Of layers and layovers
Reading Roundup: January 2023
It’s been a relaxing, restorative month.
Contrary to what the start of 2023 psychologically felt like, it ended up being a needed period of resetting — a layover, almost, between what used to be and what will soon be.
I’m in the middle of a transition in my role at work, spending time in Delhi taking in the city — even at its most frigid and polluted — while I’m still around. I’m jumping at opportunities that come my way, whether to explore food in older parts of the city, explore niche cafes, or take the train out for the Jaipur Literature Festival.
In this time, I’ve sped through five books across contemporary lit, speculative fiction, and memoir.
Although very different from one another, they each made me think about layering. For winter, of course! But also about how important it is in writing relationships and characters, in world-building (thematically as well as geographically), and in acknowledging our past as we attempt to envision our future. I’m grateful to have had the solitude to reflect on it and attempt to implement it in craft and life alike.
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin — 5 ⭐
For me, relationships have always been the most interesting parts to read in books; not only romantic, but between friends, in families, in work settings, and so on. Unfortunately, for want of simplicity, most stories sacrifice the layered nature of relationships for a kind of binary where on one hand is its basic form, and on the other, an antithesis of it. The grey in-between, where a thousand emotions exist, goes unnoticed.
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow does away entirely with the binary. It’s a masterful 2022 literary release I’ve wanted to read since I first saw it on bookish Twitter, and I’m so glad I got around to because it might just be one of the best books I’ve ever read. In large part, this is because of this complexity it candidly (and agonisingly) depicts in the friendship between Sam and Sadie, its video game developer main characters. From their first meeting at a hospital in LA as children through achieving fame as collaborators in the 1990s gaming industry eventually to their thirties, we follow the two as they contend with love, grief, disability, racism, sexism, class divide, and more. All of these experiences ultimately amount to the same conclusion: that human beings are messy and complicated, but in the end, we’ll always hope for another life with which we can try again. We’ll always crave for tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow.
Zevin’s writing made me think about my own relationships, especially those with my closest friends. I laughed, cried, got angry, and told everyone I spoke to that week about it. Even if you’re not interested in video games, even if you don’t typically read contemporary work, I can’t recommend this enough.
Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky — 5 ⭐
In my alternate history research and writing, I often think about the different paths India and the world could have taken had different decisions been made. The smaller divergences are easier to write about than fundamentally transformational ones. Building alien cultures is similar: it’s simple, even tempting, to craft anthropomorphic societies as allegories for humanity while positioning them as extraterrestrial. There are cases where alien cultures feel genuinely original (a popular example is Ken Liu’s Story of Your Life and its adaptation Arrival) but those are far and few in between, because even the best storytellers tend to be limited by the extent of their interstellar imagination, held back by their earthly experiences.
Children of Time, to contrast, feels like Adrian Tchaikovsky wrote out all popular alien tropes possible and consciously created characters that defied them. I never imagined reading about giant spiders and their biopunk society from evolutionary infancy to space exploration would be so riveting. Equally interesting are the interspersed chapters about the remnants of humanity looking for a home, failing and failing again to grow past their ancestors’ ways. The back thirty percent of the book — when both story arcs arrive on collision course with one another — I devoured on a single sleepless night.
Tchaikovsky effortlessly tackles a handful of heavy themes, constantly providing fodder for discourse. For example: What creates or destroys civilisations? How can societies learn from their mistakes when social memory is short and unreliable? Under what circumstances is it possible to overcome our worst instincts to compete and choose instead to cooperate? I’m typically not drawn to such massive volumes, but the 600 pages of Children of Time are so dense with thought and plot both — covering millennia worth of story, no less — that its length becomes a part of the brilliance of the book. I can’t wait to read the sequels soon.
Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman (BBC Dramatisation) — 4⭐
My three years in London studying civil engineering were perhaps the most critical years of my quarter-life thus far. Since graduating, moving home, and pursuing a career in a tangentially connected field, I’ve frequently been asked if I regret what I studied, and I’ve always emphatically answered in negative. One of the reasons for it, often left unsaid, is that it was impossible to dislike and regret learning about structures or urbanism in a place like London, which like all cities is a playground for the past enforced and reinforced by its built environment. London’s urban history, shaped by its buildings, bridges, transport networks, waterways, and other infrastructure, transformed my degree into a tangible subject I could grasp and believe in.
I had forgotten what that felt like — to wander in your city, your home, and examine it with new eyes — until I listened to the Neverwhere BBC audio drama. Neverwhere is a classic I’d read before as a teenager, then dwelling on the magical alone, but this time I remembered myself in London, unveiling the fables it hid (and revealed) in its expanse. This time, I did not stop at following Neverwhere’s Richard Mayhew exploring the fantastical London ‘Below’, but instead I walked in step with him in his tribulations helping the mysterious woman Door’s pursuit of her father’s killer.
In all honesty I picked this up on a whim, knowing it for a dated story. Yet the eccentric locations and stellar voice cast rounded to an unparalleled audiobook experience. Although Neverwhere rates lower than more sophisticated thematic work I read this month, if you’ve got fourish hours to immerse yourself in a world in and yet beyond ours, there’s nothing else I’d rather recommend.
Small Acts of Freedom by Gurmehar Kaur — 3.5⭐
Before I moved to Delhi, the Partition of India was simply a historical moment for me: distant and unknowable, hung isolated somewhere in the memory of a school textbook. After I started soaking in Delhi’s past, though, the Partition started to come alive; the city became a breathing legacy of a horrifying time. I’m seeing traces of the event in the neighbourhoods I stroll through, in the food I happen upon, in all those I meet.
After much dithering (and failed attempts at non-fiction about it), I decided to take a plunge finally this month in seriously exploring this event in text, starting with Small Acts of Freedom written by activist Gurmehar Kaur. Kaur weaves a tale around three generations of women in her family — the first, forced out of her childhood home in modern-day Pakistan during Partition; the second, growing up as newly independent India tries to understand its own identity; and the third — the author — coming to terms with her father’s death in war against Pakistan. As a non-linear, uniquely transcendental memoir, Small Acts is personal and authentic. The seventyish years it covers feel real and fresh, and the family is endearing in their struggles and equally in their joys.
Nonetheless, I found myself irritated with the stilted writing (which works in sections where the narrator is a child, but offsets the gravitas in pivotal scenes featuring adults). I also can’t comment on the realism of the narrated events: I do not know the author and I didn’t choose to read this in order to sort her truths from her fabrications. I picked it for the story it told, so I blame the author less and the publishers more for the textual inconsistencies I did spot. I can say for certain that with more effective beta-reading and editing, this could’ve been a far better book; one I would’ve asked everyone even moderately interested in postcolonial India to read.
Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny — 3⭐
“What if Hindu myth, but in space?” seems to be the question legendary science fiction writer Zelazny asked himself in the 1960s when plotting Lord of Light, which has since become a SF classic in the same league as Frank Herbert’s Dune (also known as “What if Arabia, but in space?”). Zelazny answers this question with the decidedly non-linear story of Sam, who masquerades as Siddhartha Gautam on a planet in the distant future where others consider themselves as the deities Brahma, Vishnu, Kali, etc., and where an imposed caste system decides one’s access to reincarnation technology and ‘godhood’.
As a bona fide Hindu mythology buff and Indian SFF fan, I was excited to read this, and in some ways it did deliver: the motifs, themes, world-building present were unique, even boundary-pushing perhaps half a decade ago. And yet his story is not unlike that of a standard speculative fiction hero — a solo radical rebelling against the status quo. Him and his (white) contemporaries’ appropriation of Indian gods, and their relationships with the indigenous races of their colonised planet often veered to overt orientalism. The chronology confuses, and the underdevelopment of most characters means the stakes never feel high enough for the reader to invest in the narrative. Then there is the challenging language, impersonal and distanced tone: no wonder I took five months to finish Lord of Light.
