bloodbath and flees into the hostile open desert, accompanied, by j̶e̶d̶i̶ ̶k̶n̶i̶g̶h̶t̶ ̶his mother. From an early age, Paul has been showing signs of a kind of cosmic prescience, and people suspect that he may even be the messiah of ancient prophecies. The ancient prophecy foretells the messiah will possess the ability to tap the minds and lives of all genetic ancestors (Avatar?) as well as the ability to fold time and space (If Dr. Strange and Yoda had an unholy love child?) and become the eye of time. His mother, Jessica, is an initiate of the religious sisterhood of Bene Gesserit. The sisterhood has engaged in selective breeding and eugenic programming over millennia of which Paul may be the culmination.

Noice. 10/10 should read

The underlying theme of Dune is ecology and the relationship of the desert with the spice, the spice with the sandworms, and the sandworms with the desert. Beyond all the political intrigue is the concept of a galactic economy being dependent on one very scarce resource. 

The complexity and depth of Frank Herbert’s universe are so vast that it’s unbelievable. His character and universe building is incredibly detailed and non-repetitive. Religion, culture, politics, dynamics of power, effects of colonialism, and blatant destruction of the environment are themes that run parallel to the intensely exciting and labyrinthine plot. He shows how myth-making and religion are so paramount to sustain power over long periods because man as a political animal alone is completely bare. The religious wisdom in the book (drawing heavily from Arabic traditions and culture) is profound. Reading dune was unlike reading any one-directional plot.

After the first Dune book, Frank Herbert wrote five prequel Dune books (that I will likely read) and his son wrote another thirteen after Franks death (that I will likely not read)

Every fantasy reflects the place and time that produced it. If The Lord of the Rings is about the rise of fascism and the trauma of the world war, Enders game is about human trafficking and child labor, and Game of Thrones about cynical politics and neoliberalism, then Dune concerns – environmental stress, human potential, altered states of consciousness, democracy, and the developing countries’ revolution against imperialism.

Books read differently as the world changes over the decades, and Dune of 2020 has geopolitical echoes that it didn’t in 1965, before the oil crisis and 9/11, middle east conflicts, and pandemics. In writing something expansive that still echoes over decades to fans - Frank Herbert achieved the pinnacle of what a sci-fi author aspires to rise to; authentic world-building.

I enjoyed the vivid descriptions in Dune so much that I painted two of them. (1. Dune Cave and 2. Dune Sandworm)

The battle of Somme - 1916

1st July marked 100 years since the start of the Battle of the Somme. It was the bloodiest battle of the first world war and the 20th century. Over 1.5 million soldiers on both sides lay dead after the battle concluded.

Amongst the combatants was a young J.R.R. Tolkien, Adolf Hitler, Otto Frank ( the father of Anne Frank), Harold McMillan (the future PM of UK), Winston Churchill and Robert Graves ( famous for Goodbye to All That, one of the most enduring memoirs of the First World War and the Somme in particular.)

J.R.R. Tolkien was one of the fortunate men who came home from this battle. He escaped from the wars haunting experience by writing and creating a world that has continued to endure for generations. It shaped his beloved epic, the Lord Of The Rings.

Reaching the front shortly after the offensive began, Tolkien served for four months in the Picardy region of France. In the rent earth of the Somme Valley, he laid the foundation of his epic trilogy. He began writing the first drafts of Middle-earth by candlelight in bell-tents and in dugouts under shell fire.

The battle scenes in The Lord of the Rings are reminiscent of the grim memories of the trenches: relentless artillery bombardment, mustard gas, and bodies of dead soldiers discovered in craters of mud.

The heroism and tenacity of his characters were inspired by the qualities he observed among his comrades.

"I have always been impressed that we are here, surviving, because of the indomitable courage of quite small people against impossible odds,” he explained. The Hobbits were “a reflection of the soldier,” made small of stature to emphasize “the amazing and unexpected heroism of ordinary men ‘at a pinch.’ "

To read more about WW1 and its influence on Tolkein’s work: NYT’s How J.R.R. Tolkien Found Mordor on the Western Front.

For anyone interested in WW1, here’s a youtube channel I found earlier this week: The Great War. The Great War covers the First World War from 1914 to 1923 – in real-time between 2014 to 2023. Every other week, it touches the important events that influenced the world 100 years ago (World War 1 on a weekly basis)

This Newsletter was late because my writing nook was under siege by these two.

Stay Safe

Saima