The Year (2006) in Books

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Red Snapper wrote me and suggested a post reviewing the books of 2006. This is of course somewhat difficult to do, because unlike some readers I tend to spend most of my time reading books written years and years and years ago — and I often let new works of fiction simmer into paperback before venturing to sit down with them. In this case, I haven’t actually read several of the books on the list below, and the list is as much a “to read” as it is a “best of.”

Secondly, the ordering isn’t especially significant. The list is more about the group as a whole than it is about putting X above Y or Y above Z. As I mentioned, I haven’t read some of the titles, and anyway ranking books isn’t usually a very intelligent exercise, especially when you’re talking about different genres of writing.

Third, I’m curious to know what was on your list in 2006. What am I leaving out?1. Kaavya. It was undoubtedly a lively year for South Asian literature of the diasporic variety, though not always for the right reasons. “Kaavya Viswanathan” quickly became the name on everyone’s lips (including Sepia Mutiny’s bloggers and commenters) for about three weeks in April and May, but in contrast to other desi writers it wasn’t for her exotic choice of subject matter. Kaavya’s plagiarism scandal was the biggest of the year (and 2006 was also the year James Frey caused Oprah to go ballistic, and Dan Brown got acquitted, so this isn’t a small accomplishment).

2. Kiran Desai also won the Booker Prize for The Inheritance of Loss. (Manish’s review; Siddhartha’s post). This is great news for the general reputation of South Asian writers, though it isn’t clear to me that the book has had very much buzz in its commercial life. Still, I’m long overdue to pick it up.

3. Sudhir Venkatesh, Off the Books: The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor has made a big impact, all the more so because Venkatesh doesn’t come from a background remotely similar to the people he studies. Interestingly, though this book has little to do with South Asia, Venkatesh’s Indian background probably did help him get his research done, because it marked him as belonging to a group in between the African-Americans he was studying and the wealthier white America beyond the south side of Chicago.

4. Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Imperial Life in the Emerald City. It’s too bad this book didn’t come out even earlier, but it’s apparently one of the most scathing accounts of the botched American reconstruction effort in Iraq to have yet appeared. As with Sudhir Venkatesh in a poor black neighborhood, journalists like Chandrasekaran and, to an even greater extent, Time Magazine’s Bobby Ghosh, benefit from being South Asian. Since they register to others as belonging an indeterminate racial background, desi journalists can pass for Iraqis and go where their white or black peers can’t.

5. Vikram Chandra’s Sacred Games. This book isn’t even out in the U.S. yet, but it’s already getting some U.S. reviews, the most widely circulated of which was Sven Birkerts’ review-that-isn’t-one.

6. Lads. Earlier in the year there was a fair bit of hype about books like Nirpal Singh Dhaliwal’s Tourism and Gautam Malkani’s Londonstani (see Manish’s post). Now, not so much. It probably didn’t help that Dhaliwal’s book was nominated for a Bad Sex Award. But Gautam Malkani wrote an important column on the real vibrancy of Asian life in Britain this past August. I haven’t read either, though of the two I’m more likely to pick up Londonstani.

7. Lads who Like Lads Should Be Allowed To Like Them, Legally. In 2006, Vikram Seth made headlines by prominently participating in the movement to repeal India’s Section 377. Seth’s magnificent memoir of his uncle and aunt’s relationship, Two Lives, doesn’t foreground homosexuality, but it is a loving consideration of another kind of coupling often considered taboo. Two Lives actually came out in November 2005, but the paperback was released in June 2006.

8-11. The heavy duty. Amartya Sen’s Identity and Violence, Amitav Ghosh’s Incendiary Circumstances, and Pankaj Mishra’s Temptations of the West. Serious books of essays meditating on very serious issues. All three of these books struck me as important. Of the three, Mishra’s book reflects the greatest effort in terms of actual footwork. And even if you’re unhappy about Mishra’s reporting on the massacre at Chattisinghpura, Kashmir, you should still read this for the excellent chapters on Pakistan (which, Mishra shows, is a mess), Tibet, and Afghanistan.

12. Upamanyu finally makes it. Upamanyu Chatterjee’s English, August was finally released in the U.S. in 2006, almost 18 years after it originally appeared in India. In one sense it doesn’t matter that much, since most people who are interested in Indian literature had already found a copy somewhere. But in another sense it absolutely does matter: if it’s in print in the U.S., it’s a lot easier for people like me to assign it in our classes (which I did for the first time, this fall)

13. Marina Budhos, Ask Me No Questions. Marina Budhos’s book is a sophisticated dystopian vision that belongs somewhere between the juvenile fiction shelves and the adult shelves. I was impressed by Budhos’s writing when I saw her read at the SAWCC conference, and I enjoyed the book itself.

14. Eqbal Ahmad’s collected writings. Eqbal Ahmad was a legendary leftist radical from the 1960s whose political beliefs were not at all doctrinaire. Amitava Kumar published a very smart review of the new collection of his essays in the Nation back in November.

70 thoughts on “The Year (2006) in Books”

  1. *the canadian dollar is called a loonie because of the image of a loon on one side and a bird on the other.

    Ummm… a loon is a bird. Or are you refering to Queen Elizabeth? I like to think of her as an old bat.

  2. Hi Amardeep,

    I bang my fists on the table and demand a section for Books on Cricket; a grotesque oversight not at all becoming a South Asian site. I nominate Indian Summers by John Wright, erstwhile coach of the Indian team. Also, I second Whose God is it anyways in his choice of The Illustrated History of Indian Cricket by Boria Majumdar.

    Howzaaaaat? 😀

  3. Ummm… a loon is a bird. Or are you refering to Queen Elizabeth? I like to think of her as an old bat.

    That is a great analogy; she is indeed like an old bat. She has played millions of balls and seen Sixes, Fours, and streaky edges fly past her. She has tasted both victory and defeat; love and hate. It is time to retire her, oil her for one last time and place her in the glass cabinet. Charles has been seasoned to the hilt and it is time for his debut innings.

    Peace

  4. I bang my fists on the table and demand a section for Books on Cricket; a grotesque oversight not at all becoming a South Asian site. I nominate Indian Summers by John Wright

    Spot on Uber! I heard Indian Summers is great – Andrew Symonds book is said to be quite good too. However, the first cricket book I plan to read is Pundits from Pakistan. I’m gonna slow down now — too much cricket talk for one comment.

    Uber- posting at 3am…watching the Ind-SA test eh? Go India!

  5. Staying on with cricket, the best cricket book to come out of India last year is definitely You Must Like Cricket?: Memoirs of an Indian Cricket Fan by Soumya Bhattacharya, a must read.

  6. Best book I’ve read this year — Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimimanda Ngozi Amichie. Much better than The Inheritance of Loss and by a 27 year old. Great stuff.

    Luce’s In Spite of the Gods was also very good, though I can’t help feeling that it was the kind of analysis of modern India that “is how non-Indians (and desis living abroad) always see India.”

  7. Uber- posting at 3am…watching the Ind-SA test eh? Go India!

    Yeah! I work in the Middle East, so it is the afternoon for me. Ganguly seems to be playing real well after getting pinged on the head:D Sorry Amardeep, last post on Cricket; I promise.

    Peace

  8. Good to see a couple of people mentioning The Last Mughal. I was going to recommend it too; I already have my own hardback copy (for those of you in the US who can’t buy it yet but are shortly planning a trip to India, you can get it there for Rs 695 — quite a bargain compared to the £25 it costs in the UK). I haven’t read it yet as I’m still ploughing through White Mughals, but I’ve flicked through it and the book certainly looks superb — absolutely packed with details of the period. Plenty of anecdotes regarding Ghalib too (and general late Mughal-era life in Delhi), if you’re interesting in all that, and it’s written in William Dalrymple’s usual engaging and informative style. It’s even regularly made the lists of “most highly recommended books from 2006” in the mainstream journalism media here in Britain.

    Pied Piper’s recommendation “The Scandal of Empire” (post #36) definitely sounds like an interesting accompaniment to White Mughals, in order to provide the flipside to Dalrymple’s more positive (but not necessarily sanitised) description of the era. Before anyone jumps on that statement, I should stress that Dalrymple is more enamoured of Mughal courtly life and is sympathetic towards British EIC employees who became “Indianised”; he’s certainly not an apologist for colonialism by any means.

    On the non-desi side, I can recommend Persian Fire and Rubicon, about the conflicts between the Persian Empire & the Spartans/Greeks (including the Battle of Thermopylae) and about the Roman Empire respectively, although both pre-date last year. For those interested in “classic” fiction, I very strongly recommend Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier; it’s one of the most brilliantly written stories I’ve ever read, and it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that every single paragraph is a poetic masterpiece.

    Absolutely fantastic post by Red Snapper (#19), by the way.

  9. My reading list is in no way up to date. I can never seem to keep up, and the only time I actually get to read for pleasure is when I’m on vacation.

    In any case, I’ve been working through A Suitable Boy along with a collection of short stories and poems by Poe and occasionally reading a fairytale or two from Grimm’s Complete Fairy Tales. I haven’t gotten to read The Inheritance of Loss yet, but that’s on my list, along with Kite Runner.

    Some good books I read in 2006: Blindness, by Jose Saramago and its sequel, Seeing

    I read Shiva’s Fire a while ago and loved it :]

    And to those that like a little bit junkier fiction, check out books by Tami Hoag (suspense/thriller/drama)

  12. The Vancouver Punjabi gangsta book is Daaku (see comment #38). I haven’t read the booki, and one review called it “genre fiction”, which can’t be good. Has anyone read it?

    The Last Mughal is available now in Canada, so if you’re very eager to read it, and live near the border …

  13. Pooja,

    Yes, yes, yes! Younguncle Comes to Town by Vandana Singh is great fun!

    I think Jerry Pinto’s book about the fabulous Helen was also worth a read, at least by any filmi enthusiast.

  14. Thanks to posts on Sp.Mtny, I got to pick up some interesting new desi authors in 2006…I just ordered ‘Patna Roughcut’, loved Samit Basu’s 2 fantasy books and liked Chetan Bhagat’s 2 books (well the writing might be below par but i liked his easygoing stories and characters. Atleast he has displaced Shobha De from the Bestseller lists in India. And it was a good move to price it @rs.95).

    People seem to like Vandana Singh’s ‘Younguncle’ series but it did not quite work its magic on me. Maybe her ‘Y comes to Town’ is more absorbing compared to the 2nd book of hers which i read. Well again i didnt quite enjoy Artemis Fowl.

    Is anyone familiar with J. P. Kerawala’s comics and books. I have an old Timpa comic which comes close to beating Tintin. Can’t seem to find his 2006 book ‘Gifts of the Gods- A Timpa adventure’.

    I’m going to ramble about some of the great books i read in 2006.

    read Naipaul’s 1971 Booker winner ‘In a Free State’. Really liked the story in which a cook lands in the US. read Shudraka’s Sanskrit play ‘Mricchakatika/The Little Clay’ Cart. T Gopichand’s absorbing- ‘The Bungler/Asmardha Jeevanyatra’ (1947,Telugu, Sahitya Academi winner). Wish i could get more translations of Regional classics.

    read a couple of business books – ‘Freakonomics:by Steven D. Levitt’ and ‘The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy’ by Pietra Rivoli. Rivoli’s book explores how a t-shirt origintes from the cotton fields in Texas, processed into Tshirts in Asia, worn in the US and finally recycled in Africa. It has a desi angle as India historically has been a player in the cotton/t-shirt market and more poignantly touches the issue of suicides by cotton farmers in Andhra

    read almost all of Christopher Buckley’s satirical novels after watching his ‘Thank you for smoking’

    re-read SF Ender’s Game/Shadow, Necromancer and a couple of ‘Sudden’ westerns and ‘Hornblower’ sea epics.

    read some awesome comics- jeff smith’s ‘Bone’ series, Hugo Pratt’s ‘corto maltese’ books, Flight, Dungeon Vol. 1: Duck Heart by Lewis Trondheim, Joann Sfar(Samit Basu fans this last comic will appeal to you). But ended up disappointed with the acclaimed ‘David Boring’ comic.

    hmm.. cant seem to remember having read any travel writing in 2006

    Am going to start 2007 with Bhalchandra Nemade’s Marathi classic ‘Cocoon/Kosla’ and then check out Douglas Preston’s ‘Relic’ which my newphew says is like an Indiana Jones story.

  16. another book i enjoyed was marley & me: life and love with the world’s worst dog.

  18. Hi

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    Click to enlarge
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