The Sindhi Hindus

 “…Sindhi Hindus in India have already moved to the dominant global mode of cosmopolitanism and accepted its ethnocidal thrust as an inescapable part of the contemporary world.” So goes Ashis Nandy in his forward to Nandita Bhavnani’s The Making of Exile and the Partition of India, a book which I’ve wanted to read since my Sindhi mother first acquired it a couple of years ago. Nandy’s introduction gets to why I’ve wanted to read it. I am half-Sindhi, but it has always nagged at me what exactly that means. I cannot speak the language. My limited culinary skills do not extend to Sindhi food. To be frank, I’m not even sure what would fall under that category beyond papad. I have never watched a Sindhi movie, though it’s unclear if an industry even exists. I am not steeped in Sindhi Hindu tradition, whatever that is. Of course, I have never been to Sindh, though as far as I aware, no one still alive in my family has been to post-partition Sindh. It would only be a bit of an exaggeration to say that my knowledge of Sindhi culture comes to knowing of the stereotype that Sindhi Hindus are miserly businessman whose names normally end in -ani. There’s a good chance I’m uniquely disconnected from my heritage - even the most culturally aware of us have a connection to old country which is essentially elevated LARPing - but what Bhavnani posits is that disconnection, albeit to a lesser extent than mine, is a defining attribute of what it is to be Sindhi Hindu post-partition.

Unlike Punjabis and Bengalis, the two main most chronicled ethnic groups of partition, there was no Sindh in India to go back to, no homeland to hold on to. In a way it makes the Sindhi Hindu partition closer to that of the muhajirs - after all, Muslims from Gujarat, Hyderabad, or wherever else in Indian sans Bengal and Punjab were not going to a partitioned Muslim version of their state, though even then, this comparison does not work fully, with the muhajirs entering Pakistan often coming with the vision a better life in a country for them. In fact, Bhavnani and her subjects hinge much of her history on the contrast and relation between the two groups. The expectations of Sindhi Hindus and Muhajirs immediately post-independence are opposites. Whereas the muhajir expectation is one of a new country with almost utopian possibilities, many Sindhi Hindus saw Indian independence and the partition that actually happened as a loss and a betrayal of their expectation - for many of them, the Indian independence that they fought so hard for resulted in them not even being in India. Bhavnani also portrays the muhajirs as the successors of the Hindus; in one sense, quite literally, as a muhajir-led riot in Karachi successfully achieved in aim of persuading the Hindus to leave so the muhajir refugees could occupy their properties, but also in a metaphotical sense, with muhajirs sliding into the Sindhi Hindu role of being the property and business owners of the province itself.

Bhavnani also just not discuss physical dislocation, but psychological dislocation as well due to differences of the Sindhi partition experience from those of the Bengalis and Punjabis. One of the most striking things I learned from reading was how few people in power wanted the exodus of Sindhis from Pakistan to actually happen. Many in the Pakistani government saw there being a utility to having a minority population of Hindus inside the country’s borders, as the ability to hold Pakistani Hindus “hostage” would serve as “insurance” against anything harmful happening to India’s still quite large post-partition Muslim population. This had enough currency that chief minister of Sindh made it difficult for Sindhi Hindus to legally emigrate from the country immediately post-partition. On the Indian side, many initially did not see a need for Sindhis to migrate to India - after all, they were not victims of the type of horrific violence which defined the Punjabi and Bengali partition experiences. Though he eventually changed his mind, even as eminent a figure as Gandhi initially said the Sindhis should stick it out in Pakistan. Once in India, they did not do a great job of playing the role of the “perfect victim.” Beyond the relative lack of violence they dealt with as a reason to flee, many were apparently unwilling to take on manual or agricultural labor jobs, leading to charges of entitlement. This was only one of a surfeit of negative perceptions that they had to deal with in India - that this was a group of quasi-Muslim, hard-drinking, meat-loving miserly businessman who were ready to cheat you for your money.

Did reading Bhavnani’s book bring me any closer to my essential Sindhiness? A little bit, though as someone two migrations away from Sindh, any type of engagement with the culture or history would. A large part of me still wants to visit Pakistan one day to see where both sides of my family originally came from. That being said - and maybe this is not the best to admit - I sometimes do wonder what the point of that would be, and especially if there is a reason to visit the cities in Sindh where my family is originally from. Hindu culture in all of the country, let alone the cities, is mostly gone, and even Sindhi culture in general is apparently far from dominant in urban Sindh. This isn’t a unique situation by any means - the often forced migrations of the 20th century have had these effects across the world - but I am left wondering what heritage there even would be to pursue, what family history there even is to see that I cannot just get from Bombay. 

Books I Read in 2024

Titles in bold were my favorites of the year and titles in italics were rereads. My slowest reading year since 2019 on account of grad school and doing other stuff in my life like writing mediocre comedy and genuinely bad other stuff. 

Fiction 

ARX-Han, Incel: A Novel - It kind of is what it sounds like, but also it isn't. Podcast interview with the author. As the name implies, it was uncomfortable read at a lot of points, but I think it worth it and the narrator - Anon - was one of the more memorable characters I've seen this.

Ayad Akhtar, The Who and The What - This and the other Ayad Akhtar work are plays, not prose. I've read before and got back to them because Akhtar was staging a new play that I really wanted to watch (alas, I did not because I decided to go to graduate school), but regardless, Akhtar is probably living writer. 

Ayad Akhtar, Junk - This is a play about high-yield bonds, so strong rec if anyone from current workplace is reading this. Akhtar makes a really interesting argument here, positing that the pivot of the US economy from manufacturing to services (or as people would say, neoliberalism) and the opening up of opportunities in America to those are not just white Protestant men were intertwined.  

Bandi, The Accusation

Paul Beatty, The White Boy Shuffle

Andrew Boryga, Victim

Graham Greene, The Quiet American

Rachel Heng, The Great Reclamation - My new go-to book recommendation whenever someone asks. 

Tanuja Desai Hidier, Born Confused - I feel like I read an Indian-American YA book every year, and every year I am disappointed. This one of the OG ones, and I actually liked it? Maybe it's because of New York/New Jersey setting, maybe it's because it's very pro-brown boy, but it worked for me.

Shehan Karunatilaka, Chinaman: The Legend of Pradeep Mathew - Great recommendation if you ever need to convince a Desi dad to read a novel.

Lisa Ko, The Leavers

Lisa Ko, Memory Piece

Nella Larsen, Passing

Gautam Malkani, Londonstani - A simultaneously really stupid and smart book, which is one of the best explorations I've see on Asian masculinity the West (though, to be fair, that is one of the lowest bars). This, along with a few other novels, will likely cause me to make the mistake of going to random boroughs in outer London when I'm visiting in January. 

Sarah Thankam Mathews, All This Could Be Different

John Okada, No-No Boy

Sheena Patel, I'm A Fan - This is a novel about a British woman who is a having an affair with an emotionally distant artist, with the women proceeding to lose herself by stalking him and his wife on Instagram. Anyway, it's well-written and tackles some interesting topics in contemporary society, but what intrigues me the most was that January 6 inspired Patel to write it. 

Sally Rooney, Conversations With Friends - Liked this a lot more than Normal People!

Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children

Sanjana Sathian, Gold Diggers - Reread this for a book club, and my thoughts didn't change on the second go-around. The prose style is way overboard for heist story, and the plot and characters are pretty whatever, but Sathian does an incredible job of what it was like to grow up in Indian ethnoburb during the 2000s. It's comparable in that way to Didi, even if I thought that was overall a stronger work.

Akhil Sharma, A Life of Adventure and Delight

Zadie Smith, The Fraud

Zadie Smith, Grand Union

Tony Tulathimutte, Private Citizens

Tony Tulathimutte, Rejection - Kind of like seeing your worst thoughts being acted on page. Was inspired to read it when I was coping and seething about some rejection from a girl on Hinge and found an article he wrote.  

Vauhini Vara, The Immortal King Rao - I complain a lot that art made by Asian-Americans has a bad and annoying tendency to be overly focused on a) complaining about our parents or b) complaining about white people. Even if this wasn't one of my favorites - I think it tried to do a little bit too much - I have to give props to Vara for at least writing a good diasporic story which was about something else.

Kurt Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle - S/o to Simran for giving this to me at a DB Christmas thing six or seven years ago. You were right that I would like it. 

Adelle Waldman, The Love Lives of Nathaniel P.

Esther Yi, Y/N - Has a line comparing a K-Pop idol's penis to winter that I have not forgotten.

Nonfiction

Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman, What Are Children For?

Robert Caro, The Power Broker - I've been circling around this one for years, and I got to say, it is everything that people say it is. Long, well-written, very informative, and probably would've blown my mind if I hadn't read a couple dozen urban history books before it. It's maybe the best nonfiction book I've ever read? Very cool when something lives up to the hype. 

Joya Chatterji, Shadows at Noon

Kyle Chayka, Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture 

Steven Conn, The Lies of the Land: Seeing Rural America for What It Is―and Isn’t

Richard Eaton, India in the Persianate Age, 1000-1765 - This and the aforementioned Chatterji book work well as an intro to South Asian history fwiw.

Beverly Gage, The Day Wall Street Exploded: A Story of America in Its First Age of Terror - About the wave of anarchist terror in the last 19th to early 20th centuries. Hits different in a post-Luigi world. 

John Ganz, When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s

Samuel Goldman, After Nationalism: Being American in an Age of Division

Patrick Radden Keefe, The Snakehead: An Epic Tale of the Chinatown Underworld and the American Dream - Love Radden Keefe's writing so much. If you, like me, have wasted too much of your time over the past two months doomscrolling through post-election takes, I think this actually goes to explain why people were kind of mad about how the immigration situation has gone over the past few years. It's not about the 2020s - this is a book about Fujianese asylum seekers and people smuggling in 1990s NYC which was published in 2009 - but the parallels between the situation then and now are hard to ignore. 

Nelson Lichtenstein and Judith Stein, A Fabulous Failure: The Clinton Presidency and the Transformation of American Capitalism

Becky Nicolaides, The New Suburbia: How Diversity Remade Suburban Life in Los Angeles after 1945

Joe Nocera and Bethany McClain, The Big Fail: What the Pandemic Revealed About Who America Protects and Who It Leaves Behind - It's weird how little we've reckoned with the choices made during the pandemic? In hindsight, I do wonder a lot if the lockdowns were really worth it. 

Lauren Oyler, No Judgment: Essays

Bruce Schulman, The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society, and Politics

Mason Williams, City of Ambition: FDR, LaGuardia, and the Making of Modern New York

Gordon Wood, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815

Michelle Zauner, Crying in H-Mart

Sketches 2024

I took two sketch comedy classes this year and wrote a handful of sketches as assignments for them. I'm not really sure what to do with the sketches, so I'm just going to link them here. Hopefully some of them are good? Titles are the class assignments and they are not in chronological order of writing. 

Characters

Character Parade

Fools

Genre

Parody

Peas in a Pod

Topical

Richmond Hill

Richmond Hill is one of the few desi neighborhoods in New York I haven’t spent much time in. Jackson Heights is where one of my libraries is and the place to take people who want to see the novelty of an urban South Asian neighborhood. Curry Hill is five minutes away from my office - I pass it almost every day. I guess I haven’t spent much time in Kensington either - maybe that’s the next place I waste a weekend night when I have nothing else to do. (Of course, Jersey’s often where the real action is at, but as much as it pains me to say it as a native, it doesn’t count for this exercise.) Still, Richmond Hill is a place of some importance. Our first New York state politician came out of here. The largest and first gurdwara on the East Coast is in the neighborhood, and though my dabbling with religion has passed, I wanted to visit at some point to pay tribute to my not-Sikh, half-Punjabi heritage. Anyway, like with most Friday nights, I didn’t have much going on so I figured it was as good a time as ever to make the trek to deepest Queens.

After finishing another wfh Friday, I got on the LIRR, ready to go to Jamaica and catch a bus to the gurdwara. Once I quickly popped in and out, maybe I’d grab some food from Guyanese section and I’d hightail my way back to the city. I got on the train a few minutes early and as I leaned back into my seat, ready to read my book for the 15-minute ride, I realized I had an issue. I was wearing shorts. If I learned anything from years of religious education, it was that you don’t wear shorts to a holy place. I tried sprinting off the idle train, but the doors were closed. After a consultation with /r/sikhism, and remembering I am a non-confrontational coward, I decided I would not be disrespecting Sikhi and the gurdwara would not happen. Regardless, one train and crowded bus ride later, I found myself in Queens’s Little Punjab.  

I walked around a bit and took in the surroundings. 101st Street didn’t have the vibrancy of Jackson Heights or Journal Square - not shocking for a residential neighborhood at 7 p.m. on a Friday - but people were still milling about. The stores were the Punjabi version of your normal desi stores. The immigration lawyers, the cheap sweet shops, the two-doctor medical offices, the barebones restaurants, the flyers for events out in the suburbs with too much text and too-big photos.  There were some genuine curiosities though. The ads on the glass of storefront mandirs promoting yatras to apparently important places of spirituality in the rest of North America. 

$200 to go to West Virginia to see the Palace of Gold. 

$250 to go to Toronto to experience the divine. 

The flyers for astrologers that filled Jackson Heights were here too. There might’ve been even more here than there. Normally, I laugh off their promises of solving life problems, but something came upon me and I found myself getting my palm read for $10 by some self-proclaimed grandson of a pandit sitting on a metal table outside a juice store. 

I didn’t quite get his prophecy. 

He told me that I give good advice, but people shittalk me behind my back. My family, my friends, my nonexistent partner. For the sake of my sanity, I’m not going to believe him.

He told me I’d make it to 82. I appreciate that. It's a solid age – just as old as our dear president. He told me my mom raised me right and that my dad is a legend. My dad was happy when I told him that, but he also thinks astrology is crap. Like father, like son in this instance. The palm reader told me there was darkness that I had picked up on some road. Not in Queens, of course - and certainly not in Little Punjab - but somewhere else. He offered to exorcize me of this darkness, but I politely declined. I like to think my neuroticism feeds me. Not a bad way to spend $10 all in all.  

Even if I was too cowardly to go in, I made my way to the gurdwara afterwards. I had to see it. This was the purpose of the endeavor. The only other American gurdwara I've been to was in San Jose. That had a scenic overlook of the Santa Clara Valley. This was smaller, two blocks down from a Caribbean nightclub and a conspicuously high number of barbershops. It’s a nice building though – very Indian with a golden dome on top and a bunch of turbaned men around it. It was one of those converted office buildings that temples in the suburbs often are. (This was the second gurdwara at this site. The first one was a converted Baptist church which had burned down.) The yellow-and-blue flags of Khalistan and remembrances for 1984 draped its entrance. There's something to be said about that, but by a different writer in a different essay. not wanting to test my luck with the shorts, and trailing a young group of Punjabi girls debating the merits of luxury cars, I made my way to Liberty Avenue and the Guyenese section.

I came to the Guyanese section just wanting a quick bite before I rode back home, but instead I quickly found myself spending my Friday night in a Guyanese bar playing old Bollywood standards. (I think it’s Guyanese at least – there’s a flag at this place, and it is a Guyanese neighborhood, but the walls are decorated with the type of stock photos that you see in a Manhattan hotel room.) 

I’m here because I saw cricket on the TV, and I was drawn in by the novelty of watching the sport with people who aren’t from South Asia. A group of West Indies fans are cheering every wicket their boys take against America; much like those straight from the subcontinent, they don’t seem interested in passing an American Tebbit test. power to them, I guess. An electrician in front of me goes through a pile of scratch-off cards and sitting next to him is the one woman here who isn’t an employee. She isn’t talking to anyone. Other tables of guys chat while drinking buckets of domestic beer - I can’t tell what they’re saying because the Hindi music drowns out everything. One dude is wearing a Washington Wizards shirt for some reason. Meanwhile I sit alone in a corner below the TV with the security footage, drinking a $4 bud light, watching America lose to our Caribbean brethren. The place is a vibe. I wait out the US's innings, see if we can pull off a strong last few overs and make the West Indies fans quiet. but it’s a double loss for me. The US only gets to 128, but they hold off long enough that I just miss the A train and have to wait 20 minutes to get out of Queens.

Books I Read In 2023

My initial goal for this blog was to make a book review blog. Clearly, I completely failed at that, but to make up for that a little, I'm doing a year-end recap of what I read instead. Titles in bold were my favorites of the year and titles in italics were rereads.  

Fiction

Paul Beatty, The Sellout - Absolutely brilliant satire and probably my favorite novel of the year. The social commentary is cutting and it was one of the funniest books I've ever read. 

Chetan Bhagat, 2 States: The Story of My Marriage - It's a cliche to say that the book is the better than the movie, and generally I find that to be true. Adapting a novel that takes hours to read into into a two-hour film comes with obvious problems, with a major one being how to make an internal monologue work in a visual medium. The 2 States screenwriter's decision to dump the annoying Chetan Bhagat stand-in's internal monologue, along with some structural changes to the story, makes the movie significantly better than the book. Watch the movie, don't bother reading the book.

Jinwoo Chong, Flux

Elaine Hsieh Chou, Disorientation - Chou wrote an essay which a lot of similar themes to the novel. Anyway, I read in an interview with Chou that her first drafts of the novel were her trying to be Paul Beatty. She said she ditched that, but I feel like you can still see the influence in the final product, which is a very good thing. Going by Goodreads reviews, I'm a bit of an outlier, but as someone who spends too much time reading Asian-American stuff, I thought this was hilarious and that Chou's satire had a 100% hit rate.  

Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human - Felt like I was obligated to read this as a longtime sadboi.  

Hernan Diaz, Trust

Junot Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao - Central New Jersey literature! The first time I read was seven years ago or so, and I really enjoyed it then. The fun part about rereading it is that I barely remembered any of the specific plot points. Anyway, the third chapter has one of my favorite lines about New Jersey "Hypatia Belicia Cabral ... would come to exhibit a particularly Jersey malaise - the inextinguishable long for elsewhere."

Farah Heron, Kamila Knows Best - This is what I was reading while I was crisscrossing New York throughout July in the midst of the literal and figurative heat of my apartment search. Anyway, even though I like movie romcoms, I don't ever read romance novels, but I enjoyed this! It's Emma, but with Ismaili Muslims in Toronto. It's not anything close to high literature, but Heron puts a fun spin spin on Austen's story. That being said, I've also enjoyed the other adaptions of Emma like Clueless and the 2020 movie, so me liking this is probably more of a credit to Austen plotting a great story more than anything else.  

Deepti Kapoor, The Age of Vice

Toshikazu Kawaguchi trans. Emily Balistrieri, Before the Coffee Gets Cold

Yasunari Kawabata, Snow County

R.F. Kuang, Babel

R.F. Kuang, Yellowface - I feel like I sympathized with main character a little bit more than I should have. I liked both this and Babel, but would probably give the edge to Babel.

Jhumpa Lahiri, The Namesake - This was the first book I read in 2023 so I wrote an actual post on it back when I thought that blogging was a New Year's resolution that I'd actually go through with.  

Stefano Massini trans. Richard Dixon, The Lehman Trilogy - This is probably just a me thing, but one of the characters keeps on talking about going to SoHo to meet a Hungarian immigrant even though the story is set in the early 20th century and no one back then called that part of New York SoHo and it was a really annoying anachronism that kept on triggering me every time it showed up. Good novel though.

Tomihiko Morimi, The Tatami Galaxy

V.S. Naipaul, A Bend in the River

Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer 

Edwin O'Connor, The Last Hurrah

Cecilia Rabess, Everything's Fine - This was controversial for some reason and I still don't quite get why.

Philip Roth, Goodbye Columbus - There's probably some essay to be written about connections between Philip Roth and Junot Diaz - two guys writing about masculinity in New Jersey immigrant communities separated by a few decades. 

Matthew Salesses, The Sense of Wonder

Asako Seriwaza, Inheritors

Zadie Smith, The Autograph Man - I read White Teeth a while ago, and I was underwhelmed and annoyed enough by it that I decided Zadie Smith was pretentious and not worth reading. At some point this year while she was on her press tour for The Fraud, I saw the description for The Autograph Man, which from what I understand is her least regarded novel, and decided it was intriguing enough for me to give it a chance. I'm so glad I did because I loved this and it made do a 180 on her! On a meta level, I loved how Smith did a complete swerve from writing something clearly based a lot on her own life in White Teeth to a completely different book heavily rooted in a religion and culture that isn't hers. And, a lot like with On Beauty, the empathy that she writes with is incredible - the main character in this book could've been written as the butt of a joke or as just another shitty, mediocre man, but she manages to make him a sympathetic figure. (It's probably telling on myself that I'm enthralled with how she writes neurotic men.) While I liked both this and On Beauty a lot, I give the slightest edge to The Autograph Man. There's a just type of love apparent whenever Smith is writing about London. I thought her Boston in On Beauty was great also, but even in that the few chapters in London really standout. 

Zadie Smith, On Beauty - If The Autograph Man is Smith's least regarded novel, On Beauty is up there with White Teeth as her most regarded novel. For me, what was most memorable about On Beauty were the characters. I read this back in August, but all the Belseys and Kippses are still seared in my brain - Howard the hypocrite professor, Monty the conservative douchebag, Zora the pretentious gunner, Levi the wannabe, etc etc. It's also an interesting read from a historical perspective - as we currently go through a round of ridiculous media coverage on what's happening on prestigious campuses, it's worth remembering that this stuff has going on for a generation at this point and this book published 18 years ago still feels current. (As I sidebar, I would also like to thank Zadie Smith for getting me a first date off one of The Apps.)

Claire Tham, The Inlet

Leo Tolstoy trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, Anna Karenina - Shockingly, Tolstoy is a good writer. I don't have anything interesting to say on the book itself, but it was an interesting experience reading it. I found in almost blind into one of The Classics of Literature to be putting myself in a weird place. On one hand, spoilers are abound everywhere - the introduction of the book assumes you know what happens so I had to skip it, online reviews assume you know everything, articles about Russia casually drop references that you didn't get before but now you kinda do because you started Anna Karenina, and it creates for a very different type of reading experience from reading newer novels.  Anyway, I find classic novels like Anna Karenina to have this strange place in pop culture. They're not like Shakespeare, Greek myths, Biblical stories or the American high school canon where most educated Americans get the references to some extent, but at the same time, if you're reading articles about culture and politics, the writers of those have some expectation that you know what happened in books like Anna Karenina. All of this is to say, the next time I write about something that isn't distressed municipal debt, I will make some obtuse reference to Levin and the status of the 19th century Russia peasantry and assume that everyone understands it. 

Vũ,Trọng Phụng trans. Nguyễn Nguyệt Cầm and Peter Zinoman, Dumb Luck

Edith Wharton, The Glimpses of the Moon

Yan Lianke trans. Carlos Rojas, Hard Like Water - What if the absolute worst people you knew had a touching love story? A totally demented book in the best way possible. 

Gabrielle Zevin, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

Nonfiction

Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism

Eve Babitz, Eve's Hollywood - Joan Didion's happy twin who hates UCLA. Wrote about this earlier this year after my trip to LA. 

Beth Bailey, From Front Porch to Back Seat: Courtship in Twentieth-Century America - An interesting read, but I do not recommend reading about the history of dating as a way to deal with romantic angst. 

Rafe Bartholomew, Pacific Rims: Beermen Ballin' in Flip-Flops and the Philippines' Unlikely Love Affair with Basketball - I liked this. As a sidebar, it's interesting how out of the four major North American American team sports, basketball, baseball and hockey did a decent job of taking off internationally, while American football remains a cultural quirk of ours. 

Nicholas Dagen Bloom, The Great American Transit Disaster: A Century of Austerity, Auto-Centric Planning, and White Flight

Yong Chen, Chinese San Francisco, 1850-1943: A Trans-Pacific Community - Wrote about this earlier this year after my trip to the Bay Area.

Thomas Curran, The Perfection Trap: Embracing the Power of Good Enough - Normally, I hate self-help books, but this one took an interesting spin by choosing to blame capitalism and other structural features for why we're all perfectionists now. 

Mike Davis, City of Quartz - Wrote about this earlier this year after my trip to LA. Ironically, this summer I took a seminar on this book while I was in New York. 

Matthew Desmond, Poverty, by America - A Montenegrin guy saw me reading this in a bar and then proceeded to go on a 10-minute rant on topics that included topics such as UN's definition of poverty, the hippies being the greatest thing to even happen to America, and extreme weather events. 

Faisal Devji, Muslim Zion: Pakistan as a Political Idea - It's provocative. It gets the people going. 

Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? - Even after reading this, I'm not really convinced there is one. To be less snarky, Fisher brings up some interesting points on the connection between capitalism and our societal-wide decline in mental health. 

Nathan Glazer and Daniel Moynihan, Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians, and Irish of New York City 

Prachi Gupta, They Called Us Exceptional: And Other Lies That Raised Us - As I'm apt to do with book by the South Asian diaspora, I had a lot of contradictory and unsettled thoughts about this one which I'm still trying to comb through. This was sort of a prequel to an article that Gupta published a few years ago that I think is one of the best pieces written about South Asian American masculinity from a left-wing perspective, though that's also because it's one of the only pieces written about South Asian American masculinity from a left-wing perspective.  

Nicole Hemmer, Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s

Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes, 1914-1991

bell hooks, The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love

Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815 - 1848 - One of my biggest intellectual surprises of 2023 was this 700-page tome on the history of antebellum America being the piece of media that changed me the most. It made me rethink how I view Christianity, how I view myself as a liberal/progressive, and honestly, how I view myself as an American. Being a second-generation American who doesn't have roots in the West, I've found myself over the years to have a tendency to want to divorce myself from American history, seeing it as something which is irredeemably ugly and exclusionary of me. And I find that a lot of liberal politics today is focused on trying to atone for America's past misdeeds, and that does have some appeal appeal to me. What I found powerful about reading this was that it made it easy for me to see a throughline from early 19th America to the views I have today, an idea of who my ideological forefathers are for lack of a better of term. The strange part about it is, as a contemporary American liberal, discovering that those forefathers are evangelical Protestants. 

Hua Hsu, Stay True

Henry Grabar, Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World - Did you know that New York City ice cream trucks have turf wars? I did not.

Daniel Immerwahr, How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States - While I was reading this in the Newport PATH station, a guy came up to me and asked me about it. We're now friends. So basically, this book has contributed more to my social life in New York than hours of random classes, volunteering and networking events have.Daniel Knowles, Carmageddon: How Cars Make Life Worse and What to Do About It

Alexandra Lange, Meet Me by the Fountain: An Inside History of the Mall - All five longtime readers of this blog know that I have a fascination with malls. One of the goals for 2024 is to write a big post about New York City malls inspired by this book because I find the history of their development and what they've become today to be absolutely fascinating in how they subvert so many ideas we have about malls. If you live in New York, I strongly recommend taking a subway trip to one of the outer-borough or urban New Jersey malls - I don't think you'll ever find another place on Earth which is so diverse. 

Michael MacCambridge, America's Game: The Epic Story of How Pro Football Captured a Nation

Mariana Mazzucato and Rosie Collington, The Big Con: How the Consulting Industry Weakens our Businesses, Infantilizes our Governments and Warps our Economies

Ashoka Mody, India Is Broken: A People Betrayed, Independence to Today - There's been a glut of articles these past few years which are very positive on India's future economic prospects, and this is an important corrective. 

H.V. Nelles, A Little History of Canada

Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business - I'm too dumb to write anything meaningful about Postman, but absolutely vital reading. 

Richard Reeves, Dream Hoarders: How the American Upper Middle Class Is Leaving Everyone Else in the Dust, Why That Is a Problem, and What to Do About It

Nilakantan RS, South vs North: India’s Great Divide

Joanna Robinson, Dave Gonzales and Gavin Edwards, MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios

Angela Saini, The Patriarchs: The Origins of Inequality

Michael Sandel, What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets

Roger Simon, Philadelphia A Brief History

David Talbot, Season of the Witch: Enchantment, Terror and Deliverance in the City of Love - Wrote about this earlier this year after my trip to the Bay Area.

Jean Twenge, Generations: The Real Differences Between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silents―and What They Mean for America's Future - One of the most informative books I've read this year. I found myself cool on the analysis since at times it can read a bit like a Gen Xer going on about her great generation is and absolving Gen X of the problems that their Gen Z kids have. But the amount of data that Twenge has put into here is incredible, and there are some absolutely shocking charts, particularly on Gen Z mental health. (It's really, really bad!) 

California Reads (Part Two: LA)

East Coast authors and screenwriters give LA a bad rap - you’re stuck on the 405 all day, the people are all self-obsessed wannabes, secretly there’s a rotten core under all the sunshine, and the entire California dream is one big, giant phony scam. In Eve’s Hollywood, Eve Babitz is here to say that those people are all wrong, and LA’s great. And, man, does she make a compelling case for LA being great! I first found out about this book when Babitz died shortly after her more-noted and often-compared Joan Didion. Even though she’s very different from Didion, I’m glad I read this, because it was a charming read. Eve Babitz makes ‘50s and ‘60s LA seem like the most fun city on Earth as she races down Sunset first thing in the morning to get taquitos from Olvera Street, watches her mother draw the old Victorians of Bunker Hill, sees Westside teenagers almost break out into a riot at the premiere of a surfer movie, and meets a lot of men. 

Even though it’s a world away and a time long past now, she makes you believe that all of LA’s boosters were right. Hollywood seems like a haven of cool, eccentric artists and not the sketchy-feeling tourist trap that it is today. Downtown seems like a fun meeting place of classes and cultures with cool old mansions instead of being kind of stinky. Westwood is …well, she hates Westwood and writes that it's “so insanely crappy that you could throw up.” But Eve Babitz’s LA is a fun place that can’t be brought down even by such minor calamities like earthquakes and the Watts Riots. (One small criticism of this book: her LA is quite white.)  A lot of works about LA can just be outsiders trying to break the myth by writing  about how much it sucks and its secret awfulness. This book is not that, and it’s what makes it worthwhile.   

Meanwhile Mike Davis’ City of Quartz is a Southland native telling us that LA sucks, it is deeply problematic, and that pitch-black negativity is why it’s worth reading. Reading Eve’s Hollywood and City of Quartz back-to-back was interesting. The pure contrast in style between the aspiring literary It Girl essayist and the Marxist geograper’s onetime doctoral thesis is the obvious one, but what makes this interesting is that you have two children of Los Angeles with very different perspectives. If Babitz is fulfilling the dreams of Southern California real estate boosters and the myths of Hollywood by trying to push back against the East Coast intellectuals who are haters that just don’t understand Los Angeles, Davis is tearing down that idealized booster vision of LA sold by the Hollywood and the real estate industry, initially financed in large part by East Coast capital. And, if nothing else, Davis really tears down that vision, attacking many of LA’s major institutions - Hollywood, the police, the developers, the church, the homeowners, and of course, the politicians. Even if the book can feel like one long Marxist broadside that doesn’t always hold up well to 2020s LA, his critique is effective, with the chapter on the homeowners’ movement being both my favorite and the one most relevant to contemporary California. Davis the Marxist looks at homeowners’ associations of West LA and the San Fernando Valley with a horrified admiration, viewing them as the one class in the Southland to successfully organize into a class-based mass politics against the cabal of real estate and corporate elites that run the region. For Davis, this is the organized proletariat that socialists dream of, but instead of them fighting for equal Los Angeles that uplifts all, they’re instead fighting for their God-given right to a tract home with a yard, car, and away from poor minorities and are quite successful at it. 

While Davis’s disappointment is evident in that it ended up being these people - the ones who were fighting for - who succeeded in bending the city to their wills as. While time has shown that the suburban LA homeowner didn’t succeed in all of their goals - the efforts to ban apartments in hope that it would prevent demographic change in the Valleys and Orange County being the best example of their inability to stop demographic change - Davis does a great job in illustrating the movement that made California housing the mess it is today. These were the people who succeeded in bending to the city their collective will as they managed to get referendums passed to limit residential density, increase the power of neighborhood councils at the expense of the mayor’s office, and most notably, pass Proposition 13. And I think that’s the strength of this book overall. If you’re familiar with contemporary LA, then this book gives you the origin story of why a lot of things are the way they are, even if you need to fill in the gaps of the last 30 years in a lot of places. 

That being said, I don’t want to portray Davis as an all-knowing seer, as his crystal ball was off in some place. For me, one of his bigger misses was not getting what modern gentrification in LA ended up looking like. For Davis, the exemplar of gentrification was the new office towers of Bunker Hill giving professional workers a feeling of safety away from the rest of Downtown, mis-forecasting the trend of real, increased interest by college-educated yuppies in actually living Downtown (and in areas closer to the center of the city, like Silver Lake, Echo Park, and Boyle Heights). There’s also been more interest in Downtown public spaces that are much less fortress-like than Davis anticipated, with the tearing down of Broadway Plaza for The Bloc at the 7th Street/Metro Center station being a prime example of where he was wrong. 

But more than admonishing him for misses, it’s sad that we won’t be able to read about Davis’ thoughts on contemporary LA. He wrote intelligently on issues ranging from the Catholic Church to LAPD, and almost every institution he touched has changed dramatically in the last 30 years, oftentimes for the worse. LA is as interesting as ever, and it’s a loss that he isn’t here to observe it. 

California Reads (Part One: The Bay)

In February, I went to California for the first time since I moved from LA in June 2020. As I’m wont to do about every place I go to, I spent the first few months of the year prepping by reading a bunch of books about California history to get myself in the mood for the trip - two on the Bay and two on LA. Back when I lived in LA, I got extremely into learning about the history of SoCal, but I never got around to learning as much about the Bay Area’s history as I wanted to. I’ve been looking for a comprehensive history about the entire region for a while, and it’s been impossible to find a book which gives an overview of the entire place instead of just the individual cities. Anyway, at some point, my curiosity to learn about Bay Area history brought me to buying Season of the Witch: Enchantment, Terror and Deliverance in the City of Love by David Tablot which focuses on San Francisco from the late ‘60s to the early ‘80s. It’d been sitting on my shelf for a couple of months now, and with me actually going to SF, now was as good a time as ever to get to reading it. 

The last book I read about San Francisco history was in the parts of Kevin Starr’s Material Dreams, which covered California in the 1950s and 1960s, that had to do with the city. Season of the Witch served a nice unintentional follow-up, and while Material Dreams is probably my favorite nonfiction about California, Season of the Witch...well, I didn’t hate it exactly, but it’s definitely not a favorite of mine. 

So, on the positive side I did learn a lot from reading, and Talbot did inspire me to visit some of the neighborhoods that he spent the entire time focusing on like Haight-Ashbury and The Castro. But for better or worse, if there was a list of things that you’d expect a stereotypical white San Francisco boomer liberal to write a book about, Season of the Witch covered all of it. Whether that’s a good or bad thing comes down to personal taste. I enjoyed the parts that dealt with municipal politics, cults, and how cults influenced municipal politics - the most interesting thing I learned from this book was that Jim Jones apparently was decisive in getting George Moscone elected mayor, and the throughline Talbot draws from the hippie communes in the Haight-Ashbury to Jonestown, and the influence that had on San Francisco liberal politics was something I never thought about before. The chapters on how the LGBTQ community became big in SF, and because I’m me, the apparent redemptive power of the 1981 49ers healing the city from the scars of Jonestown, the Zodiac killer, and the assassinations of George Moscone and Harvey Milk, were also highlights. And, also, it’s nice to read a positive story about a city getting up from the muck, especially in 2023, when a lot of media coverage of SF post-covid makes it sound like the city’s really  going through it and facing an uncertain future.  

But to get to the parts that I enjoyed, I had to slog through chapters upon chapters of Talbot idolizing ‘60s hippie culture and the pop music scene around it that I didn’t care about before I started reading, and still don’t care about now. That being said, II understand for a lot of people, the hippie culture is the appealing part about this era of SF history, and not necessarily Bill Walsh’s insecurities. The one place where I thought this book utterly failed however is that it ends up being very white. Outside of some stories about black music promoters and one chapter on Chinatown kingmaker Rose Pak, Talbot almost exclusively focuses on white San Francisco. Normally, I’m not inclined to hold this against a history book - America was a very white place - but for a book that covers one of the epicenters of the beginning of a very profound demographic change in the US, it was disappointing. During the time period Talbot covered, San Francisco's white population dropped by 1/3, while its minority population doubled, mainly off the backs of Asians and Latinos. That is not the impression this book gives you, and it’s disappointing to see from a liberal writer, especially in an era where major events like the I-Hotel fight are happening.

The other SF book I read was Chinese San Francisco, 1850-1943: A Trans-Pacific Community by Yong Chen, which as the title hints, covers a different San Francisco from David Tablot’s. This book was very academic, and I’m not sure if anyone’s actually read it outside the context of an Asian American studies class. Anyway, I went with this book since, as anyone who’s talked to me for more than 20 minutes can attest, I’m into the history and geography of Asian America and the San Francisco Chinatown is the start of that. Chen does a great job of tracing the history of the neighborhood from the beginning of Chinese immigration to the city to the depths of the exclusion era, and ending with the increased acceptance of the Chinese community during WW2. Chen also answered a lot of questions that I always curious about and ones that I didn’t know I had like why so many migrants from Guangdong? (Answer: Many reasons, though Guangdong being relatively prosperous and international was the big one.) and how did Chinatown last being in the middle of downtown San Francisco (Answer: International pressure from fear that moving the neighborhood would ruin US-China relations). 

What I ended up finding to be the most interesting part of the book was the second part of the title, Chinese San Francisco as a trans-Pacific community. This isn’t too dissimilar to the relationships between diasporas and motherlands today, which actually surprised me to an extent because of the relative standing of America vis-a-vis China during this time period and worse communication technologies. Chen makes the point that the San Francisco Chinese community and China itself remained closely tied for all of this period, even as immigration was limited after the passage of the exclusion act, to the extent that one of the main reasons Chinatown wasn’t relocated after the 1906 earthquake was fear that doing so would create an international incident. But you this relationship show up in other ways too - the fairly constant back-and-forth travel between the two countries for brides and goods, discourse in Chinese-American newspapers on how to modernize China, the diaspora playing a role in the Chinese legislature post-revolution, boycotts in Chinatown over anti-China trade policy, and so on. This is definitely a book that I’d recommend to anyone with a deep interest in Asian American history (though with an emphasis on deep, since as an academic book the writing can be a slog sometimes if you’re not into the topic), and it left me wanting to know more about what happened in Chinatown after the end of the time period it covered.