Last year I read 22 books, which I was extremely disappointed by. I had set an arbitrary target of 40, but life happened, and the failure to meet my target was something that I struggled with. Life will certainly happen this year as well, as it does always. However, I have decided to set myself a lofty goal this time around, as writing is something I want to pursue seriously. I have not written anything over the last year and a half for personal purposes; I did work on my academic writings and my dissertation, but those, unfortunately, followed the style that seems to have been cemented in the world of academia. In fact, one of the primary criticisms of my academic writings from various professors was that it seemed like a journalist had written them; that it had more “colour” than was deemed necessary, and that I needed to let academic essence seep through my work. I am yet to understand how to do that.
By http://pictures.abebooks.com/SAWTOOTH/3708865367.jpg, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4568066
As it were, I can already see that my reading has impacted how I started this post. I am currently halfway through Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, a book gifted to me two years ago by a good friend. Ishiguro’s writing is beautiful, and I am not for one moment saying that I have the capacity to write the way he does. The genius of The Remains of the Day lies in its simplicity; in so many words, Ishiguro is able to convey varying emotions, interweaving sensitive matters through the needle hole of fiction, while maintaining the stoic English humour that has become one of the trademarks of the nation. It is a truly sensational piece of work, and I can only marvel at how easy a read it is. I plan to read more of Ishiguro’s corpus this year.
One piece of writing in The Remains of the Day that has stood out to me is how cleanly Ishiguro dissects the ladder and the wheel. In the book, the protagonist, Stevens, while discussing the hallmarks of a good butler, stated this:“Butlers of my father’s generation, I would say, tended to see the world in terms of a ladder-……- any butler with ambition simply did his best to climb as high up this ladder as possible……. For our generation, I believe it is accurate to say, viewed the world not as a ladder, but more as a “wheel”…. For we were an idealistic generation for whom the question was not simply one of how well one practiced one’s skills, but “to what end” one did so; each of us harboured the desire to make our own small contribution to the creation of a better world.”
While reading this, I was reminded of one reading I did when I was writing an academic essay for an economics class. Friedrich Engels, while writing “The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man”, asserts that it can be argued that labor played a role in the evolution of man from ape; “the hand became free”, “something to say to one another”, the need for “society” and the ultimate “mastery” of nature, Engels, writes, is an extension of labour. As such, Ishiguro’s concept of the previous generation seeing the world as a ladder and the next one seeing it as a wheel, I can understand, is by nature also influenced by labour. The evolution from simply climbing the ladder to making a “small contribution to the creation of a better world” is an evolution. If anthropological evolution, as per Engels’ arguments, was dictated by labour, are philosophical and moral evolutions dictated by labour as well? If not all, are some?
I finished The Apollo Murders by Chris Hadfield recently, and my reaction to that was decidedly mixed. I believe that the book is an extremely proficient technical manual disguised as a crime/spy/space saga. The science overwhelms the actual narration and the plot, and Hadfield, in my opinion, seems to have taken it upon himself to explain the intricacies of astronaut life, while adding some drama and mystery in order to make it available to a wider audience. Cannot wait for the novel to be made into an eight-part series for Netflix, with Hadfield inevitably announcing its cancellation after one season. I liked the book here and there, although I genuinely cannot understand what the book was meant to do. Halfway through the book, you have a fairly good idea of who the culprit is, and the protagonist is not really the protagonist for much of the book, apart from the climax., which makes it even more confusing, given he is deemed important enough to be given a first-person prologue.
I might try my hands on some Russian literature after Ishiguro; in my TBR lies an ominously huge copy of the Karamazov Brothers by Fyodor Dostoevsky, and the Resurrection by Leo Tolstoy.
I plan to chart my reading challenge throughout this year. I believe it will be an interesting exercise, if only for me. Hopefully, as the year progresses, I will start writing something of my own as well. Sportskeeda continues, and I love writing about football, but I am eager to diversify my writing capabilities, like my reading ones. You might find the occasional Pokemon content here as well.
More family, more books, more words, more Pokemon and more football for me. I hope you all have a year where you get to do the things you enjoy.
Happy New Year!
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