What I’ve been reading

1. Tezer Özlü, Cold Nights of Childhood.  A Turkish novella, originally published in 1980, newly translated into English and the first English-language book by her.  I give this one an A/A+, mostly emotional drama and narrative, I can’t tell you more without spoilers.  Here is more on the author.  Only 76 pp.  When will her suicide book be published in English?

2. Jens Heycke, Out of the Melting Pot, Into the Fire: Multiculturalism and the World’s Past and America’s Future.  Argues that ethnic divisions should be made less rather than more focal: “When I visited Rwanda, I asked Rwandans of various backgrounds whether they thought distinguishing people by race or ethnicity ever helped anyone in their country.”  An effective presentation of facts, though only one side of the story and it does not take sufficiently seriously the question of how tolerant environments ever get established in the first place (hint: it is through a certain amount of identity politics…what exactly is an Englishman anyway?).

3. Slavoj Žižek and John Milbank, The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic?  How Hegelian should our understanding of Christ be?  The book is written as a confrontational dialogue, and to its benefit.  You do need to be able to stomach sentences such as: “Do the three main versions of Christianity not form a kind of Hegelian triad?” (SZ)  In any case, the smartness of the authors makes it worthwhile.  Once you move past their immediate (and extreme) fan bases, both are in fact considerably underrated.

There is Peter Baldwin’s Athena Unbound: Why and How Scholarly Knowledge Should be Free for All.

And Nicolas Spencer, Magisteria: The Entangled Histories of Science and Religion.

Ashoka Mody has published the quite pessimistic India is Broken: A People Betrayed, Independence to Today.

Plus quite a few others that I don’t feel the need to tell you about…