What I read in 2024 - Part 1 of 9
Belated reflections on my last year's reading haul
Illustration 1: Brain of a person suffering from Kuru Disease. The original “Brain Rot”.
This is my annual reading review for 2024. You can read and critique my reading reviews for the other years in this decade here (2020), here (2021), here (2022) and here (2023).
The first part of this very long essay, and my running fascination, are a few thoughts on the act of reading itself. And what it meant to me this year.
My last review was a seven part essay - one each for the book I read in 2023. The count this time is 19 (though several of these books we also re-reads) - a minor personal achievement. Perhaps a vaccination against brain rot.
Reflections on the act of reading
What really worked for me this time was never setting aside time to read. Rather to use it as a partial substitute to doom-scrolling. Electing it as a preferred activity to winding down after a day and winding up before it. Choosing to read in flights and lounges over looking for wi-fi. To sum up, using reading as a sealant against those passages of the day when rage-baiting seeps through into our lives. I guess that is the only way you can do it when your work hours keep getting longer.
The other thing that I applied to reading was to have a very high threshold to put aside a book before finishing it. In this respect, I was kind of overcompensating for our collective social habit of losing focus - thanks to the storm of notification-style stimuli we live through. I wanted my reading to be an exercise where it was acceptable to have no dopamine hits for extended periods. I wanted it to be a slow buildup of an awareness, a connection with the idea that the author was trying to convey. Maybe, getting mildly bored and yet staying curious in this way, could be just about how we as a species have developed our own language learning models.
That said, I was incredibly fortunate with what I chose to read last year. Barring Paulo Coelho’s works (that epitomize toxic positivity in my view), everything else that I had a chance to read was, in some way, reflective and intellectually additive.
Here comes the first of them:
Illustration 2: Not just another old grandpa. Lt. Colonel Antonio Tejero Molina, who once attempted to topple an elected Government. But failed, after thirty six minutes of effort.
On the 23rd of February 1981, military officers in a country barged into the swearing-in ceremony of its newly elected Prime Minister. The country had just successfully completed its second democratically conducted parliamentary elections in five years. Their aim was a coup-d'état, with the proposal to install a “national unity” government overseen by a leader from the ranks of the armed forces. Which country are we talking about?
South Asia? Middle East? Africa or Latin America? - would be the usual guess in your head if you never knew of this event.
The surprise is, the attempt happened in Europe. Not your Europe behind the Iron Curtain at the time. But in Western Europe. It happened in Madrid. It was Spain.
Though I had purchased it long back in 2013, around the time it had been featured by the Economist and FT as one of the best history books to read that year, I finally ended up reading this book in 2024.
If you have seen the series Money Heist on Netflix, you would know a speciality of contemporary Spanish storytelling. Blowing up a moment/episode in time into multiple perspectives; unreliable narrators; extended flashbacks. On all of those accounts, The Anatomy of a Moment proves to be a worthy predecessor to Money Heist in this tradition.
For context, Spain from 1939-75 was ruled by a military junta led by General Francisco Franco, following his victory in the Spanish Civil War until his death. Following his demise, social and political pressure saw the first elections in 1977 and a referendum that approved a constitution based on parliamentary democracy. However, the army wasn’t happy with its loss of political control and the senior officers often capitalized on the troubles of the democratic governments to wrest back the power from the parliament.
There are two things that stand out for me in this book - aside from its narrative style that keeps you gripped through 400+ pages, describing the events that lasted just for a few hours on a late winter evening.
First, this is an excellent first draft of a historical moment, where small decisions taken by individuals decide the fate of millions. It is a draft which precedes the conventional narrative. One that is later created to make every event in history look as if it was fore-ordained.
There is a pivotal moment in the book, where General Alfonso Armada, the general who was most likely to take power after the coup, calls the King’s Palace in Madrid and requests his Secretary to see him. The King, after a brief chat with his Secretary on the reason for his visit, declines. The coup loses its legitimacy and dies on the spot. The importance of this decision, by the King not to meet the General, spares Spain a few decades of military dictatorship.
General Armada was the King’s mentor, occasional tutor and trusted advisor. For the King, feigning innocence and agreeing to see him, and thereby adding his support to the coup by association, would have been a natural reaction. He chose not to do it.
Second, it reminded me why seeing political leaders as black-and-white characters, as has become the tradition of our times, is so misguided. The three people who resist the Civil Guards who storm into the parliament are all compromised - either by their association with the former dictatorial regime or due to their support of violent communist militias. The outgoing Prime Minister Adolfo Suarez is a cunning political operator, who on his way to power has stepped on a lot of toes. He has also presided over an economy in permanent crisis. The second, the acting Deputy Prime Minister General Mellado, ironically, had himself attempted a similar coup (and gunned down innocents) forty years ago. The third, Santiago Carillo, was the leader of Spanish Communists, someone who had actively empathized with armed insurrections. He was highly respected by leftist militias in India as well. What amazed me is their desire to bury their differences, embrace statesmanship and stand up to the military.
To me, they are what political scientists have called Heroes of Retreat. People, who after having been part of an unfair/outdated system, have the courage to undo all of their legacy and discard all of their beliefs. Their exceptionalism lies in their ability to dismantle and retreat and to pave the ground for something new. In that sense, these three stand beside Mikhail Gorbachev, PV Narasimha Rao and Deng Xiaoping, as close equals.
Finally, the question is -why should you, someone who is most likely not from Spain, read this book? After all, this is an obscure event happening in a corner of the world that today draws its power - diplomatic, economic and military- as a part of the EU. Spain’s national image and soft power, to us in Asia, is a luminous gem in Europe’s cultural mosaic which we happily experience on our holidays. Beautiful indeed, but just a part. Even within Spain, while people widely know what happened that day, they don’t talk about this period as Americans or Chinese discuss their respective Civil Wars.
We should read it as a cautionary case study. Something that can happen when the elite of a country begin to think of people on the street as children who need to be guided, and decide to interfere. When cultural nationalism reaches a height where any criticism of the government becomes a criticism of cultural values of the nation (as Indians and Chinese very well know). Something that always happens when every debate about the personal moral weaknesses ends with a comparison with the infallible character and unimpeachable values of the Armed Forces (as Pakistanis very well know).
And of what happens when people decide to look at outcomes over egos, of nations and legacies over personal relationships. As the Spanish leaders that day decided to.
Illustration 3: Bats. The oldest and most diverse of all mammals. Source: Charles J. Sharp - Own work, from Sharp Photography, sharpphotography.co.uk
Written in 2012 by David Quammen, one of the greats of contemporary popular science writing, Spillover is a part crime procedural, part epidemiological treatise, and part travelogue on Zoonosis. This latter is the phenomenon where disease-causing germs jump from an animal host to a human one. Ebola Virus, Coronavirus, SARS, Nipa Virus - are all zoonotic diseases. So is AIDS. This is also one of the best books I read last year. Naturally, five years ago during the COVID outbreak, this book had an unusual resurgence in popularity.
However, the lessons that people tend to draw after reading any book about zoonosis are very different from what Quammen is trying to make, in my view. The fact that hypermobility, urban encroachment into forested areas and overpopulation have increased the instances of zoonosis doesn’t mean that we should turn back the dial on travel or economic growth.
This book argues that zoonosis is a natural trade-off of growth, whose probability scales in proportion to our development as a species.
Zoonotic germs - predominantly viruses- don’t particularly love us. They have been living and multiplying within wild animals - often causing pandemics in their populations - for millions of years. It is just that we have become so abundant over the past century or so that our cells have become easier to hitch a ride onto. To a virus, therefore, we are the outbreak.
Books on popular science either skip the “science bit” or use separate boxes and illustrations to talk about the concepts important to understand the narrative. Quammen’s genius lies in blending science and drama together. Traveling through northern Australia, Bangladesh and China, he pithily explains why bats are such villains when it comes to zoonotic spillovers - they can’t help it.
Bats are one of the oldest lineages of mammals, with the largest number of species in our Class and they have adapted to live extremely gregarious lives. That bats have managed to survive so long means they have become immune to many germs that would have easily spread among them, and which are lethal to other mammals if they spillover.
For me, this book also inculcated a new respect for epidemiologists, especially those on the field. Putting on a hazmat suit, spending extended periods in wildernesses to ferret out the microbial culprit, they are like detectives solving millions of murder mysteries simultaneously. In nine separate chapters, the author follows several such scientists on the track to uncover the causal germ and spillover event behind diseases like Hendra, Ebola, non-symptomatic malaria, Nipa, Herpes and HIV - to list the noteworthy ones.
There are many other fields too in which the experts still know very little of their subject matter - think astrophysics or deep ocean geology or nanoscience. Epidemiologists are special (alongside nuclear scientists). Because they put their lives on the line in search of truth like nobody else does. When an astrophysicist enters his lab to analyze readings from the James Webb Space Telescope, there is negligible chance that they won’t return back. An epidemiologist-cum-cell biologist studying Ebola in a lab, as the book shows, has a fair probability of becoming the vector of the disease and destroying himself and his community.
Why I would recommend this book is also because it isn’t a moralistic tale. It doesn’t try to conjure up a vision of a world where we all are dead. Or are locked down. Masked up. And perpetually sanitized.
Human interactions with wildlife - flora and fauna - are as ubiquitous and eternal as the act of having sex. Just because there are some extremely risky behaviors doesn’t mean that we should be scared of the act. Perhaps just a bit more aware about where the things can go wrong, how they go wrong and how to build the guardrails around them.
Dry humor, even when he is on the quest to understand the origins of SARS, acts as an appetizer.
Sample this:
If you ever notice these animals (bats) on the menu of a restaurant in Southern China, you might want to choose the noodles instead.
Or this:
If your husband catches an ebolavirus, give him food and water and love and prayers but keep your distance, wait patiently, hope for the best—and, if he dies, don’t clean out his bowels by hand. Better to step back, blow a kiss, and burn the hut.
I rest my case.
The next part of this essay would be a review of two enjoyable, but scarcely memorable works. The first, by a legend of South Asian English literature. The other by a meticulous polyglot on the same path to greatness