Celebrating Differences

This year started off well for me in terms of reading. Poetry found its way back into my register. In the pre-internet days I used to listen to poets read their work on CDs and cassettes. But it’d been a decade since I surrendered to the verse. I spent days in January listening to and reading Simon Armitage, the current Poet Laureate. Many of his poems have been etched into stones in the English countryside, allowing hikers and trekkers, shepherds and farmers to have chance encounters with his poems. In his words and under his gaze, ‘Dew enters the field/ under cover of night,/ tending the weary and sapped,/ lifting its thimble of drink / to the lips of a leaf… or carries its torch/for the rain.’ His words enforce a stillness. In that moment when you first read him, you feel your vision of a dew drop has been altered forever. His collection of poems Sandettie Light Vessel Automatic (Faber & Faber) glistens with other similar gems and revelations, whether it is about returning soldiers or walking home or the natural landscape.

But after the enthusiasm of the early months, as one un-settled into March and April and realised that this was to be a year like no other, my reading faltered. Looking at the personal choices of the host of eminent authors and intellectuals, in the following pages, one realises how at times of unease, the sources of comfort are as particular as they are manifold. The choices of our 15-odd contributors span history and politics, poetry and fiction, writing in English and translations, some have found books published in previous years to be especially relevant today. In the 100-odd books on our ‘best of’ list, repetitions are rare, proving the diversity of choice and the rich pickings on offer.

Three novels stood out for me this year. Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line by Deepa Anappara (Hamish Hamilton); Girl in White Cotton (also called Burnt Sugar) by Avni Doshi (Fourth Estate); and Red Pill by Hari Kunzru. It is particularly exciting that Anappara and Doshi are both debut writers, which means one can only hope that they have prolific careers ahead.

Djinn Patrol is both pacey and tender. Anappara uses her journalist’s skills to weave a story of children who go missing from a basti in an unnamed Indian metropolis. The story is told through a young boy who takes on the role of a detective and whose neighbour is the first child to go missing. This is a contemporary novel that while dealing with the injustices, inequities, brutalities of India, never loses its narrative grip.

Doshi’s Girl in White Cotton also holds its reader in a pincer grip. But this is no easy read as it deals with a mother-daughter relationship and one that is especially fraught as the mother is losing her memory and the daughter has secrets from the past. It is a slow read as it examines human relationships with a surgeon’s precision and reveals the ooze beneath the surface, with every cut of a sentence.

Kunzru’s Red Pill on the other hand, is a novel that one can race through as one keeps wondering, what next. It tells of a writer hoping to use the time at a writing residency in Berlin to finish his book. Instead he slides down a rabbit hole of a violent cop show and grows obsessed with its creator Anton. This obsession will take him into the world of the alt-right and the recesses of the internet. It forces one to reckon with questions on paranoia and reality.

My favourite book of the year is the collection of essays Vesper Flights (Jonathan Cape) by Helen Macdonald. As a fan of her memoir H Is for Hawk (2015), I felt I’d been waiting five years for her new book to land. And I was not disappointed. I am no nature expert. I am a nature novice. But this is the kind of book that takes Simon Armitage’s verse and turns it into prose. It tells us of the art and science of berries and corn, sun birds and murmurations. To me it is the most important book of the year, because, as Macdonald writes, ‘Most of all I hope my work is about a thing that seems to me of the deepest possible importance in our present-day historical moment: finding ways to recognise and love difference.’

In our choices of 2020, we hope you, dear reader, will come to recognise and appreciate the many different preferences.

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