Skip to content

Ismail Lagardien

in words and images

Menu
  • Home
  • About
  • Bookshelf/Reading List
  • The Image
Menu

Bookshelf/Reading List

20 June 2022

As if I don’t have enough to read, I bought Joanne Joseph’s Children of Sugarcane. I just stopped reading on page 49, while I prepare to get on with life, and so far the book is quite exceptional in its elegance and immersion into the lives of its main characters. I hope I can finish it before I am scheduled to leave town on 6 July.

12 May 2022

With my own book published an in stores, I have started reading (partially) in preparation for a long project that I will start in mid-July.

Added to the essays and papers that I read almost daily, I have started reading the brilliant William Dalrymple’s book, The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company, published by Bloomsbury. I still have not started reading (start to finish) The Future is Asian: Global Order in the 21st Century by Parag Khanna.

12 March 2022

I finished reading Fatima Bhutto’s The Runaways a few days ago. I enjoyed the way it was written; short chapters that switch between characters within a single story. Effective.

Now I will pay more attention to Karel Schoeman’s Early Slavery at the Cape of Good Hope 1652 – 1717.

22 February 2022

I finished reading William Dalrymple’s City of Djinns, and started reading Fatima Bhutto’s The Runaways. As much as I would like to get to The Future is Asian: Global Order in the 21st Century by Parag Khanna, the next few weeks – until the end of May, actually – will be inordinately busy.

23 December 2021

Well now. It’s been a while. Apart from the very many essays I have read – and spending the year writing a memoir which is due for publication in March 2022 – I have managed to get through a few books. Too few, it should be said. I have mainly been buying books for Kindle, because I am loathe to go an mingle with people in malls and bookshops during a pandemic. I don’t actually like Kindle for two main reasons. The first is that I like the feel and smell of books. The other is that I have the Kindle app on my iPad. Sitting on an iPad in a public places and constant being concerned about having to charge battery is a terrible annoyance. The latter is the reason why I gave my Apple Watch to a niece. I really don’t want Apple to know how much or how little exercise I do, nor do I want them to know my movements. The biggest problem occurred when I stayed over at a friend’s place and the thing went dead; it needed a charge. So I went out and bought an old fashioned watch. It tells me the time in analog and I am perfectly happy with that.

Before I continue. I have received two books from a great friend, Jo-Anne Duggan, which will be the first formal reading for a project that I hope will take off by the middle of next year. For now, everything – the entire project – depends on whether borders will be opened and, of course it becomes easy to travel. These are the two books:

  1. Karel Schoeman’s Early Slavery at the Cape of Good Hope 1652 – 1717
  2. Nigel Worden’s Slavery in Dutch South Africa. African Studies 44.

These two books will become essential reading in the first half of 2020.

In November I bought two books by William Dalrymple:

  1. City of Djinns: A year in Delhi (I’m half way through it. He really is such a knowledgable and sensitive writer on India)
  2. From the Holy Mountain: A Journey in the Shadow of Byzantium.

I got Fatima Bhutto’s The Runaways: How far would you run to escape your life?, which I will probably start reading in the new year sometime.

After an interview I did with the Very Reverend Michael Weeder of St George’s Cathedral in Cape Town, I got his book of poetry, The Promise of Memory which features on its cover a picture by Jimi Matthews.

I finished two books on Afghanistan that were quite shocking. As much as I am aware of and I have remained on tope of the Washington’s war against the Afghan people, the books were immensely disturbing and deeply saddening (maddening) in places

  1. West of Kabul East of New York by Tamim Ansary
  2. No Good Men Among the Living: America, the Taliban and the War Through Afghan Eyes (I highly recommend this book)

I also got Branko Milanovic’s Capitalism Alone: The Future of the System That Rules the World. I shall start reading this in the new year, but I am a great admirer and a friend of Branko’s so I have no doubt that it will provide greater insights into a topic that is close to my heart (and mind)

Also for reading in early next year are:

1. Nick Bostrom’s Superinteligence: Paths Dangers and Strategies (Again)

2. Phillipa Taylor’s Future War.

3. Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decameron.

4. Economic Philosophy: Complexities in Economics Edited by John Davis & Wade Hands.

5. Susie Linfield’s, A Little History of Photography Criticism; or, Why Do Photography Critics Hate Photography?

6. Jason Hickel’s The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and its Solutions.

4 August 2021

23 December 2021

A couple of friends, Laurine Platsky and Eric Miller gave me three books as a birthday gift

  1. Wolfgang Streeck’s How Will Capitalism End?
  2. Gorrel Espelund, Jesper Strudsholk and Eric Miller‘s Photography and textual essays, Reality Bites: An African Decade.

4 June 2021. I finally received a new (used) copy of a book a lost a few years ago. And bought a couple online

  1. Christopher Coker’s War and the 20th Century: The Impact of War on the Modern Consciousness. I ordered a used copy from a seller in the USA. It was well worth the four-week wait.

2. Ismail Kadare’s The Palace of Dreams.

3. Barry Eichengreen’s The Populist Temptation: Economic Grievance and Political Reaction in the Modern Era.

9 May 2021 I got three new books this week.

  1. Is Capitalism Broken?, with contributions by Yanis Varoufakis, Arthur Brooks, Katrina Vanden Heuvel and David Brooks.
  2. The Future is Asian: Global Order in the Twenty-First Century, by Parag Khanna.
  3. The Improbable War: China, the United States and the Logic of Great Power Conflict, by Christopher Coker

I got Charles Allers’s biographical book, Anwar Ibrahim: Evolution of a Muslim Democrat, a few years ago (at the same time I got A Doctor in the House: The Memoirs of Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad, by the former Prime Minister of Malaysia, Mahathir Mohamad.

14 April 2021. It has been a tough few months. After the attack of last October, which resulted in two surgeries – I now have two plates holding my jaw together and another in my mouth to hold implants in place – I also had spinal surgery in January. I’m pleased to say that all is well. Except, of course, because of Covid restrictions, I have not gone walkabout for weeks, and one of the conditions for fully recovering from the spinal surgery was that I should walk at least a couple of kilometres a day. Well, between avoiding all humans, and writing for a living I am deskbound for most of every day.

I haven’t done much (book) reading. Most significantly, I have started/continued reading:

  1. The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory by Brian Green.
  2. Too Black to Wear Whites: The Remarkable Story of Krom Hendricks, a Cricket Hero who was Rejected by Cecil John Rhodes’s Empire, by Jonty Winch and Richard Parry
Bedtime Reading

I have also continued reading chapters of The Lockdown Collection, edited by Melinda Ferguson. The book is an anthology of sorts, with contributions from some of South Africa’s best writers and journalists, and how the first few months of the Covid Pandemic has affected their lives and day-to-day routines. I wrote one of the contributions. This was the second book on the topic published by Melinda Ferguson, and featuring a handful of writers. The first was an e-book. Explains Melinda:

“At the end of March, my first response against creative suicide Lockdown The Corona Chronicles, was published after a group of 17… authors, under my benevolent whip, got an e-book together in just 7 days”.

Melinda Ferguson, The Lockdown Collection. Compiler/Publisher’s Note, p8

Anyway, most of my reading continues to be academic papers and essays, news reports and analyses from publications as far and wide as the South China Morning Post, Malaysiakini, The New Straits Times, to the Financial Times, London Review of Books and the Guardian, The Hindu (and whatever else I can get online in India) to the LA Times and Commondreams.

26 December 2020. I have been drifting away from reading 20 or 30 books a year to reading fewer than 10, and a unimaginable amount of academic papers and essays in print and online. Over the past year I have read a small handful of books, and reread a few others.

I’m currently reading:

  1. So, For the Record: Behind the Headlines in an Era of State Capture, by Anton Harber
  2. Too Black to Wear Whites: The Remarkable Story of Krom Hendricks, a Cricket Hero who was Rejected by Cecil John Rhodes’s Empire, written by Jonty Winch and Richard Perry.
  • Elif Shafak’s 10 Minutes 38 Second in this Strange World.
  • An exceptional book.

    The books I finished reading this year are:

    1. Edward Luce’s The Retreat of Western Liberalism;
    2. The Fate of the West: The Battle to Save the World’s Most Successful Political Idea (I started reading the latter late last year):
    3. Swing Time by Zadie Smith;
    4. Encountering Apartheid’s Ghosts: From Krugersdorp to Constitution Hill by Leon Wessels;
    5. Elif Shafak’s 10 Minutes 38 Second in this Strange World.
    6. Sarah Bakewell’s At the Existentialist’s Cafe: Freedom, Being and Apricot Cocktails;
    7. Firefighting: The Financial Crisis and it’s Lessons by Ben S Bernanke, Timothy Gethner and Henry Paulson,
    8. Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World, by Adam Tooze.
    9. Khamr: The Makings if a Waterslams, by Jamil Khan. (A forgettable book)

    I reread

    1. Arundathi Roy’s The God of Small Things,
    2. A few Chapters of A Doctor in the House: The Memoirs of Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad, by the former Prime Minister of Malaysia,
    3. Selected essays in Known and Strange Things, by Teju Cole,
    4. Chinua Achebe’s There was a Country: A personal history of Biafra
    5. A few chapters of Ian Kershaw’s To Hell and Back: Europe 1914 – 1949.
    6. Thoughts on the New South Africa by Neville Alexander
    7. One or two sections of Susan Sontag’s On Photography,
    8. Inside Apartheid’s Prison, by Raymond Suttner.

    Two books I finally got to may be regarded as good scholarship, but parts of them made me particularly angry.

    1. Pumla Dineo Gqola’s What is Slavery to Me: Post-Colonial/Slave Memory in Post-Apartheid South Africa, and
    2. Gabeba Baderoon’s Regarding Muslims: From Slavery to Post-Apartheid.

    I started reading, Dennis Cruywagen’s The Spiritual Mandela: Faith and Religion in the Life of South Africa’s Great Statesman, but lost interest. I suspect I won’t get back to it in any serious way. I also suspect that I may have left out a few books, or chapters of books I have read in 2020.

    Away from books

    It is almost impossible to list the amount of essays and papers I have read in 2020. It could be anything from 30 to 100, and covered my main interests: Political Economy; Global Economic Governance; Photography; Memory; Architecture; Physics, Astronomy and Cosmology. At the start of the year I waded through about 20 papers on fascism over January and February for a project, which came to an abrupt halt because of the Lockdown and restriction of movement, and social contact as part of preventing the spread of Covid-19.

    Some of the essays were from academic journals, but very many were from publications like the London Review of Books, the New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, Harper’s, the LA Review of Books, the Paris Review, the Times Literary Supplement, New Scientist, Quantum Magazine and Physics World.

    I also spend at least two hours a day reading news and analyses from around the world (BBC, The Financial Times, The Straits Times, Malaysiakini, South China Morning Post). Over the past 10 years I have come to rely less and less on the New York Times and Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune and the LA Times, Newsweek and Time for daily news. I really no longer see the point of reading these newspapers.

    And then there are the podcasts… I subscribe to tens of podcasts from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab and it’s Science Casts, to the Guardian’s Football Weekly and The Tuesday Club.

    Reading in 2021

    I suspect that I will read even fewer books next year, in part because books are either becoming more expensive, or this life as a struggling writer is becoming more difficult. I will, however, get Brian Greene’s latest book, Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe. (It costs almost R500), and You Look Like a Thing and I Love You: How Artificial Intelligence Works and Why It’s Making the World a Weirder Place by Janelle Shane, and anything else on Artificial Intelligence and Robotics I can lay my hands on. I am especially intrigued by the intersection of neuroscience and artificial intelligence/robotics; the ethics are a matter of concern.

    And so, as I write this in 2020, nine months into a global pandemic, next year is another country. I suspect I will be getting most of what I read from online sources – and listen to very many podcasts.

    RSS Financial Times

    • UK Power Networks: inflation prompts bout of vendor remorse from Hong Kong investor
    • To catch a rare-book thief
    • Courts backlog worsens as junior barristers quit over pay
    • Kellogg’s loses UK legal challenge over new government sugar rules
    • Uniper: the pain from Germany’s gas crisis will be widely shared

    RSS Branko Milanovic Personal Blog

    • China’s household incomes and inequality in the Year I of covid
       There has been an enormous talk of the new inequalities wrought by covid-19 between and within countries: in mortality and morbidity, vaccination rates, style of life (those who had to show up physically at work vs those who could stay at home), unemployment rates, gender, age etc. But it is only now that actual information […]
    • A short essay on the differences between Marx and Keynes
       This short piece is stimulated by my recent reading of the French translation of Joan Robinson’s 1942 Essay on Marxian Economics published together with several additional texts on Marx, Marshall and Keynes written by Robinson over the years. (The translation and preface by Ulysse Lojkine.) It was also stimulated by a very nice review of […]
    • What if Putin’s true goals are different?
       By any standard indicator that measures the achievements by the extent to which the stated objectives have been realized, Russia’s war against Ukraine has been a failure. Ukraine is much more militarized than ever; it is probably one of the most militarized countries in the world right now; Russia’s security has markedly deteriorated; NATO has […]
    • From dilettantism to war: a review of Andrei Kozyrev’s political memoir
       Russia is remarkably ill-starred by having had very incompetent leaders. They have done the opposite of what they intended to accomplish. Brezhnev planned to introduce a degree of predictability in domestic and foreign policy; he presided over a long period of technological decline of the Soviet economy.  Gorbachev wanted to create a democratic federation; he […]
    • The many in one: A review of Amartya Sen’s “Home in the world: A memoir”
      No contemporary famous economist has as broad interests and knowledge, nor as diverse life experience as Amartya Sen. It is not surprising that many have been looking forward to reading the first volume of his memoirs. It covers the period from his birth in 1933 to the beginnings of his academic career in the United […]

    RSS BBC World News

    • Copenhagen shooting: Gunman charged in court with murder
    • Ukraine war: What is Putin's plan now Luhansk has fallen?
    • EasyJet executive quits after major flight disruption
    • Marmolada glacier collapse in Italy kills seven
    • Copenhagen shooting: Harry Styles fans praise Danish police for attack response

    RSS Channelnews Asia

    • Russia hails capture of Luhansk region, but big Ukraine battles lie ahead
    • S Korea's FX reserves fall in June by most since late 2008
    • Oh mother, Tomljanovic downs Cornet in rollercoaster
    • Nadal swats away Dutchman Van de Zandschulp to march into quarters
    • Al Jazeera reporter likely killed by unintentional gunfire from Israeli positions, US says

    RSS Singapore Straits Times

    • Updated Covid-19 shots are coming. Will they be too late?
    • Gunman behind Copenhagen shooting to be kept in custody for 24 days: Police
    • Spain seizes first underwater drug smuggling drones
    • Wildfire rages north of Athens, 1 town evacuated
    • Brussels Airlines to cancel around 700 flights over summer holiday
    • Harry Styles devastated over Denmark shooting, cancels concert
    • Ukrainians take up new positions as Putin proclaims victory in Luhansk
    • Washington Report Podcast: Most Americans do not want Biden to run for presidential re-election
    • Pope Francis denies he is planning to resign soon
    • 18 dead in Uzbekistan unrest last week: Prosecutor

    RSS Business Times

    • An error has occurred, which probably means the feed is down. Try again later.

    RSS The Economist

    • Politics
    • KAL’s cartoon
    • Business
    • Business
    • Politics

    RSS Malay Mail

    • Cuepacs: Four-day working week proposal not suitable for now 
    • Higher Education Ministry gives six-month rent moratorium to campus food operators at IPTAs
    • Economists: Govt’s move to maintain electricity tariff shields consumers in Malaysia from direct impact of rising prices

    Tags

    Asia black and white book broadcasting brother building contractor business day CapeTalk China Classic Inn columnist container house Facebook Film heritage Hotel Kuala Lumpur Malaysia memoir memory niece North America passport photographic gaze photography project publishing race research Ruwayda Schengen Social Media South Africa sport state of emergency tik tok too white to be coloured to coloured to be black travel Twitter visa War Warisan Western Asia write writing

    Categories

    • Architecture (1)
    • Art (6)
    • Asia (4)
    • Cape Malay (5)
    • Cities (4)
    • Culture (6)
    • Culture (4)
    • Family (2)
    • Family Roots (5)
    • Film (2)
    • Food (3)
    • Heritage (9)
    • Identity (5)
    • Journalism (1)
    • Makanan (2)
    • Malaysia (6)
    • Melaka (2)
    • Memory (5)
    • On Writing (4)
    • Photography (9)
    • Politics (7)
    • Race (5)
    • Racism (1)
    • Random Shots (3)
    • Social Justice (2)
    • Social Media (3)
    • South East Asia (3)
    • Sport (2)
    • Vlog (2)
    • War (2)
    • Web Development (1)
    • Western Asia (1)
    • Writing (7)

    Archives

    • June 2022
    • May 2022
    • March 2022
    • February 2022
    • January 2022
    • December 2021
    • September 2021
    • August 2021
    • June 2021
    • October 2020
    • September 2020
    • August 2020
    • June 2020

    Categories

    • Architecture
    • Art
    • Asia
    • Cape Malay
    • Cities
    • Culture
    • Culture
    • Family
    • Family Roots
    • Film
    • Food
    • Heritage
    • Identity
    • Journalism
    • Makanan
    • Malaysia
    • Melaka
    • Memory
    • On Writing
    • Photography
    • Politics
    • Race
    • Racism
    • Random Shots
    • Social Justice
    • Social Media
    • South East Asia
    • Sport
    • Vlog
    • War
    • Web Development
    • Western Asia
    • Writing

    Anti-G8 and Anti-War Graffiti in Geneva 2003

    Anti-war paint. Geneva 2003
    Anti-war paint. Geneva 2003
    Anti-war paint. Geneva 2003
    Anti-war paint. Geneva 2003
    Anti-war paint. Geneva 2003
    Anti-war paint. Geneva 2003
    Anti-war paint. Geneva 2003
    Anti-war paint. Geneva 2003
    Anti-war paint. Geneva 2003
    Anti-war paint. Geneva 2003

    Bastakiya, Dubai 2012

    Verona

    © 2022 Ismail Lagardien | Powered by Minimalist Blog WordPress Theme