My reading year

The non-fiction edit

I read more books than normal this year. I can go into the reasons why but will save that for another day. Today, I am covering my favourite reads of 2024.

This was a year where I despaired of fiction. A little. I still have some stand-out fiction recommendations). But there was so much variety and knowledge and wisdom in the non-fiction I read, the fiction just seemed that bit paler in comparison.

Take Early Indians by Tony Joseph. In less than 250 pages, and in clear, lucid language, using the latest genetic, linguistic and artistic research, he gives us a history lesson we will not forget. About who we are as a nation and a people, and where we came from, in this palimpsest of a land.

Peggy Mohan does something similar with her Wanderers, Kings, Merchants. She uses linguistics to map out a history of India through its languages. Again, giving us a lesson on how mixed we are, of genes and cultures and languages, and how we are constantly evolving.

Raw Umber was a sensory delight. Sara Rai, the granddaughter of Munshi Premchand writes a sort of a memoir, a series of essays on growing up in Allahabad, on summer holidays in her crumbling family home in Benares, on her famous and not-so-famous family members, on her own writing. It’s a gorgeous book and you float on her words that bring a lost world to life.

Hundreds of thousands of migrants make their way to the capital, every year. Journalist Neha Dixit writes of one of them, in her The Many Lives of Syeda X. We follow Syeda’s journey across three decades, as she and her family learn to survive, in sweatshops around the city, battling unscrupulous landlords and employers, a growing communalism and unexpected calamities like demonetization and a pandemic. It’s a revelatory book, shedding light on the invisible workforce of women in the informal sector, the ones who make those bindis and rakhis and tea strainers we so carelessly buy on the streets of our cities. India has failed our Syedas, this book seems to say, and they deserve better. If I had to choose one book to recommend this year, this would be it.

Thousands of kilometres away, as the world was coming out of a pandemic, a writer was stabbed as the result of a fatwa issued against him thirty years back. Rushdie lived to tell the tale in his deeply personal and cathartic account of the attack and its aftermath, Knife. He writes in some amount of detail, leaving none of the brutality and the savagery out. Yet what remains unforgettable is the strength of Rushdie’s unique voice, as he continues his advocacy for freedom of expression, and his firm conviction that art outlasts its oppressors.

Annie Ernaux has become somewhat of a favourite ever since I read her Happening, the year she won the Nobel. She has made a career of mining her memories, and her works are always about her life, the people in them, and the influences on her writing. This year, I read two of her books. The Years is literally a memoir of a generation, as she writes about her life in the context of what was happening in France and the world, through the decades between 1940 and 2007. Writing as ‘we’ and referring to herself as ‘she’, this is her attempt she says, ‘to save something from the time where we will never be again'. It’s a novel way to capture a generation’s zeitgeist and it had me captivated. A Woman’s Story is a very different book – it is a slim memoir about her mother. Ernaux is both objective and deeply loving, as she tries to ‘see’ her mother as she wasn’t seen during her lifetime. It’s moving beyond measure and can be a hard relate for anyone who has loved and lost a parent.

Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez is a rage-inducing book. Perez shows us how the base data that informs most decisions - whether you talk of the workplace, or politics, or healthcare, or public transport, or anything in the public sphere - is mostly based on men. It perpetuates gender bias and can be downright dangerous for women in some cases. The examples are shocking, and you wonder how the world can forget half of humanity while designing things that matter. This is a must-read for anyone who cares about an equal world.

I like philosophy, or at least I like writers who explain philosophical concepts to me. In At the Existentialist Café, Sarah Bakewell takes us on a journey to explore the Existentialists. She combines biography, history and philosophy to give us a fascinating look at the twentieth century and some of the people and ideas that changed the world in that period. In the process, she has given me so many good recommendations to add to my ever-growing TBR. It’s not an easy book, but if like me, you like the twentieth century and you are fascinated by philosophy, you will like this book.

Dalrymple gives me the third of the Indian history books I read and loved this year. The Golden Road is an attempt to tell the story of an ancient India that was open to the world and engaged with it and influenced it, much before comparative civilizations. He coins the term the Golden Road to describe the sea passages that ferried Indian goods and ideas both to the West and to the East. It’s a book filled with historical facts, and while you are familiar with quite a bit, there was a lot that was new too. Dalrymple’s storytelling is almost hypnotic and though it galls you that a Britisher is telling you your history, you are still grateful someone is.

These were my ten best non-fiction reads of the year. But think of the ones I have not included, and you will realize what a blockbuster reading year this was for me. Just a quick glance at the other notable non-fiction - Ben McIntyre’s A Spy Among Friends, Aruna Roy’s The Personal is Political, Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son, Shanta Gokhale’s The Engaged Observor, Ghosh’s Smoke and Ashes and Gawande’s Being Mortal. Each of these is worth your time – educative and illuminative, but above all entertaining.

Stay tuned for Part 2 where I cover my favourite fiction reads of the year.

But before that, do tell me what your favourite non-fiction reads of this year were.