Because ’tis the season… to be eating! Edible Economics was a suitable appetizer for this reader who did not want to bite off more than she could chew on a seemingly daunting topic. And because ’tis also the season when most of us have so much on our plates — figuratively and literally — these bite-size treats from Ha-Joon Chang whet the appetite but keep it from being too overwhelmed. The book’s intent is simple: To make the topic more palatable so the reader may “eat” economics better in the future.
As soon as I closed this book, I could already imagine those who would criticize this for not providing enough solutions, or for not being meaty enough. Perhaps it is, for those who are seasoned in the field. But I don’t think it was written for them. This is definitely not a textbook. (Thank heavens!) It is a starter from which I learned a lot.
While we feed our souls with the company of those we love, and feed our bellies with the season’s treats, it’s never a bad idea to feed the mind with books, and with something one knows little about but which has massive consequences on our lives and the world we live in. So… bon appetite and happy holidays!
A quick and enjoyable re-reading of my initiation to the flavors of Latin American magic realism — in anticipation of Salma Hayek’s production of the upcoming series adaptation.
Recommended by my best friend in our early teens, this is the book that led to highschool years enlivened and colored by the novels of Isabel Allende and Gabriel Garcia Marquez and the poetry of Pablo Neruda and Octavio Paz. This is also the book that made the kitchen a more magical place for me.
Reading this with older eyes shows me how much I’ve grown, how much I’ve outgrown, and also how much I did not understand back then: It seems to be oozing with more sensuality now. The romantic passages are no longer what strike me the most. When John Brown encourages Tita to express herself through writing and thereby carving her path to freedom, I realize that nothing Pedro ever did could top that and I was rooting for the wrong man all along. Now I’m no longer concerned about whether the adaptation is faithful to the love story, I’m more concerned about how faithful it is to the kitchen magic.
“My grandmother had a very interesting theory; she said that each of us is born with a box of matches inside us but we can’t strike them all by ourselves… Each person has to discover what will set off those explosions in order to live, since the combustion that occurs when one of them is ignited is what nourishes the soul. That fire, in short, is its food. If one doesn’t find out what will set off these explosions, the box of matches dampens, and not a single match will ever be lighted.”
What makes me buy a book for its cover design? My favorite city’s unparalleled skyline!
That is why I read Eric Ambler even though thrillers and spy novels are not my usual genre of choice… especially those written circa 1939.
It was the lure of Istanbul that pulled me into the orbit of Charles Latimer, a detective novelist vacationing in Turkey in the 1930s. There he meets a Turkish colonel who broaches the subject of Dimitrios, a murdered criminal whose body was found floating in the Bosphorus. Intrigued by the dead man’s notoriety, Latimer does his own investigating. What he uncovers is a web of international intrigue that leads him to Smyrna, Athens, Sofia, Geneva, and finally, Paris.
But I began to suspect that this book was not a regular thriller when Charles Latimer inspected the body of Dimitrios in the morgue and saw him, “Not as a corpse in a mortuary, but as a man, not as an isolate, a phenomenon, but as a unit in a disintegrating social system.” It is also worthy of note how Dimitrios, who had become the epitome of evil in Latimer’s mind, turned out to be, “A picture of distinguished respectability,” when he was alive.
“But it was useless to try to explain him in terms of Good and Evil. They were no more than baroque abstractions. Good Business and Bad Business were the elements of the new theology. Dimitrios was not evil. He was logical and consistent; as logical and consistent in the European jungle as the poison gas called Lewisite and the shattered bodies of children killed in the bombardment of an open town. The logic of Michelangelo’s David, Beethoven’s quartets and Einstein’s physics had been replaced by that of the Stock Exchange Year Book and Hitler’s Mein Kampf.”
The Mask of Dimitrios does not read like a thriller. It is unlike those formulaic bestsellers that cater to superficial and momentary sensations. Those who seek such will be disappointed. It is rather a perceptive insight into that rapidly splintering era sandwiched between two World Wars.
What makes it terrifying is the way he seemed to be describing the world today.
“Boris tells me what he’s seen on television. Lots of politics in the Ukraine, in Russia, and in America. I don’t pay too close attention. Politics are important, of course, but at the end of the day, if you want to eat mashed potatoes it’s up to you to put manure on the potato plants. The important thing is that there’s no war.”
Alina Bronksy’s wit has been on my radar for quite some time but it took one Sunday that badly begged for light reading to make me read her.
Having parents who are advancing in years, I find myself increasingly drawn to elderly protagonists. And so it was a joy to discover Baba Dunja. Her spunk, her kindness, her practicality, and her comic observations make her one of the most endearing characters one will encounter in books.
But don’t think it’s all light-hearted fun. Alina Bronsky, being a Russian-born German writer, seems to have married dark Russian humor with good old Teutonic political satire.
Even though the government appears to be apathetic about this town near Chernobyl, and despite warnings of radiation levels, Baba Dunja and her cast of amusing friends and neighbors are undeterred by the discrimination against its residents and consider Tschernowo home. And I think that’s what this book is all about — the idea and process of home that we choose and make for ourselves, no matter what.
“There was no greater violence than the one done to meaning.”
Succession, sans caricatures of misbehaving heirs like Shiv, Kendall, Roman, and Connor. But Logan Roy who has bent reality around his fortune? Logan Roy, the giant, who looks at people as economic units and pygmies that form a market? I see him here, along with the tragedies that come with capitalism.
Trust begins with a novella called Bonds. That the two words are significant in the realm of both relationships and finance makes for a clever opening to a story about marital and familial bonds and the American economy in the early 20th century.
This is a nesting doll in book form, with each section revealing a different narrator, and consequently, a different version of the previous story. Within this brilliant play on literary structure, Hernan Diaz leads us to question the narratives we bank on and who controls them.
What I would like to highlight, however, is the often overlooked but none-too-subtle criticism of how women have been usually portrayed in literature and of their consignment to the peripheries of history; and while it has been said that this is about the equivalence of money and power and how the powerful can easily manipulate narratives, I choose to see this as a double-edged sword that shows how the powerful can easily be threatened by the sheer force of a story.
And this book? Powerful. Truly deserving of the Pulitzer.
In Hindu cosmology, world time is divided into four great epochs called the Yuga Cycle: Satya Yuga, Treta Yuga, Dwapara Yuga, and the Kali Yuga. As the cycle progresses through the four stages, the length of each yuga decreases, but social and moral decay multiplies. We are believed to be in the Kali Yuga, the age of conflict, sin, and disintegration.
This sets the tone for the book, so that a few pages in, I felt relieved that I did not read this before, or during, my trip to India.
“This book covers so many sensitive areas that it is bound to raise a few cries of protest and dissent, particularly from Indians understandably touchy about criticism from abroad; but it is a work of love. Its subject is an area of the world I revere like no other, and in which I have chosen to spend most of my time since I was free to make that choice,” writes Dalrymple in the introduction.
But as I read on, I began to regret not reading this before, or during, my trip to India! Unlike the three other Dalrymple books in the Vintage Departures edition, this is less travelogue than a compilation of articles and essays about the Indian subcontinent, from north to south and east to west, which are more political in nature.
Published in 1998, it includes interviews with Pakistan’s Benazir Bhutto and Imran Khan, and figures from opposing sides of caste wars and political parties. It is, therefore, a crash course on a part of the world that, despite its significant advances, is still reeling from the British Raj, the Partition, and religious discrimination. As an outsider and common reader, I have yet to encounter a more readable and insightful work that encapsulates caste and gender prejudice, corruption in government, the justice system and the economic obstacles of the subcontinent in a single book.
Dalrymple rarely waxes poetic here, but this book stamps his authority in the field of journalism. As I read this amidst horrifying world events and the filing of certificates of candidacies by movie stars, social media influencers, and crooks here in the Philippines, I can easily believe that we are, indeed, in the Age of Kali.
“Wojnicz had noticed that every discussion, whether about democracy, the fifth dimension, the role of religion, socialism, Europe, or modern art, eventually led to women.”
Reading Olga with UP Symphony rehearsing Shostakovich as background.
Mischief. More literary mischief from Olga.
That the first death in the book happens to be of a woman whom our dear Wojnicz mistakes for a servant, when she is in fact the guesthouse proprietor’s wife, is not negligible.
And then, mushrooms. Then the puns in the names: January and August, two characters named after months, months named after a two-faced Roman god and a Roman Caesar; Dr. Semperweiss, because, always white; and it’s not a mere coincidence how the owner of the Guesthouse for Gentlemen where Wojnicz lodges is named Wilhelm “Willi” Opitz (see Opitz syndrome, especially in males); the Tuntschi, definitely a nod to the Sennentuntschi of Alpine folklore involving an ill-treated doll that retaliates; and Empusium, after Empusa, the female shape-shifter of Greek mythology.
The Empusium is Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain reframed, they say. Friends who have known me way back from my Thomas Mann reading phase know the story of how I developed a fever while reading the Magic Mountain. (They tried to assuage my sickness by saying that it’s the best state in which to read Thomas Mann. Hah!) Strangely enough, I also got sick a day after I started reading The Empusium. Whether that’s part of Olga’s mischief, I cannot say for sure, but, “The story has a spirit of sickness,” says my mom ominously.
While Mann’s mountain was an allegory for a sick Europe, Olga’s mountain is glaringly sick with misogyny. In the author’s note, Olga divulges that the chauvinistic passages were paraphrased from the words of history’s famous men, and she names all of them. Why do you think it’s labeled as a “horror story”?
“Today the West often views Islam as a civilization very different from and indeed innately hostile to Christianity. Only when you travel in Christianity’s Eastern homelands do you realize how closely the two religions are really linked. For the former grew directly out of the latter and still, to this day, embodies many aspects and practices of the early Christian world now lost in Christianity’s modern incarnation… Certainly if John Moschos were to come back today it is likely that he would find much more that was familiar in the practices of a modern Muslim Sufi than he would with those of, say, a contemporary American Evangelical. Yet this simple truth has been lost by our tendency to think of Christianity as a Western religion rather than the Oriental faith it actually is. Moreover the modern demonization of Islam in the West, and the recent growth of Muslim fundamentalism (itself in many ways a reaction to the West’s repeated humiliation of the muslim world), have led to an atmosphere where few are aware of, or indeed wish to be aware of, the profound kinship of Christianity and Islam.” — William Dalrymple, From the Holy Mountain
Hagia Sophia, followed by mosaics, lots of them: These are the things that initially come to mind whenever I encounter the word “Byzantine,” and I suspect I am not alone in this. And because it is art that outlives the rise and fall of empires, there is almost nothing else we can clearly visualize about Byzantine beyond its art, architecture, and its leading players in history.
“The sacred and aristocratic nature of Byzantine art means that we have very little idea of what the early Byzantine peasant or shopkeeper looked like; we have even less idea of what he thought, what he longed for, what he loved or what he hated,” writes William Dalrymple.
But once upon a time, circa 580 AD, a monk called John Moschos traveled with Sophronius the Sophist across the empire including the three greatest Byzantine metropolises — Constantinople, Antioch, Alexandria — and wrote about it. In a book called Spiritual Meadow, Moschos detailed what he saw, whom he met, the heresies he witnessed, and stories about common folk, “the sort who normally slip through the net cast by the historian.”
It was this book that Dalrymple used as a guide to travel through the eastern Mediterranean world in 1994, a world that is now predominantly Islamic, but a world that once was predominantly Christian (not in deed, of course, but by religious affiliation) for hundreds of years, from the age of Constantine to the dawn of Islam in the 7th century.
This journey among the dwindling population of Eastern Christians begins in the Monastery of Iviron in Mount Athos, an autonomous region in Greece that is under the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople. To this day, women are prohibited from entering the monastic community. It is, therefore, a place I cannot travel to even if I wanted to.
And this is the service Dalrymple does for his readers: To visit places inaccessible to us, to experience cultures and traditions unheard of and never to be seen again, “to do what no future generation of travelers would be able to do: to see wherever possible what Moschos and Sophronius had seen, to sleep in the same monasteries, to pray under the same frescoes and mosaics, to discover what was left, and to witness what was in effect the last ebbing twilight of Byzantium,” and then tell the tale. (A sad validation of this slightly conceited claim is the wistful realization that most of the Syrian Byzantine sites mentioned in this book became casualties of war several years after its publication.)
The stunning architecture that William Dalrymple describes with an eye for detail and a penchant for lyricism; the coming across of endangered languages such as Turoyo, the modern Aramaic spoken in the Tur Abdin region in southeastern Turkey and northern Syria, “where Jesus could expect to be understood if he came back tomorrow”; the discovery of a musical mystery, an ancient form of plainsong in Syria that could possibly be the direct antecedent of the Gregorian chant; the Eastern roots of Celtic illuminating art and how the trajectory of Renaissance art owes it to John of Damascus, an Arab Christian monk; the author’s observation that “Muslims appear to have derived their techniques of worship from existing Christian practice” and that “Islam and the Eastern Christians have retained the original early convention; it is the Western Christians who have broken with sacred tradition”; perspectives on the Armenian genocide, the Kurdish conflict, the Lebanese Civil War, and the Israeli–Palestinian situation at the time; the realization that Byzantine Palestine was dominated by Christians and for eight hundred years the Jewish community was a minority; accounts of Muslims praying in Eastern churches, “the Eastern Christians and the Muslims have lived side by side for nearly one and a half millennia, and have been able to do so due to a degree of mutual tolerance and shared customs unimaginable in the solidly Christian West”; and most remarkably, the awareness that, oftentimes, people are not as hostile and as divided as governments and ideologies want us to believe; these are a few of the things that will have readers brimming by the time they get to the last page.
This is essential Dalrymple right here — a book that will leave one richer for having read it.
Thank you, dear Anna, for this most wonderful recommendation! 🤍
The Book-Butterfly 