Five Books I Loved This Summer

It is never too late to change the direction of your day, your summer, or your entire year. I am a firm believer in that: no matter how much time feels wasted, or how irreversibly gloomy a season may seem, something as simple as going out to meet a friend or picking up a great book can shift its energy entirely. 

Admittedly, this past summer was a strange season of my life. It was not gloomy by any means, but it was a season of transition to graduate school, which will begin this fall. Throughout these warm months, I cycled through happy, restless, lost, and hopeful emotions. In retrospect, it has been a bit of a rollercoaster. But, lucky for me, I always had the comfort of reading good books to keep me grounded in curiosity.  

Below is a list of my five favorite books from the summer. Four are related to South Asia. The last is, somewhat unexpectedly, a work of science fiction, a genre I very rarely read. 

1. Pakistan: A Hard Country by Anatol Lieven

Initially, I was intimidated by how long this book is. It is five hundred pages long. But I am so glad that I ultimately purchased it. Pakistan is a deeply researched yet very readable analysis of the Pakistani political landscape. The author does not shy away from the country’s challenges (corruption, weak institutions, violence etc) but neither does he accept the view that Pakistan is a “failed state.” 

Instead, Lieven shifts his focus on the lesser talked about kinship groups in Pakistan. Kinship networks, or the biradari system, provide crucial protection, access to jobs/resources, and solidarity to Pakistani people in moments of extreme hardship, particularly where formal state institutions are too weak to offer support. They are vital to the resilience of Pakistani society amidst national crises. 

Interestingly, Lieven also explains that the leaders who oversee such kinship groups often become powerful political authorities themselves, and contribute to systems of political patronage and corruption at higher levels of Pakistani government. And so, at the heart of his argument is this paradox: some of the same structures that hold society together and make it so resilient can also weaken the state at large. I had never encountered this argument before, and I found the paradox especially memorable. 

I am keeping in mind that this book was written in 2011. Naturally, a lot has happened since then. Some reviewers online have critiqued that the book does not consider Pakistan’s rapidly changing demographics and urbanization. But, nevertheless, I think it is a fascinating and approachable analysis of Pakistan’s political landscape and history.

2. The Backstage of Democracy: India’s Election Campaigns and the People who Manage Them by Amogh Dhar Sharma 

A very insightful, serious intervention into Indian political writing. Instead of focusing primarily on the more visible side of politics, this book suggests that campaign management from behind the scenes is an equally important center of political power. Amogh Dhar Sharma analyzes exactly how the work of strategists, consultants, and pollsters working for Indian political parties has transformed over the years, especially with rapid technological advance shifting how political parties reach voters. 

What I especially liked about this book was Sharma’s explicit “human-centered approach” to studying Indian politics. He takes a serious look at what socio-economic backgrounds these political professionals come from, and their motives for joining politics in the first place. Moreover, he writes extensively about how technology has transformed how political parties manage their reputations. I loved his section about the “crucial symbolic power of computers” which Rajiv Gandhi and his team used to project the image that their politics was grounded in  modern, unbiased expertise.

If you’re at all interested in Indian politics, then definitely read this!

3. The World With Its Mouth Wide Open by Zahid Rafiq 

Just a magnificent collection of short stories. The prose are raw and beautiful, often in a somewhat abstract sense about the violence and subliminal terror that entails living in a conflict-ridden place like Kashmir. I have read Rafiq’s short story Bare Feet several times, in which a ghost visits the narrator in the middle of the night and asks him to find his family and tell them that he has been killed. The language is so vivid about the decay of the city that the narrator visits and the impending threat of violence everywhere. 

4. India, Empire, And First World War Culture by Santanu Das 

An exceptional monograph I have been reading for my MPhil. It offers original and eloquently expressed insights into the letters and songs of Indian soldiers during the First World War. The sections “I Might Rain Men on You” and “Letters as Literature” have been particularly formative for me, resonating with my own blossoming passion for the intersection of history and literature. What I found most compelling was how the soldiers’ letters inserted into the book are both lyrical and yet direct in message, fusing verse and letter-writing. Santanu Das focuses not only on what these letters say, but how these soldiers expressed themselves poetically and how the pressures of censorship affected their messages. One of my main takeaways from this book is just how literary these soldiers were, despite many of them being unable to read or write. Their letters are filled with diverse metaphors and references to nature, even amid the horrors of war and the constraints of censorship.

5. The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin 

It is really rare for me to like science fiction. Usually, I find a lot of science fiction writing to be unrelatable and difficult to comprehend. But The Left Hand of Darkness converted me into an admirer of the genre. Le Guin has this ingenious way of writing otherworldly stories while also sliding in the most thought-provoking political commentary that is directly relevent to life on Earth. It blows my mind, even after reading her work for the second time. 

This particular novel is written like a report from an envoy (named Genly Ai) traveling to an alien planet, where gender is fluid and patriarchy is nonexistent. Genly tries to understand the planet Gethen, but the divide between his culture/biology and theirs is so vast, some encounters remain quite alien and off-putting to him. I believe the disconnect Le Guin describes here is essentially an allegory for the tension between different cultures here on Earth. Over the course of the novel, Genly’s journey shows just how difficult and gradual it can be to develop an open mind, to be received by others, and to learn how to receive them in return. 

More generally though, the book is a carousel of philosophical questions. What can a society without fixed gender and patriarchal systems look like? What is the value of uncertainty? And what does it mean to be a true patriot? There are so many thought experiments woven throughout, which are often separate from the main plot. Some readers may find these digressions frustrating, and while it takes patience to keep up with all the detailed subplots, to me, the extra commentary only adds to the richness of the book.