My Books of 2023 (Fine Sentences Included)
I think 2023 was a good year for reading for me. I certainly feel like I read more and was rewarded by the books I read in various ways.
Without further ado, here are the books I read and enjoyed.
The Best Ones
I’m a big sucker for sweeping histories when competently done. It’s what I tried to do with Fola in Formation — a coherent and flowing narrative covering a long period of time. For this I really enjoyed Slouching Towards Utopia even if I don’t think it delivered on the author’s promise in the opening chapter. But it was a refreshing take on history (by a very intelligent author who can also be very annoying and unpleasant) in a way that forced me to rethink a few ‘settled’ ideas I thought I had.
Here’s a coda on Ghandi:
“Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was born in 1869, the son of Karamchand Uttamchand Gandhi, the prime minister of the small British-allied and British-subject principality of Porbandar on the peninsula of Kathiawar, and of Karamchand’s fourth wife, Putlibai.16 When he was fourteen their families married him and Kasturbai. In 1888, at the age of eighteen, he sailed from Mumbai to England to study law. Three years later, at the age of twenty-two, he was a lawyer, and sailed back to India. He did not do well in his career. In 1893 he ran across a merchant who needed a lawyer to try to collect a £40,000 debt in South Africa. Gandhi volunteered for the job and again crossed the ocean. He thought he was going for a year. But he decided to stay. In 1897 he went back to India to collect his family and bring them to South Africa. He would remain in South Africa for twenty-two years. And it was there that he became an anti-imperialist, a politician, and an activist, for in South Africa people from the Indian south continent were not treated as badly as indigenous African peoples, but they were at most only one step higher.” (Brad de Long, Slouching Towards Utopia)
Here’s another typical sentence:
“To fight one set of wars at the start of the twentieth century to unify Serbs and Croats, and another set of wars at the end of that century to “ethnically cleanse” Serbs of Croats, and Croats of Serbs, seems among the sickest jokes history ever played on humans, or, more causally accurate, humans ever played on history.” (Brad de Long, Slouching Towards Utopia)
And:
“To see a utopian future in your mind’s eye and think that it is almost within your grasp, and that your actions, even if severe, even if cruel and brutal, can bring it closer, out of the realm of fantasy, as a reality down here on earth — that is the curse of ideology.” (Brad de Long, Slouching Towards Utopia)
Finally:
“In Germany after World War I, supporters of the German Socialist Party were called Sozis — the first two syllables of Sozialist. For some reason, urban Bavarians made fun of people named Ignatz. The name was a stand-in for a what in English is a country bumpkin: someone rural, foolish, and awkward. There was a diminutive nickname for Ignatz: Nazi. Hence the political enemies of Adolf Hitler and his National Socialist German Workers’ Party in Bavaria in the 1920s began calling them a mash-up of these terms, “Nazis.” The name stuck.” (Brad de Long, Slouching Towards Utopia)
I won’t call it the best written book I’ve ever read (a lot of annoying repetitions) but it was very enjoyable with something new to me on almost every page.
Ed Conway is a really good journalist in the classic definition of the word. In a time of artificial intelligence where everything in the world seems at the mercy of lines of software code, it is nice to read about the hard facts of the world we live in that have been the same since forever. Material World tells the story of sand, salt, iron, copper, oil and lithium and how they have shaped — and continue to shape — the world around us.
There are so many stories like this about humans coming in contract with a natural resource for the first time:
“Back in the fourteenth century, long before the Europeans arrived, a group of locals was travelling from the foothills of the Andes towards the Pacific Ocean. On their way through the Atacama, they stopped up for the night and made camp. But when they lit the fire they were astonished to see some of the rocks on the ground sparking and igniting. Fearing evil demons they made a run for it. But in time word spread about these ‘devil’s stones’. People soon realised that not only were they explosive, when they were thrown out on the ground they made that earth especially fertile.” (Ed Conway, Material World)
And:
“If steel provides the skeleton of our world and concrete its flesh then copper is civilisation’s nervous system, the circuitry and cables we never see but couldn’t function without.” (Ed Conway, Material World)
Finally:
“Oils can also be ‘sweet’ or ‘sour’ — a measure of sulphur content, which dates back to the early days when crude was mostly used for indoor lighting. Too much sulphur in your kerosene and not only was there a noxious smell when it burned, it would also tarnish the silver in your lamp. Back then the quickest way to test for this before burning was to give it a quick taste — the more sulphur, the more sour it was — and this shorthand has stuck.” (Ed Conway, Material World)
I think Andrew Roberts Napoleon is a contender for the best bio I’ve ever read. It is rather sympathetic to a man who is considered — with reason — to be nothing short of evil by many people. But the case is well made in painstaking detail and plenty of interesting anecdotes about a man who personally led his forces into battle across Europe, killing hundreds of thousands of Frenchmen in the process. And yet he also personally chaired policy drafting meetings that ran to 9 hours or more and gave France so much of what makes it a modern country.
The book has a lot of detailed descriptions of battles and battle scenes; I will admit much of these flew over my head (military history is not my strong point) but the almost 1,000 pages gave me much pleasure. Indeed this quote, by Thomas Hardy, perhaps sums it up best:
“‘SPIRIT SINISTER: “… My argument is that War makes rattling good history; but Peace is poor reading. So I back Bonaparte for the reason that he will give pleasure to posterity.” ’” (Andrew Roberts, Napoleon the Great)
On the context of his rise:
“Rarely in military history has there been so high a turnover of generals as in France in the 1790s. It meant that capable young men could advance through the ranks at unprecedented speed. The Terror, emigration, war, political purges, disgrace after defeat, political suspicion and scapegoating, on top of all the normal cases of resignation and retirement, meant that men like Lazare Hoche, who was a corporal in 1789, could be a general by 1793, or Michel Ney, a lieutenant in 1792, could become one by 1796. Napoleon’s rise through the ranks was therefore by no means unique given the political and military circumstances of the day.73 Still, his progress was impressive: he had spent five and a half years as a second-lieutenant, a year as a lieutenant, sixteen months as a captain, only three months as a major and no time at all as a colonel. On December 22, 1793, having been on leave for fifty-eight of his ninety-nine months of service — with and without permission — and after spending less than four years on active duty, Napoleon was made, at twenty-four, a general.” (Andrew Roberts, Napoleon the Great)
Cheeky:
“A major problem with Christianity, as he told Bertrand, was that it ‘does not excite courage’ because ‘It takes too much care to go to heaven.’” (Andrew Roberts, Napoleon the Great)
I’m going to see Ridley Scott’s movie soon (partly so I can be that type of guy who points out historical inaccuracies in movies on Twitter) which I hear has a strong focus on his relationship with Josephine. On the terms of their divorce:
“Such is the cruelty of courts. She was hardly exiled from Paris, however, as she kept the Élysée Palace as part of her settlement. Napoleon gave her Malmaison and the fourteenth-century Château Navarre in Normandy, which had cost him 900,000 francs, and she maintained her rank of empress, all honours and prerogatives, while her debts of 2 million francs were paid off and she enjoyed 3 million francs per annum in income for life.53 As Frederick the Great said of Maria Theresa at the time of the first partition of Poland: ‘She wept, but she took.’” (Andrew Roberts, Napoleon the Great)
And for perhaps my favourite Napoleon quote:
“He unsurprisingly wanted his memoirs to confound his detractors.111 ‘Many faults, no doubt, will be found in my career,’ he said, ‘but Arcole, Rivoli, the Pyramids, Marengo, Austerlitz, Jena, Friedland — these are granite: the teeth of envy are powerless here.’” (Andrew Roberts, Napoleon the Great)
Japan and China
I finally visited Japan this year. Won’t bore you with the details but if you want to read about my time there and the photos I took, go to my earlier post. It also includes (at the end) a review-ish of Mark Ravina’s To Stand With the Nations of the World, one of the finest books on economic development I’ve ever read.
“As early as 1862, Katō Hiroyuki argued that Japan should adopt the Western principle of separation of powers. Examining the various polities of the world, Katō had concluded that “weaker” governments could actually produce stronger nations because autocracies enervated their own people.” (Mark Ravina, To Stand With the Nations of the World)
Why indeed:
“The Tokugawa regime fell not because it was “weak” but because it could not adapt to an increasingly violent international environment. For centuries, the Tokugawa shoguns had assiduously avoided foreign entanglements, maintaining limited but peaceful relations with China and Korea and strictly limiting contact with other polities. That long Pax Tokugawa had obviated the need for a powerful national military: there was no one to fight. Without a national army, the shoguns lacked a key incentive to establish national institutions, such as national taxation. Why would the Tokugawa risk sparking domestic discontent by collecting taxes for a national army it did not need?” (Mark Ravina, To Stand With the Nations of the World)
And finally, the Japanese have long been good at copying and making stuff:
“But the widespread use of guns in Japan did not begin until the introduction of matchlocks by the Portuguese in 1543. Japanese warriors were impressed by their superior range and accuracy, and daimyo began promoting domestic production. Japanese smiths were proficient enough that by the late 1500s they were making guns in large numbers and developing new techniques to improve accuracy. In battlefield reports from the early 1600s, gunshot wounds outnumbered arrow wounds by four to one.” (Mark Ravina, To Stand With the Nations of the World)
Might sound funny, but A Tale for the Time Being was very good preparation for visiting Japan, fiction or not. Is it even fiction? After reading the book, I did some reading around Ruth Ozeki. Imagine my surprise when I realised that two of the main characters were a barely disguised depiction of she and her husband’s lives.
“Old Jiko is supercareful with her time. She does everything really really slowly, even when she’s just sitting on the veranda, looking out at the dragonflies spinning lazily around the garden pond. She says that she does everything really really slowly in order to spread time out so that she’ll have more of it and live longer, and then she laughs so you know she is telling you a joke. I mean, she understands perfectly well that time isn’t something you can spread out like butter or jam, and death isn’t going to hang around and wait for you to finish whatever you happen to be doing before it zaps you. That’s the joke, and she laughs because she knows it.” (Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being)
I visited Matsushima Bay while in Japan (and a couple of temples there):
“Miyagi prefecture is located in the Tohoku region, in the northeastern part of Japan. This area was one of the last pieces of tribal land to be taken from the indigenous Emishi, descendants of the Jōmon people, who had lived there from prehistoric times until they were defeated by the Japanese Imperial Army in the eighth century. The Miyagi coastline was also one of the areas hardest hit by the 2011 earthquake and tsunami. Old Jiko’s temple was located somewhere along this stretch of coastline.” (Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being)
And also had a bath in an onsen:
“The way you take a bath in Japan is first you rinse your body really well with hot water to get the sweat and dirt off so you don’t make the bathwater gross, and then you climb into the bathtub and soak for a while to kind of soften things up. Then you get out again and sit on your stool, and that’s when you really wash yourself all over with soap and a scrubby cloth, and if you’re going to shampoo your hair or shave your legs or brush your teeth or something, you can do it then. And after you’re all clean, you rinse off all the soapy suds and get back into the tub to finish things off. You can really hang out there for a long time if you’re into it and can stand the smell of rotten eggs.” (Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being)
And walked Akihabara:
“Akihabara means Field of Autumn Leaves, but the fields and leaves have all been replaced by electronics stores, and these days people call it Akiba or Electricity Town. I’d never really hung out there before. I thought it was where manga otaku and loser geeks like my dad went to sell their computer hardware when they ran out of money, but I was totally wrong. Akiba is wild and weirdly awesome. You walk through these narrow alleyways and shopping streets lined with stores and stalls spilling over with circuit boards and DVDs and transformers and gaming software and fetish props and manga models and inflatable sex dolls and bins filled with electronics and wigs and little maid costumes and schoolgirl bloomers.” (Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being)
Finally, heiwaboke is something that stayed with me:
“Old Jiko says that nowadays we young Japanese people are heiwaboke.112 I don’t know how to translate it, but basically it means that we’re spaced out and careless because we don’t understand about war. She says we think Japan is a peaceful nation, because we were born after the war ended and peace is all we can remember, and we like it that way, but actually our whole lives are shaped by the war and the past and we should understand that.” (Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being)
Haruki Murakami’s Underground was perhaps not the best book to read before using the Tokyo underground system extensively. On the positive side, it gave me a better appreciation of the thousands of ordinary Japanese men and women who work tirelessly to impose order on an incredibly complex system everyday.
“I already knew society had got to the point where something like Aum had to happen. Dealing with passengers day after day, you see what you see. It’s a question of morals. At the station, you get a very clear picture of people at their most negative, their downsides. For instance, if we’re sweeping up the station with a dustpan and brush, just when we’ve finished, someone will flick a cigarette butt or a piece of litter right on the spot where we’ve cleaned. There are too many self-assertive people out there.” (Haruki Murakami, Underground)
And:
“To be honest, the day after the gas attack, I asked my wife for a divorce. We weren’t on the best of terms at the time, and I’d done my fair share of thinking while I was in South America. I had meant to come out and say my piece when I got home, then I walked straight into the gas attack. Still, even after all I’d been through, she would barely speak to me.” (Haruki Murakami, Underground)
The first chapter of Party of One is perhaps the best thing I’ve read on the rise of Xi Jinping so far. I knew most of the pieces but this book connected them together in a way I hadn’t come across before.
““Xi Jinping is the new architect of China’s pathway to becoming a major power,” said Gong Fangbin, a professor at Beijing’s National Defense University. “Mao Zedong let the Chinese people stand up, Deng Xiaoping let the Chinese people get rich, Xi Jinping will let the Chinese people get strong.”” (Chun Han Wong, Party of One)
Here’s a good paragraph from that first chapter:
“The misjudgment of Xi was no accident. To ascend the byzantine world of Chinese politics, where officials who advertise allegiances too firmly expose themselves to reprisals when orthodoxies change, Xi made himself inoffensive and inscrutable in his early career. He appeared amenable to friends and rivals alike, with his public remarks seldom straying from perfunctory praise for party policies and routine condemnation of corruption and red tape. Unvarnished accounts of his personal life are rare and patchy. In 2000, while he was a provincial governor, Xi said he had rejected more than one hundred interview requests.13 Even some of Xi’s fellow princelings concede to having misjudged a longtime friend.” (Chun Han Wong, Party of One)
And this ironic passage:
“Xi kept up his schmoozing with party bigwigs and foreign dignitaries, as would any official on the cusp of promotion. He charmed the U.S. ambassador over dinner with his keen grasp of economic data and fondness for Hollywood movies about World War II, and plied his superiors with alcohol in the kind of extravagance that he would suppress after taking power.126 On one occasion in 2004, as he recounted later to liquor executives, Xi hosted former party chief Jiang Zemin and his wife with a bottle of eighty-year-old Moutai liquor — a scarce and lavish treat worth at least tens of thousands of yuan at the time.127 That same year, the company that produces Moutai, a fiery baijiu spirit made from red sorghum, donated a bottle of the same vintage to the permanent collection at a museum in Zhejiang’s capital of Hangzhou.” (Chun Han Wong, Party of One)
Also:
“Whereas his predecessors often delegated the finer details of policy-making to specialists, a practice known as “grasping the large, releasing the small,” Xi prefers a hands-on approach. He often makes direct requests for policy adjustments and insists that he gets the final call on key decisions. State media credits Xi for personally overseeing the formulation of policies big and small, from major economic plans to campaigns to reduce food waste and improve public toilets.67 When party inspectors discovered that local officials in Shaanxi province had been illegally building some twelve hundred villas inside nature reserves, Xi issued instructions on six occasions over four years, demanding punishment for the offenders, and stronger protections for the local ecology.” (Chun Han Wong, Party of One)
Finally, this made me laugh:
“At Xi’s behest, the party launched a nationwide campaign to collect unpaid membership dues, an effort state media billed as a test of loyalty. In 2016, Tianjin officials reported collecting some 277 million yuan, or about $41 million, in back-dated dues from more than 120,000 party members at state-owned companies.93 Online forums crackled with party members fuming about the hit on their finances. An employee at the China Academy of Space Technology in Beijing posted a poem lamenting how he had to make a lump-sum payment worth “five years of transport expenses or the cost of a half-year’s supply of baby formula.”” (Chun Han Wong, Party of One)
Nigeria and Africa
I wrote a review of Stepping on Toes earlier in the year at Stears. I think I can modestly say some of the points I pointed out have proven to be prescient.
“At the time we took over, staffers of the NPA preferred to remain on a grade level for years on end instead of being promoted. This anomaly resulted from a dysfunctional scaling system which resulted in junior officers on higher steps of their grade level earning more than their seniors by grade. For instance, an officer on grade Level 8, Step 5, could be earning more than an officer grade on Level 10, Step 2.” (Hadiza Usman, Stepping on Toes)
I also wrote a review of my friend Olumide Soyombo’s memoirs, Vantage, over at 1914 Reader. On how relationships work in Nigerian business:
“At the early stage, you are opening doors for the company, introducing them to the corporate world, solving regulatory issues, etc. I know how many times I have had to make a foray into regulatory agencies to help a company; a foreign investor is not going to do that. Foreign investors might bring capital, but they are not going to introduce you to the CIO or CMO of a Nigerian telco. Sometimes those introductions are partnerships that are even worth more than any amount of cash.” (Olumide Soyombo, Vantage)
The Lumumba Plot is a proper thriller. One of the most enjoyable books I’ve read in recent times. I couldn't put it down and I’m sure its; the fasted I’ve ever read a book. I also wrote a long review at 1914 Reader. Highly recommended.
“That was his style, equal parts charm and pluck. He had a tendency to tell the audience before him whatever it wanted to hear, even if that risked alienating others. He was chameleonic. He improvised rather than planned. Sometimes, Lumumba’s approach would pay off, allowing him to rise high and fast. Other times, he flew too close to the sun.” (Stuart A. Reid, The Lumumba Plot)
A paragraph on the departing Belgian colonialists:
“One Belgian administrator dealt with the collapse of state authority by simply giving up. As he formally transferred responsibility for his territory to Congolese leaders months before independence, he said, “I have nothing left to say but to appeal to all, young and old, men and women, to reestablish yourselves an authority and save your country from anarchy.” Good luck, he seemed to be saying as he tossed over the keys. You’ll need it.” (Stuart A. Reid, The Lumumba Plot)
Finally:
“It speaks to the flimsy basis of America’s engagement in the Congo crisis that fifteen years on, when Richard Helms, Richard Bissell’s deputy at the CIA, testified before the Church Committee, he could not recall which camp Lumumba belonged to. “I am relatively certain that he represented something that the United States government didn’t like, but I can’t remember anymore what it was,” he said. He asked his interrogators for help. “Was he a rightist or leftist?…What was wrong with Lumumba? Why didn’t we like him?”” (Stuart A. Reid, The Lumumba Plot)
Anansi’s Gold frustrated me a bit. There’s an amazing story in there of a conman who should be added to the Hall of Infamy of conmen across the world. Instead the book goes on several tangents making weird arguments and taking cheap shots at an assortment of people — there are only good people (Kwame Nkrumah) and bad people (pretty much everyone else). Fair enough you might say but it means you have to wade through a lot of these things to get to the gist of the matter which is that:
“Blay-Miezah told visitors to his offices about the secret of President Nkrumah’s fortune, lying hidden in bank vaults in Switzerland. His tone was confiding and cautious: he was letting them in on a deep secret, and he implored them to keep it quiet. Nobody could know. He told them how Nkrumah had set up the Oman Ghana Trust Fund — Oman meant “our nation” he explained patiently — to protect Ghana’s ancestral wealth. Then Blay-Miezah dropped in some convincing numbers, even more impressive than the ones he would later give to Acheampong. The Trust Fund controlled twenty-seven billion dollars in cash and diamonds and thirty thousand gold bars.” (Yepoka Yeebo, Anansi’s Gold)
From this implausible tale, the man spun an incredible web that took in the high and mighty in Ghana and several people abroad. He ruined lives but always had another lie in him to cover up the last lie.
“Gladys Blay-Miezah was, initially, awed by her husband. “I had never seen anybody who was as interesting, as impressive. He was an enigma,”18 she said. He was kind and generous, but it was increasingly clear he had a unique sense of morality that made him a less-than-perfect husband. “The ethical thing was really bad,” she said. “There were too many women.”” (Yepoka Yeebo, Anansi’s Gold)
As a Nigerian, I think I found it embarassing that perhaps the greatest 419 conman out of Africa was a Ghanaian while Nigeria carries the reputational can. Hilarious, in fact.
“Blay-Miezah had bribed a high-ranking police officer, he’d forged documents, he’d stolen someone else’s degrees, he’d skipped out on hotel bills. He’d lied, cheated, and stolen his way across the world, from Accra to Monrovia to Philadelphia. Now, he was going to be in prison for years, long enough for people to forget why they had ever had faith in him to begin with.” (Yepoka Yeebo, Anansi’s Gold)
And:
“Ghanaians love their con men. It’s the national sport. There’s an appreciation for the con, for the sweetener, for getting one over on someone, for kalabule. There have been government crusades against kalabule. One military leader killed people accused of it. But Ghanaians delight in the kind of man who can talk himself out of a bind or into a fortune. (Less so when a woman does it.) In hard times, all you have is your wit, and Ghana has seen a lot of hard times.” (Yepoka Yeebo, Anansi’s Gold)
Perhaps it is best understood as a post-independence history of Ghana and the men who shaped the country. Given the many troubles that Ghana has contended with as a country since then, it is unsurprisingly scathing about John Jerry Rawlings:
“In Ghana, Rawlings landed on a novel approach to solving the country’s problems: theatre. When it rained, Accra flooded, and the gutters filled with raw sewage. The city was low lying, flood-prone, and surrounded by wetlands and the Gulf of Guinea. Despite this, it had few sewers and no real system of drains, because sewers and drainage were complex and expensive. Empty gestures, on the other hand, were free. So during the rainy season, Rawlings would make a show of getting a crew together and jumping into the gutters to clean them out. Soldiers would encourage citizens around the country to do the same, often at gunpoint.” (Yepoka Yeebo, Anansi’s Gold)
Finally:
““Why are they calling me a crook?6 If I had this thing and I said I’d give people 10-fold returns, are they not the crooks? People can walk away if they don’t like the deal.”” (Yepoka Yeebo, Anansi’s Gold)
The Eternal Conflict
After reading Enemies and Neighbours, I found it difficult to publicly comment or argue anymore about the Israel-Palestine conflict. It’s an incredibly even-handed narrative that begins in the late 19th century and goes up to 2017 by which point, nothing new is really happening anymore. The numbers only get bigger:
“In the twenty years between 1967 and the start of the first intifada, 650 Palestinians were killed by Israel in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. From late 1987 to September 2000, the death toll was 1,491. From the second intifada to the end of 2006, the figure was 4,046 Palestinians and 1,019 Israelis.” (Ian Black, Enemies and Neighbours)
And when the separation began:
“In 1936, a British visitor observed ‘a contrast that shouts’ between the neighbouring towns.67 Jews in Jaffa demanded that their neighbourhoods be annexed to Tel Aviv. ‘At the present moment’, the Peel Report noted, ‘the two races are holding rigidly apart.’68 Chaim Sturman, a veteran of HaShomer, the settlement guards, founder of Ein Harod and a renowned ‘Arabist’, worried that he would soon forget how to speak Arabic. (Sturman was killed by a mine in September 1938.) Earlier that year Moshe Shertok had lamented the poor standard of Arabic teaching in Jewish schools; the reason was that more than ever the Yishuv consisted of contiguous Jewish-only areas. ‘The number of Jews who need Arabic on a daily basis is becoming smaller and smaller’, he noted.” (Ian Black, Enemies and Neighbours)
Also:
“In the aftermath of the war the physical and human landscape of the country was transformed, in many places beyond recognition. The removal of 700,000-plus Arabs accelerated the long-standing trend towards segregation between the two communities. ‘Henceforth the overwhelming majority of Israelis would no longer meet Arabs in the immediate vicinity of their homes’, wrote Meron Benvenisti, an astute Jewish observer of the interaction between the two peoples. ‘The Arabs had departed the Jewish landscape. And the violent, complex, but intimate relations between adjacent settlements or neighbourhoods had ceased to exist.’” (Ian Black, Enemies and Neighbours)
This pithy comment by a Palestinian:
“Ahmed Tibi, who was renowned for his oratorical skills in Hebrew, honed a clever and quotable line about Israel’s oft-declared wish to remain Jewish and democratic. ‘This country is Jewish and democratic,’ he said: ‘Democratic towards Jews, and Jewish toward Arabs.’” (Ian Black, Enemies and Neighbours)
And from Moshe Dayan’s Zionism defining speech in 1956:
“This is our life’s choice, to be prepared and armed, strong and determined, lest the sword be stricken from our fist and our lives cut down. We are a generation that settles the land, and without the steel helmet and the cannon’s fire we will not be able to plant a tree and build a home. Let us not be deterred from seeing the loathing that is inflaming and filling the lives of the hundreds of thousands of Arabs who live around us. Let us not avert our eyes lest our arms weaken.” (Ian Black, Enemies and Neighbours)
Finally:
“Language mattered too. In the mid-1950s concerns began to be expressed that knowledge of Arabic among Jews, always very limited, was in decline as it had lost much of its practical relevance after 1948. Occasional meetings between Arab and Jewish writers lapsed into embarrassed silence because although the Arabs generally learned Hebrew, the vast majority of Jews, with the exception of native-speaking immigrants from Iraq and Egypt, knew no Arabic, and showed little interest in learning it.” (Ian Black, Enemies and Neighbours)
Read it, then have a strong opinion on the conflict.
Others
As things have gone from bad to worse for my beloved Manchester United this season, I find that I’m probably the only one of my friends left who believes Erik ten Hag remains the right man to manage the football team. I haven’t changed my mind on that even if I’ve wavered now and again. A big part of it was reading Ten Hag: The Biography earlier this year. Most people only know him only from Ajax but this book goes into detail about his family life, his playing career and all the coaching jobs he’s held. I remain convinced about him. And even if it ends not working out at United, I have no doubt he will be a success wherever he ends up next.
“‘The media like to label people. I’m fine with that. I am proud of my heritage. Tukker, bald, my accent, purple or red, you name it. I am who I am, and I’m undisturbed. I don’t care about what they say. Yes, Twente is home for me. As soon as you cross the River IJssel near Deventer, you are almost home. We used to say to the outside players at FC Twente, “Do you have your passport with you? Otherwise you won’t get in.”” (Maarten Meijer, Ten Hag)
On how the Amsterdam media treated him when results initially didn’t go well at Ajax:
“Leading Dutch newspaper De Telegraaf pulled out all the stops to malign ‘the peasant from the countryside’. The Twente accent was not the only thing he was mocked for. His appearance was another. The hair on his head was in the wrong place: nothing on top, everything on the bottom. He was ridiculed by football commentators Johan Derksen and René van der Gijp on the talk show Voetbal Inside. Derksen likened him to a ‘garden gnome’, the ubiquitous Dutch garden decoration.” (Maarten Meijer, Ten Hag)
Finally:
“On Christmas Eve 2021, Erik ten Hag announced, ‘There will come a time when Ajax and I will part. That may take a while, but it can also happen quickly, because you are only as good as your last game. That’s why I live from match to match. In Germany they say: himmelhoch jauchzend, zum Tode betrübt [‘rejoicing to high heavens, plunged to the depth of despair’ — a line taken from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s play Egmont]. If I move, I want to work for an organisation with a clear philosophy, attainable ambitions and honest people. If I don’t have the right impression, I won’t start on it. The last thing I want is to look over my shoulder to make sure they don’t shoot me in the back.’” (Maarten Meijer, Ten Hag)
I haven’t quite finished Arts & Minds yet but I will as the subject matter is something very important to me and for stuff I will like to write about in future. Here’s a paragraph I enjoyed:
“Coffee houses had a reputation as raucous places for men to socialise with other men, where they might acquire ‘a swagger in the gait, a drunken totter, a noisy riotous deportment, a volley of oaths, and a total want of what is called good-breeding’.76 Although the establishments were often run by women, they were places men went to escape the company of their wives. The coffee-house culture seems to have stayed with the Society of Arts, even after it moved into more sedate venues. Its debates could become heated, full of ‘strong expressions and shouting’ as well as ‘hissing and clapping’.” (Anton Howes, Arts and Minds)
Seasons come and seasons go but the French mastery of luxury goods is eternal:
“Members of the Society of Arts wished to do something about Britain’s addiction to luxury — the prosperity and pride of the nation was at stake. Yet there were several potential solutions to the problem. One was to eradicate the taste for luxury itself. It was considered by many to be a vice, and in the context of paying the French for their manufactures, it was almost treasonous. One member, the artist and satirist William Hogarth, condemned it in his paintings and prints. His satires included a ‘viscount of Squanderfield’, dressed to the point of absurdity in the latest French fashion: red-heeled shoes, lace ruffles, richly embroidered sleeves, a fake beauty spot on his chin, and a vast black bow in his hair.” (Anton Howes, Arts and Minds)
As someone with a sideline photography hobby, I found this passage interesting:
“The domestic market was simply too small to support more than a handful of contemporary British artists.39 Those who managed to scrape a living tended to stick to profitable trades like portraiture, which satisfied individual vanities, not high-minded and preachy projects like history painting.” (Anton Howes, Arts and Minds)
If you follow some ‘big’ photography accounts on social media, you find them posting about travel and all sorts of other ‘vanities’ but portrait and weddings is how/where they make a living from photography. It is simply too difficult (or near impossible) to earn a living from any other type of photography.
I loved Morgan Housel’s Psychology of Money very much and is probably one of my most recommended books in the last few years. So getting Same as Ever was a no-brainer. It doesn't quite hit the same heights as POM but that is understandable as this is a much deeper and interesting topic. Rather than telling you what to do and how to do it, this basically gives you a list of things that never change and gently urges you direct your energies elsewhere.
“Predicting what the world will look like fifty years from now is impossible. But predicting that people will still respond to greed, fear, opportunity, exploitation, risk, uncertainty, tribal affiliations, and social persuasion in the same way is a bet I’d take.” (Morgan Housel, Same as Ever)
And:
“Montesquieu wrote Two hundred and seventy-five years ago, “If you only wished to be happy, this could be easily accomplished; but we wish to be happier than other people, and this is always difficult, for we believe others to be happier than they are.”” (Morgan Housel, Same as Ever)
Fiction
I ended up reading more fiction than usual (by my standards) this year. I joined a parents book club at my kids school late in the year which added a couple of books to this list and of course the aforementioned Japan book.
Thousand Cranes and The Book Thief were from the book club. The only way I can describe Thousand Cranes is that its a 300 page novel disguised as a 100 page one. It is dense and full of imagery and almost impossible to ‘get’ in one reading. Very bleak too.
The Book Thief has of course been around for a while and was rather topical for the times we currently live in. I will say this: whatever you do, don’t watch the movie after reading the book. Except of course you’re very bored and desperately looking to annoy yourself.
“The human heart is a line, whereas my own is a circle, and I have the endless ability to be in the right place at the right time. The consequence of this is that I’m always finding humans at their best and worst. I see their ugly and their beauty, and I wonder how the same thing can be both. Still, they have one thing that I envy. Humans, if nothing else, have the good sense to die.” (Markus Zusak, The Book Thief)
Yellowface I found quite funny although the ending was a bit of a letdown mainly because there was no good/easy to end it. It is a many-a-truth-said-in-jest type of book which pokes (deserved) fund at the publishing industry.
“PUBLISHING MOVES SLOWLY, UNTIL IT DOESN’T. THE TRULY EXCITING moments — going to auction, negotiating deals, fielding calls from potential editors, choosing a publisher — are a dizzying whirlwind, but the rest involves a lot of staring at your phone and waiting for updates. Most books are sold up to two years before they’re released. The big announcements we’re always seeing online (Book deal! Movie deal! TV deal! Awards nominations!) have been open secrets for weeks, if not months. All the excitement and surprise are feigned for social clout.” (Rebecca F Kuang, Yellowface)
And a message for our times:
“You come to regret everything you’ve ever shared about yourself: every photo, every meme, every comment on a YouTube video, every offhand tweet. Because the trolls will find them. I deleted as much of my digital footprint as I could in those first twenty-four hours, but the Wayback Machine still exists.” (Rebecca F Kuang, Yellowface)
Age of Vice is one book I’d really like to be made into an Apple TV series (notice I did not say Netflix). A sprawling epic about modern India and the multiple stories it carries within it. It’s long but pacey and hardly dips. As someone who grew up in Nigeria, I found myself nodding in familiarity at many things in the book. Here’s one:
““My grandfather,” he said one night in bed, “was a Walia. That was his name. He changed it to Wadia after he met a Parsi trader who was doing very well. This was way back, just after Independence. He thought the change would bring him fortune. That’s it. That’s the story. It’s not a story at all.”” (Deepti Kapoor, Age of Vice)
And:
““These men,” Dean was saying, “are heroes to the people from whom they steal, whose very lives they destroy.”” (Deepti Kapoor, Age of Vice)
Finally:
“She remembers her father. She was seven years old, it was her first time out in their new car, an Ambassador. Her father let her ride in front. She’d never sat up front with him before. They went on a tour of Lutyens’ Delhi. On the way he said something she’s never forgotten: Whatever you do, whatever happens, however much you love dogs, however much you care, never stop or swerve for a stray dog on the road, just drive on through it, there are too many of them, and it’s just not worth the pain. Even if it breaks your heart.” (Deepti Kapoor, Age of Vice)
The Five Sorrowful Mysteries of Andy Africa got a lot of critical praise in the Western media so I was curious. It’s well written but it just felt like something I had read before, namely the internal dialogue of a young Nigerian man with raging hormones.
“Death and dying are easy. Even boring. Life is hard. And senseless. Life is lifting a mountain without touching it, quenching a volcano without using even a drop of spittle. Life is waking up and finding hooks in your heart. If you remove any, you die. If you leave any, you die. You end up stuffing more hooks into your heart to stay alive.” (Stephen Buoro, The Five Sorrowful Mysteries of Andy Africa)
