Favourite Books of the Year 2023

It is that time of the year when we share the list of our favourite books. I normally wait till the beginning of the new year to share this list. But this time, I feel that I’m not going to finish the current book I’m reading and so I thought it is a good time to make this list.

This year was not a great reading year for me, in terms of number of books. I had a three-month reading slump during the first half of the year, and a two-month reading slump during the second half, and with this, half my reading year was gone. But in terms of spectacular books, I read many.

I read 34 books, out of which 18 were fiction and 15 were nonfiction and one defied classification. I read 20 books by male writers and 14 books by female writers. I read 18 books which were written originally in English, 14 books which were translated, and 2 books in their original language which was not English.

So, here is the list of my favourites.

(1) Temple Alley Summer by Sachiko Kashiwaba – I thought this was a manga comic when I got it, but it turned out to be a novel. I was disappointed initially, but I needn’t have, because it was spectacular. It has Japanese culture, history, ghosts and strange happenings embedded inside and it is beautiful.

(2) The Three-Cornered World by Natsume Sōseki – This year I read three books by Natsume Sōseki. This is the first time I read novels by him, and as soon as I read my first book by him, he zoomed past Yukio Mishima and became my all-time favourite Japanese writer. I loved all the three books of his I read (the other two were ‘Kokoro’ and ‘Botchan’) but ‘The Three-Cornered World’ (also called ‘Kusamakura’) is my favourite. It is incredibly beautiful. Pages and pages of beauty. It was an absolute pleasure to read. I think it is one of my all-time favourites. Hoping to read more by Sōseki-San during the coming year.

(3) Tomie by Junji Ito – This is my first Junji Ito book. Beautiful artwork, extremely scary story. A book which shouldn’t be read in the night, in the dark. It will give you nightmares.

(4) A Testament of Hope : The Essential Writings and Speeches by Martin Luther King Jr. – I wanted to read a Martin Luther King book and finally got to read this one. It was amazing, beautiful, inspiring! It was not just a collection of speeches, it was also in some way the history of the Civil Rights era. Most of us know some of MLK’s famous lines, especially, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” But we wouldn’t have read a complete speech or essay by him. This book has those amazing quotes, and it has those wonderful, inspiring speeches. As the old saying goes, if you want to read just one book by MLK, this is that one. This is probably my book of the year.

(5) Black Foam by Haji Jabir – The author is Eritrean, the book is written in Arabic, and the story happens in three places, Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Israel – all these together made it a very unusual and fascinating book. The writing is beautiful and the story is moving and insightful.

(6) Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson – My second book by Jacqueline Woodson. This one is a memoir in verse. Very beautiful. Hoping to read more Woodson.

(7) Iravu Chudar (Night Flame) by R.Chudamani – I read a big collection of short stories by Chudamani last year. It was exceptional. Chudamani is a short story specialist. But she has also written a few slim novellas. This is the most famous of them. It is about how being your own person is very hard when your family and people around you are different. It is a beautiful and heartbreaking story.

(8) Karukku by Bama – Karukku is Bama’s memoir. Bama is a Dalit writer and this book describes her life as a Dalit Christian since the time she was a kid. It is beautiful, eye-opening and heartbreaking. This is a book which satisfies the traditional definition of a classic – often recommended but rarely read. It deserves more readers.

(9) Diary of an Invasion by Andrey Kurkov – This is my most recent Andrey Kurkov book. Have loved all his books that I’ve read till now. This one is probably his finest. It is about the recent Russian invasion of Ukraine and how it has impacted normal Ukrainians.

(10) Siberian Haiku by Jurga Vilė and Lina Itagaki – My first Lithuanian book which is also a graphic novel. It is about innocent Lithuanians who were deported and forced to work in Gulags in the middle of nowhere during the Soviet era. The story is moving and the artwork is incredibly beautiful.

(11) My Heart by Semezdin Mehmedinović – I read two books by Mehmedinović this year. The first one, ‘Sarajevo Blues’, is his most famous book. But this one, ‘My Heart’, is my favourite. Mehmedinović’s writing is incredibly beautiful and this book is an absolute pleasure to read.

(12) Artificial Intelligence : A Guide for Thinking Humans by Melanie Mitchell – Once in a while we stumble upon an amazing science book by accident. This is that book for me this year. Melanie Mitchell takes the complex concepts of Artificial Intelligence and makes them accessible and easy-to-understand for us. Clearly she is a great teacher. Her students are very lucky. I want to read everything that she has written for the general reader.

(13) Madam, Will You Talk? by Mary Stewart – I finally got to read my first Mary Stewart. This is her first book. The writing is beautiful, the heroine is charming, the story is gripping. What else do we need? I read one more book by her after this. Hoping to read more by her soon.

(14) The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine by Ilan Pappé – I read a couple of books on Palestine and Israel. It is hard to pick a favourite between them, but I decided on this one. This is moving and heartbreaking. Not to be attempted when you are feeling vulnerable. But an important book which is especially relevant for our current times.

Have you read any of these? Which are your favourite books from this year?

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Christmas Presents

Got these books as Christmas presents 😊 Mike Brearley’s book and Joya Chatterji’s book were presents to myself 😊 The others were presents given by my book club friends. I have the best book-loving friends 😊

I’m very excited about Michiko Aoyama’s and Patrick Dewitt’s books because they both are about books and libraries and librarians.

Michelle Zauner’s book seems to be about grief. Looking forward to crying while reading it.

I’ve never read William Trevor before. Kim (from Reading Matters) did a whole year reading project of William Trevor’s works this year, which was very inspiring. Looking forward to reading my first William Trevor soon.

I’ve always loved Mike Brearley’s books. His book ‘The Art of Captaincy‘ is a classic. This new book by him looks more personal and looks like his memoir. Looking forward to reading it.

Saw Joya Chatterji’s book when I visited the bookshop last weekend. I always have a soft corner for books which are huge in size and so immediately fell in love with this chunkster.

Have you read any of these?

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Book Review – The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine by Ilan Pappé

I’ve wanted to read Ilan Pappé’s ‘The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine‘ for a while. Books on the Nakba are hard to come by, because they’ve been typically pushed below the carpet, and this is one of the few books out there. I picked it up a few days back and finished reading it today.

The book narrates what happened during the Nakba in 1948, how Israelis forcibly evicted Palestinians out of their homes and their villages and their cities, sometimes sending them to neighbouring countries as refugees, and at other times just killing them and demolishing their houses and the buildings in the village or that part of the city. I don’t think anyone can deny what happened or sweep it below the carpet, because Ilan Pappé gives names of people who were involved, victims’ names, perpetrator’s names, names of the villages and towns which were razed down, what has been built on their rubble, and what the new towns or parks are called today. He also quotes from books, diaries, memoirs, official Israeli government documents. The evidence stares us on the face. Clearly there is blood on Israeli hands. I was crying most of the time I was reading the book. It was heartbreaking. When I was not crying, I was angry, very angry. It is hard to believe that this violence and injustice is continuing for 75 years. Israelis, who are mostly Jewish, who themselves are from a community which has been oppressed for more than 2000 years – it is hard to believe that they have turned oppressors themselves and have taken the oppressive methods and techniques that were inflicted  on them and used them to oppress the Palestinians. As Arundhati Roy said in one of her recent speeches (you can find it here) –

“What lessons should we draw from this tragic conflict? Is it really impossible for Jewish people who suffered so cruelly themselves—more cruelly perhaps than any other people in history—to understand the vulnerability and the yearning of those whom they have displaced? Does extreme suffering always kindle cruelty? What hope does this leave the human race with?”

It is just tragic and heartbreaking. As the Israelis keep pounding Gaza everyday in the current phase of the genocide perpetrated by them, bombing hospitals, killing women and children who are staying in a school, and employing Nazi era techniques like separating all the males and asking them to strip and taking them in a truck to a camp, where no one knows what will happen to them (the book says that in 1948, most of these prisoners were shot dead), one feels helpless as an individual, and wonders what one can do to protest against or stop this state-sponsored violence, other than watching the news and weeping. (There is a passage in the second part of the Chinese classic, ‘Outlaws of the Marsh‘. It goes like this – “Reader please note…lamentations are of three kinds the world over : With both tears and sound it is called crying, with tears and without sound it is called weeping, without tears and with sound it is called wailing.” This is what I’m doing right now – weeping.)

I’m sharing some of the moving passages from the book, so that we can weep together.

“For Israelis, to recognise the Palestinians as the victims of Israeli actions is deeply distressing, in at least two ways. As this form of acknowledgement means facing up to the historical injustice in which Israel is incriminated through the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948, it calls into question the very foundational myths of the State of Israel, and it raises a host of ethical questions that have inescapable implications for the future of the state. Recognizing Palestinian victimhood ties in with deeply rooted psychological fears because it demands that Israelis question their self perceptions of what ‘went on’ in 1948. As most Israelis see it – and as mainstream and popular Israeli historiography keeps telling them – in 1948 Israel was able to establish itself as an independent nation-state on part of Mandate Palestine because early Zionists had succeeded in ‘settling an empty land’ and ‘making the desert bloom’. The inability of Israelis to acknowledge the trauma the Palestinians suffered stands out even more sharply when set against the way the Palestinian national narrative tells the story of the Nakba, a trauma they continue to live with to the present. Had their victimhood been the ‘natural’ and ‘normal’ outcome of a long-term and bloody conflict, Israel’s fears of allowing the other side to ‘become’ the victim of the conflict would not have been so intense – both sides would have been ‘victims of the circumstances’, and here one may substitute any other amorphous, non-committal concept that serves human beings, particularly politicians but also historians, to absolve themselves from the moral responsibility they otherwise would carry. But what the Palestinians are demanding, and what, for many of them, has become a sine qua non, is that they be recognised as the victims of an ongoing evil, consciously perpetrated against them by Israel. For Israeli Jews to accept this would naturally mean undermining their own status of victimhood. This would have political implications on an international scale, but also – perhaps far more critically – would trigger moral and existential repercussions for the Israeli Jewish psyche : Israeli Jews would have to recognise that they have become the mirror image of their own worst nightmare.”

“Our third source is the oral history we have from both the victimisers and the victims. It is very difficult to get the facts in the former case and almost impossible, of course, in the latter. But their stories have already helped shed light on some of the most appalling and inhuman crimes in the war that Israel waged against the Palestinian people. The perpetrators can only talk, it seems, shielded by the safe distance of years. This is how a particularly appalling case came to light just recently. On 12 August 1949, a platoon of soldiers in the Negev, based in Kibbutz Nirim not far for Beit Hanun, on the northern edge of today’s Gaza Strip, captured a twelve-year-old Palestinian girl and locked her up for the night in their military base near the kibbutz. For the next few days she became the platoon’s sex slave as the soldiers shaved her head, gang-raped her and in the end murdered her. Ben-Gurion lists this rape too in his diary but it was censored out by his editors. On 29 October 2003, the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz publicised the story based on the testimonies of the rapists: twenty-two soldiers had taken part in the barbaric torture and execution of the girl. When they were then brought to trial, the severest punishment the court handed down was a prison term of two years for the soldier who had done the actual killing.”

“Most of the interviews with the survivors were done in 1999 by an Israeli research student, Teddy Katz, who ‘stumbled upon’ the massacre while doing his MA dissertation for Haifa University. When this became public, the University retroactively disqualified his thesis and Alexandroni veterans dragged Katz himself into court, suing him for libel. Katz’s most senior interviewee was Shlomo Ambar, later a general in the IDF. Ambar refused to give him details of what he had seen, saying: ‘I want to forget what happened there.’

***

In fact the story of Tantura had already been told before, as early as 1950, but then it failed to attract the same attention as the Deir Yassin massacre. It appears in the memoirs of a Haifa notable, Muhammad Nimr al-Khatib, who, a few days after the battle, recorded the testimony of a Palestinian who had told him about summary executions on the beach of dozens of Palestinians. Here it is in full : “On the night of 22/23 May the Jews attacked from 3 sides and landed in boats from the seaside. We resisted in the streets and houses and in the morning the corpses were seen everywhere. I shall never forget this day all my life. The Jews gathered all women and children in a place, where they dumped all bodies, for them to see their dead husbands, fathers and brothers and terrorize them, but they remained calm. They gathered men in another place, took them in groups and shot them dead. When women heard this shooting, they asked their Jewish guard about it. He replied: ‘We are taking revenge for our dead.’ One officer selected 40 men and took them to the village square. Each four were taken aside. They shot one, and ordered the other three to dump his body in a big pit. Then they shot another and the other two carried his body to the pit and so on.””

“Jaffa was the last city to be taken, on 13 May, two days before the end of the Mandate. Like so many of Palestine’s cities, it had a long history going back as far as the Bronze age, with an impressive Roman and Byzantine heritage. It was the Muslim commander, Umar Ibn al-‘Aas, who took the town in 632 and imbued it with its Arab character. The Greater Jaffa area included twenty-four villages and seventeen mosques; today one mosque survives, but not one of the villages is left standing. On 13 May, 5000 Irgun and Hagana troops attacked the city as Arab volunteers headed by Michael al-Issa, a local Christian, tried to defend it. Among them was an extraordinary unit of fifty Muslims from Bosnia as well as members of the second generation of the Templars, German colonists who had come in the mid-nineteenth century as religious missionaries and now decided to try and defend their colonies (other Templars in the Galilee surrendered without a fight, and were swiftly driven out of their two pretty colonies, Waldheim and Beit Lehem, west of Nazareth). All in all, Jaffa enjoyed the largest defense force available to the Palestinians in any given locality : a total of 1500 volunteers confronted the 5000 Jewish troops. They survived a three-week siege and attack that began in the middle of April and ended in the middle of May. When Jaffa fell, its entire population of 50,000 was expelled with the ‘help’ of British mediation, meaning that their flight was less chaotic than in Haifa. Still, there were scenes reminiscent of the horrors that took place in the northern harbour of Haifa: people were literally pushed into the sea when the crowds tried to board the far-too-small fishing boats that would take them to Gaza, while Jewish troops shot over their heads to hasten their expulsion. With the fall of Jaffa, the occupying Jewish forces had emptied and depopulated all the major cities and towns of Palestine. The vast majority of their inhabitants – of all classes, denominations and occupations – never saw their cities again, while the more politicised among them would come to play a formative role in the re-emergence of the Palestinian national movement in the form of the PLO, demanding first and foremost their right to return.”

“On 9 April 1948, Jewish forces occupied the village of Deir Yassin. It lay on a hill west of Jerusalem, eight hundred metres above sea level and close to the Jewish neighbourhood of Givat Shaul. The old village school serves today as a mental hospital for the western Jewish neighbourhood that expanded over the destroyed village. As they burst into the village, the Jewish soldiers sprayed the houses with machine-gun fire, killing many of the inhabitants. The remaining villagers were then gathered in one place and murdered in cold blood, their bodies abused while a number of the women were raped and then killed. Fahim Zaydan, who was twelve years old at the time, recalled how he saw his family murdered in front of his eyes : “They took us out one after the other; shot an old man and when one of his daughters cried, she was shot too. Then they called my brother Muhammad, and shot him in front us, and when my mother yelled, bending over him – carrying my little sister Hudra in her hands, still breastfeeding her – they shot her too.” Zaydan himself was shot, too, while standing in a row of children the Jewish soldiers had lined up against a wall, which they had then sprayed with bullets, ‘just for the fun of it’, before they left. He was lucky to survive his wounds.”

“When Golda Meir, one of the senior Zionist leaders, visited Haifa a few days later, she at first found it hard to suppress a feeling of horror when she entered homes where cooked food still stood on the tables, children had left toys and books on the floor, and life appeared to have frozen in an instant. Meir had come to Palestine from the US, where her family had fled in the wake of pogroms in Russia, and the sights she witnessed that day reminded her of the worst stories her family had told her about the Russian brutality against Jews decades earlier. But this apparently left no lasting mark on her or her associates’ determination to continue with the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.”

“UN observers did draw some conclusions in October, writing to the Secretary General – who did not publish their report – that Israeli policy was that of ‘uprooting Arabs from their native villages in Palestine by force or threat’.15 Arab member states attempted to bring the report on Palestine to the attention of the Security Council, but to no avail. For almost thirty years the UN uncritically adopted the rhetorical obfuscations of Abba Eban, Israel’s ambassador to the UN, who referred to the refugees as constituting a ‘humane problem’ for which no one could be held accountable or responsible. UN observers were also shocked by the scope of the looting that went on, which by October 1948 had reached every village and town in Palestine. After so overwhelmingly endorsing a partition resolution, almost a year earlier, the UN could have passed another resolution condemning the ethnic cleansing, but it never did. And worse was to come.”

“One United Nations emissary was different. Count Folke Bernadotte had arrived in Palestine on 20 May and stayed there until Jewish terrorists murdered him in September for having ‘dared’ to put forward a proposal to re-divide the country in half, and to demand the unconditional return of all the refugees. He had already called for the refugees’ repatriation during the first truce, which had been ignored, and when he repeated his recommendation in the final report he submitted to the UN, he was assassinated. Still, it is thanks to Bernadotte that in December 1948, the UN General Assembly posthumously adopted his legacy and recommended the unqualified return of all the refugees Israel had expelled, one of a host of UN resolutions Israel has systematically ignored. As president of the Swedish Red Cross, Bernadotte had been instrumental in saving Jews from the Nazis during the Second World War and this was why the Israeli government had agreed to his appointment as a UN mediator: they had not expected him to try to do for the Palestinians what he had done for the Jews only a few years before.”

“There was also the question of the money expropriated from the 1,300,000 Palestinians, the ex-citizens of Mandatory Palestine, whose finances had been invested in banks and institutions that were all seized by the Israeli authorities after May 1948. Neither did Israel’s proposed policy of resettlement address the issue of Palestinian property now in Israeli hands. A member of the committee was the first governor of the national bank, David Horowitz, and he estimated the combined value of property ‘left by the Arabs’ at 100 million pounds. To avoid becoming embroiled in international investigations and scrutiny, he suggested as a solution: ‘Maybe we can sell it to American Jews?’”

Have you read ‘The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine’? What do you think about it?

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Book Review – On Palestine by Noam Chomsky and Ilan Pappé (edited by Frank Barat)

I’ve wanted to read ‘On Palestine‘ for a long time. Finally picked it up a few days back.

The first part of ‘On Palestine’ is a collection of conversations between Noam Chomsky and Ilan Pappé. The conversations are moderated by Frank Barat. Frank Barat’s brother Florent Barat makes an occasional appearance in some of the conversations. The second part of the book is a collection of essays written by Noam Chomsky and Ilan Pappé on the Palestine – Israel issue.

Now thoughts on the book. The book is very powerful and insightful. The commentary that the book offers on Palestine – Israel history would have been, once upon a time, regarded as a fringe opinion and ignored by the mainstream audience. But today, this is increasingly becoming the mainstream opinion. Which is very fascinating. Inspite of attempts by Israelis and many American commentators to suppress things or ignore them, the facts and the analysis described in the book are out there for all to see. We have to thank the internet and social media for that. In the past, oppressors had the power and influence in mainstream media, and called the oppressed by different names, like terrorists and Nazis, and other such, to justify their violence and oppression and got away with it. But, unfortunately, today because of the widespread influence of internet and social media, people can actually see what is happening and make up their own minds about it.

One of the contradictory things about Israeli behaviour, that I learnt from the book, is this. Israel occupied Palestinian territory after the war in 1967. But Israel refuses to integrate the Palestinians as Israeli citizens. Israel also refuses to let Palestinians have their own country and live freely in their own land. Israel has also imposed harsh conditions in these places so that people can’t move out. So if I am Palestinian, I am stateless and don’t have a country, I can’t become an Israeli citizen and I can’t move around freely. I don’t understand this. It is not like a hundred or a thousand Palestinians are living like this. There are millions. How can this be legal? Why is everyone watching this and not doing anything about it? Why is the US government supporting this state of limbo? And what is everyone expecting? That Palestinians will bow to their Israeli overlords and take what comes their way? It is all very heartbreaking. It makes one angry.

The current situation where Israel has perpetrated a genocide is tragic and heartbreaking. But this book says that this is not the first time it has happened. The book says that this has been happening for a long time, especially since 2006. But it is the worst this time.

One thing that I learnt from the book was that though Israel and its best friend, the US, have paid lip service to the two state-solution, anytime that has come close to implementation, they have either stepped back or blocked it. Here is what Noam Chomsky says about it (it is excerpted from his UN speech) –

“Many of the world’s problems are so intractable that it’s hard to think of ways even to take steps toward mitigating them. The Israel-Palestine conflict is not one of these. On the contrary, the general outlines of a diplomatic solution have been clear for at least forty years. Not the end of the road—nothing ever is—but a significant step forward. And the obstacles to a resolution are also quite clear. The basic outlines were presented here in a resolution brought to the UN Security Council in January 1976. It called for a two-state settlement on the internationally recognized border—and now I’m quoting—“with guarantees for the rights of both states to exist in peace and security within secure and recognized borders.” The resolution was brought by the three major Arab states: Egypt, Jordan, Syria—sometimes called the “confrontation states.” Israel refused to attend the session. The resolution was vetoed by the United States. A US veto typically is a double veto: the veto, the resolution, is not implemented, and the event is vetoed from history, so you have to look hard to find the record, but it is there. That has set the pattern that has continued since. The most recent US veto was in February 2011—that’s President Obama—when his administration vetoed a resolution calling for implementation of official US policy opposition to expansion of settlements.”

There were interesting parallels drawn in the book between Israel’s policy towards Palestinians and the apartheid regime in South Africa. It was interesting to learn about the similarities and the differences. One of the interesting things that I learnt from this part was this –

Noam Chomsky : “I do not want to go too far off on South Africa, but there is a crucial aspect of the end of apartheid that is totally suppressed here and in Britain for reasons of ideological fanaticism. Apartheid was substantially ended by Cuba. The scholarly record on this by now is just overwhelming. The Cubans sent military forces, mostly Black soldiers, who drove the South Africans out of Angola, forced them to leave Namibia, broke the mythology of this white superman, which had a big effect on white and Black South Africa. And the South Africans know it. When Mandela was let out of jail, his first comment was to praise Cubans for their inspiration and their help, because they played a huge part in ending apartheid.”

This is very interesting! I didn’t know that Cubans were involved in a war against the apartheid regime! I remember reading that the Cubans sent armies and helped native Africans fight against their oppressors, but I didn’t know that they were involved in a fight against South Africa. Need to read up more on that.

I can go on. The book is around 200 pages and there are lots of things in it. Most of what we read is heartbreaking and makes us angry. But it is an important book and it makes us understand the present situation better. This is my first Chomsky and my first Ilan Pappé, and I’m glad I read it. There is an introductory essay to the book in which Frank Barat explains how he became an activist. It is fascinating to read. There is another introductory essay in which Ilan Pappé shares his thoughts on the Palestine issue and what he feels could be a potential solution to the problem. It is insightful and thought-provoking.

I had misgivings when I started the book. Both Chomsky and Pappé are Jewish. How could they present a neutral point of view? That was my biggest question. Also, they are outsiders. (Pappé is Israeli, but Chomsky is American, and so a clear outsider). How can outsiders write an objective book about an oppressed people? I felt that their thoughts were going to be biased one way or the other. I’m happy to say that I shouldn’t have worried. Because the book is excellent. Ilan Pappé even explains in one of the conversations on how he learnt the Israeli version of the Palestine issue for many years as a kid, and how it took him a lot of effort and a major change in perspective to see the facts as they were.

Highly recommended. Can’t wait to read more Chomsky and more Ilan Pappé.

I’m sharing below some of my favourite quotes from the book.

Favourite Quotes

Frank Barat : “I want to go back to the question of a Jewish state. If the Jews are a people, what is the problem of them having a state? And why shouldn’t we recognize Israel as a Jewish state?”

Ilan Pappé : “I think that no one I know has ever objected or questioned the right of people to redefine themselves on a national, ethnic, or cultural ground. There is no ground for objecting from the perspective of international law or international morality. Neither is the historical moment in which they decide to do it questionable, however this particular group had defined itself in the past (in our case, as a religious group). The problem lies elsewhere. What is the price paid by this transformation and who pays the price? If this new definition comes at the expense of another people, this becomes a problem. If a group is a victim of a crime and is looking for a safe haven, it cannot obtain this by expelling someone else, another group, from this space that you want as your safe haven. This is the difference between what you want as a group and what means you use to achieve it. The problem is not the right of the Jews to have a state of their own or not. That’s an internal Jewish problem. Orthodox Jews might have a problem with this. Palestinians have no qualms about the Jews forming a state in Uganda, as some people proposed in 1902 to 1903. Not one Palestinian in the world would be interested in this scenario. That’s the main issue. How do you implement your right to self-determination?”

Noam Chomsky : “In 1971 Israel made a decision, which in my view was its most fateful decision in its history. There was an offer from Egypt for a full peace treaty. The Israeli government, led by Golda Meir, considered it and rejected it because they wanted to colonize the Sinai. Basically their choice at the time was between security and expansion. A peace treaty with Egypt, whatever one might think about that outcome, would have meant security, in fact, permanent security as Egypt was the only powerful Arab military force. They understood that, but they preferred to expand into the Sinai. This was a fateful decision and it’s been followed ever since. Ever since then Israel prefers expansion over security. To say they prefer expansion to security means that they are going to follow the path of apartheid South Africa because that follows automatically. Step by step they are going to become isolated, a pariah state, delegitimized, very much like South Africa, they are going to be able to survive only as long as the US supports them. It’s very interesting to look at the history of South Africa. You could pretty much replace the word South Africa with Israel all through the history.”

Noam Chomsky : “In January 2006, a very important event took place: the first full, free election in the Arab world, carefully monitored, recognized to be free and fair. It had one flaw: it came out the wrong way. Hamas won the Parliament, control of the Parliament. The US and Israel didn’t want that. You may recall, at that period, the slogan on everyone’s lips was “democracy promotion.” The highest US commitment in the world was democracy promotion. Here was a good test. Democracy: election came out the wrong way; the US instantly decided, along with Israel, to punish the Palestinians for the crime of voting the wrong way; a harsh siege was instituted, other punishments; violence increased; the United States immediately began to organize a military coup to overthrow the unacceptable government. That’s quite familiar practice—I won’t go through the record. The European Union, to its shame and discredit, went along with this. There was an immediate Israeli escalation. That was the end of the November agreement, followed by major Israeli onslaughts. In 2007, a year later, Hamas committed even a greater crime than winning a fair election: it preempted the planned military coup and took over Gaza. That’s described in the West, in the United States, most of the West, as Hamas’s taking over Gaza by force—which is not false, but something is omitted. The force was preempting a planned military coup to overthrow the elected government. Now, that was a serious crime. It’s bad enough to vote the wrong way in a free election, but to preempt a US-planned military coup is far more serious. The attack on Gaza increased substantially at that point, major Israeli onslaughts.”

Gave you read ‘On Palestine‘? What do you think about it?

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Book Review – Wildfire at Midnight by Mary Stewart

What do you do after reading one Mary Stewart book? You read another Mary Stewart book! 😊

‘Wildfire at Midnight‘ is Mary Stewart’s second book. It is also my second Mary Stewart book.

Gianetta, sometimes called Janet, goes on a holiday to the Isle of Skye in Scotland. She wants to escape the crowds of London at the time of the coronation. There is a strange atmosphere at the hotel she is staying. Soon she discovers that a young girl has been murdered. Soon, two women mountain climbers, who are staying at the hotel, go out in the morning to climb the mountain, and they disappear. As strange things start happening and the darkness deepens, a murderer seems to be on the prowl. What happens after that forms the rest of the story.

‘Wildfire at Midnight’ is very different from Mary Stewart’s first book, ‘Madam, Will You Talk’. The charming prose and the humour and the romance in Mary Stewart’s first book are missing. But instead of that what we get is a dark, gripping, murder mystery thriller, which is scary, which keeps us on the edge of our seats, and which makes us want to turn the page to find out what happens next. The Scottish highlands and the Scottish mountains and the mist and the fog and the bog come alive in the story through Mary Stewart’s beautiful descriptions. The revelation at the end is surprising and not at all what we expect.

I enjoyed reading ‘Wildfire at Midnight’. It was fast-paced and gripping. I loved ‘Madam, Will You Talk’ more, but I enjoyed reading this one too.

I’m sharing with you one of my favourite passages from the book. It is about the meditative beauty of fly fishing. Hope you like it.

“Dougal was a good instructor. He soon showed me how to assemble my hired rod, how to fix the reel and tie the fly, and then, with infinite patience, he began to teach me how to cast. Neither of us spoke a word about anything but the matter in hand, and very few, even, about that. It was not long before I found, to my own surprise, that the difficult art I was attempting had, indeed, a powerful fascination, before which the past faded, the future receded, and the whole of experience narrowed down to this stretch of glancing, glimmering water, and the fly I was trying to cast across it. The timeless scene and the eternal voice of the water created between them a powerful hypnosis under whose influence the hotel with its inmates and its problems seemed far away and relatively unimportant.”

Have you read ‘Wildfire at Midnight’? What do you think about it?

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Book Review – Madam, Will You Talk by Mary Stewart

I wanted to read something light and entertaining and some friends recommended Mary Stewart to me sometime back and so I decided to read one of her books. Mary Stewart wrote romantic suspense novels and she was probably the pioneer in it, before it became big and a separate literary genre these days with lots of authors working there.

‘Madam, Will You Talk?’ is Mary Stewart’s first book. Charity has lost her husband sometime back during the war. She decides to go on a holiday to France with her best friend Louise. They go and stay in a hotel in Avignon. Then strange things start happening there. As our narrator and heroine Charity says at the beginning of the story –

“And when, later on, the cat jumped on to my balcony, there was still nothing to indicate that this was the beginning of the whole strange, uneasy, tangled business. Or rather, not the beginning, but my own cue, the point where I came in. And though the part I was to play in the tragedy was to break and re-form the pattern of my whole life, yet it was a very minor part, little more than a walk-on in the last act. For most of the play had been played already; there had been love and lust and revenge and fear and murder – all the blood-tragedy bric-à-brac except the Ghost – and now the killer, with blood enough on his hands, was waiting in the wings for the lights to go up again, on the last kill that would bring the final curtain down. How was I to know, that lovely quiet afternoon, that most of the actors in the tragedy were at that moment assembled in this neat, unpretentious little Provençal hotel? All but one, that is, and he, with murder in his mind, was not so very far away, moving, under that blazing southern sun, in the dark circle of his own personal hell. A circle that narrowed, gradually, upon the Hôtel Tistet-Védène, Avignon.”

Before long, one thing leads to another, and our heroine Charity is on the run, and a mad man, a bad man, is pursuing her. What happens after that forms the rest of the story.

I loved ‘Madam, Will You Talk?’ Charity is a charming heroine, her narration is charming and we fall in love with her instantly. Mary Stewart’s prose through Charity’s voice is beautiful and charming (Yes, yes, I know! I’ve used ‘charming’ three times in the last few lines already, and have broken every creative writing rule! Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any other word which expresses the sentiment perfectly. I checked the thesaurus, trust me! So charming it is! Yes, 4th time!) The pages flow smoothly, the descriptions are beautiful, the pace picks up, there are gripping car chases, exotic locales, bad villains, surprising good characters, beautiful romance, wonderful unexpected revelations, fascinating mystery which is resolved in the end, and a happy ending. Everything that you want in an entertaining story which uplifts your mood. It is all there. Loved it! Can’t wait to read more Mary Stewart!

I’m sharing one of my favourite passages from the book. It comes at the beginning of the story. It is about Charity’s friend Louise. Hope you like it.

“Louise stubbed out her cigarette carefully, and then folded her hands behind her head. She is tall and fair and plump, with long legs, a pleasant voice, and beautiful hands. She is an artist, has no temperament to speak of, and is unutterably and incurably lazy. When accused of this, she merely says that she is seeing life steadily and seeing it whole, and this takes time. You can neither ruffle nor surprise Louise; you can certainly never quarrel with her. If trouble should ever arise, Louise is simply not there; she fades like the Cheshire Cat, and comes back serenely when it is all over. She is, too, as calmly independent as a cat, without any of its curiosity. And though she looks the kind of large lazy fair girl who is untidy – the sort who stubs out her cigarettes in the face-cream and never brushes the hairs off her coat – she is always beautifully groomed, and her movements are delicate and precise. Again, like a cat. I get on well with cats.”

Have you read ‘Madam, Will You Talk?’ or any other novel by Mary Stewart? What do you think about it? Which is your favourite Mary Stewart novel?

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Book Review – Artificial Intelligence : A Guide for Thinking Humans’ by Melanie Mitchell

I thought I’ll study something recently and I decided to explore Artificial Intelligence, because it seems to be in the limelight these days. I did a course in Artificial Intelligence when I was in college. At that time no one cared about Artificial Intelligence. Many of my classmates who are promoting it now, didn’t care about it then. I did that course because I had dipped into Roger Penrose’s ‘The Emperor’s New Mind‘ and Douglas Hofstadter’s ‘Godel Escher Bach : An Eternal Golden Braid‘ at that time and was inspired by them and so I was excited by this field. The course wasn’t as interesting as I’d expected and it didn’t capture any of the excitement that I’d felt while reading Penrose’s and Hofstadter’s books. After passing out of college, I went to work in a tech company. The company that I went to work for was one of the biggest companies around but no one there cared about Artificial Intelligence. The company didn’t care about exciting new technology, none of the top management or the managers had any vision on how the technology universe was unfolding and the company just went with current fashion and fads and wanted to make more and more money and improve its profit margins. From a technology perspective it was a junk company. I tried talking to my boss and other people there about exciting new technology, but I was treated like a disrupter who refused to keep his head down and do grunt work and count his dollars. One of my bosses was so upset with me that he even exiled me to the cubicle next to the toilet. So I gave up after a while.

Enough of that sad story. Time to contemplate on Artificial Intelligence now. So I decided to study Artificial Intelligence properly now. I thought I’ll do it the hard way and got a textbook and started reading it. It went well for around 60 pages or so. (The book is around 1200 pages.) After that things got complex, but not with the complexity I liked. I could have ploughed on with it till I reached a place where things got better, but I thought it might be a better idea to read a simpler book on the subject first. I did some research and discovered Melanie Mitchell’s book.

Melanie Mitchell’s book is around 400 pages long. But you don’t feel that because it flies like the breeze. Her writing style is conversational and reading the book is like attending the class of your favourite teacher. Melanie Mitchell has got a Ph.D in Artificial Intelligence, she worked with Douglas Hofstadter while researching for her Ph.D, and she has worked in the field for more than thirty years. She also seems to be a great teacher. All that shows in the book. She wears her learning lightly, she starts from the basics and takes the reader to a reasonably advanced level, and she gives a survey of the field historically and describes all the important happenings today. She also covers all the important developments and technologies that are part of AI. She doesn’t shy away from the important and difficult questions (like can a computer or a software program really think, is a computer sentient), she handles all the tricky questions with aplomb, she separates the hype from the facts, and she states her point of view strongly whenever she disagrees with the hype. Her affection for her field is infectious. The book is brilliant and so is Melanie Mitchell.

As the oft-repeated maxim goes, if you want to read just one book on Artificial Intelligence, this is that book. It is exceptional.

I’m sharing one of my favourite passages from the book. Hope you like it. It is about how computers still cannot think like humans.

Beginning of Quote

“I want to describe one additional question-answering task that is specifically designed to test whether an AI (NLP) system (Artificial Intelligence (Natural Language Processing) system) has genuinely understood what it has ‘read’. Consider the following sentences, each followed by a question :

Sentence 1: ‘The city council refused the demonstrators a permit because they feared violence.’

Question: Who feared violence?

A. The city council
B. The demonstrators

Sentence 2: ‘The city council refused the demonstrators a permit because they advocated violence.’

Question: Who advocated violence?

A. The city council
B. The demonstrators

Sentences 1 and 2 differ by only one word (feared / advocated), but that single word determines the answer to the question. In sentence 1 the pronoun they refers to the city council, and in sentence 2 they refers to the demonstrators. How do we humans know this? We rely on our background knowledge about how society works: we know that demonstrators are the ones with a grievance and that they sometimes advocate or instigate violence at a protest.

Here are a few more examples :

Example 1

Sentence 1: ‘Joe’s uncle can still beat him at tennis, even though he is 30 years older.’

Question: Who is older?

A. Joe
B. Joe’s uncle

Sentence 2: ‘Joe’s uncle can still beat him at tennis, even though he is 30 years younger.’

Question: Who is younger?

A. Joe
B. Joe’s uncle

Example 2

Sentence 1: ‘I poured water from the bottle into the cup until it was full.’

Question: What was full?

A. The bottle
B. The cup

Sentence 2: ‘I poured water from the bottle into the cup until it was empty.’

Question: What was empty?

A. The bottle
B. The cup

Example 3

Sentence 1: ‘The table won’t fit through the doorway because it is too wide.’

Question: What is too wide?

A. The table
B. The doorway

Sentence 2: ‘The table won’t fit through the doorway because it is too narrow.’

Question: What is too narrow?

A. The table
B. The doorway

I’m sure you get the idea: the two sentences in each pair are identical except for one word, but that word changes which thing or person is referenced by pronouns such as they, he or it. To answer the questions correctly, a machine needs to be able not only to process sentences but also to understand them, at least to a point. In general, understanding these sentences requires what we might call commonsense knowledge. For example, an uncle is usually older than his nephew; pouring water from one container to another means that the first container will become empty while the other one becomes full; and if something won’t fit through a space, it is because the thing is too wide rather than too narrow.

These miniature language-understanding tests are called Winograd schemas, named for the pioneering NLP researcher Terry Winograd, who first came up with the idea. The Winograd schemas are designed precisely to be easy for humans but tricky for computers…

Several natural-language processing research groups have experimented with different methods for answering Winograd schema questions. At the time I write this, the program reporting the best performance had about 61 per cent accuracy on a set of about 250 Winograd schemas. This is better than random guessing, which would yield 50 per cent accuracy, but it is still far from presumed human accuracy on this task (100 per cent, if the human is paying attention)…

Maybe that’s a good thing. As Oren Etzioni, director of the Allen Institute for AI, quipped, ‘When AI can’t determine what “it” refers to in a sentence, it’s hard to believe that it will take over the world.’”

End of Quote

Have you read Melanie Mitchell’s book? What do you think about it?

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