A year in books: 2020
5 books that shifted my thinking
Every year I take stock of the books I’ve read, calibrating and making sense of the year that was with the words that accompanied and shaped my life and my thinking for that year. This year, unlike any other, is no different.
However, homeschooling my two kids while working from home meant that my target reading list was practically halved. It was hard to grab even a few minutes each day to immerse myself in a different world, when uncertainty, stress, and sheer fatigue was just too overwhelming to get a break. However, I traded breadth for depth this year, and amongst many favourites, my top five book picks for the year have truly shifted my thinking, shaping what I believe and what I hope to focus on in the year ahead.
These mostly non-fiction books were my constant, truth-telling, visionary and sometimes difficult companions during this challenging year. Here’s my top 5 and why:
#5: A Paradise Built in Hell: Rebecca Solnit
I arrived back in Kenya in March after nearly five weeks of work travel, mere days before lockdowns were announced and borders began to close. In the bewildering few days after the first COVID cases were declared, I found myself retreating to narratives of hope during moments of despair. I read Geraldine Brooks’ Age of Wonders: A Novel of the Plague, alongside Rebecca Solnit’s A Paradise Built in Hell. But where Brooks’ fictional portrayal of the devastation wrought by the plague was a grim but helpful reminder of how our human actions can shape our social fabric in the time of crisis, Solnit offered me the hope, optimism, and faith in humanity that I craved at the moment.
Her stories of solidarity and community support in the aftermath of the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, the 9/11 attack in New York, and Hurricane Katrina belied the reality that was portrayed in the media and in public narrative.
Solnit’s beautiful prose rang true and resonated throughout this COVID year when I witnessed countless examples of courage, solidarity, support, and bravery. In the examples of many people, communities, and organisations that gave of their time and effort to help each other in need — collaborating across organisations to provide first-line defence against the pandemic, taking paycuts to prevent people from being fired, pivoting missions to rally to the crisis at hand. This was a hard year with many losses, grief, and incomprehension at how hard it was to achieve change. But it was also filled with hope in the wreckage. Much like Arundhati Roy encourages us to imagine the pandemic as a “portal” to reinvent our world out of injustice, Solnit’s words echo despite the wreckage, encouraging us to imagine our better selves and a better future: “Many fear that in disaster we become something other than we normally are — helpless or bestial and savage in the most common myths — or that is who we really are when the superstructure of society crumbles. We remain ourselves for the most part, but freed to act on, most often, not the worst but the best within. The ruts and routines of ordinary life hide more beauty than brutality.”
#4: The Value of Everything: Mariana Mazzucato
I nursed this book throughout the lockdown, grappling with the fundamental economic and societal shifts that the author calls for. Mazzucato is as much a public intellectual as she is an economist, attempting to shift the discourse of decades of economic thinking on value creation in our national narratives. To summarise her argument simplistically— there are makers and takers in the economy. Our current neoliberal form of Western capitalism rewards the takers way more than the makers.
Mazzucato’s deeply researched, insightful treatise on the nature of Western capitalism, the increasing financialization of the global economy, and the lack of discourse on “value creation” fundamentally shifted my thinking this past year. The real value creators in the pandemic, health and essential workers, rose to the foreground but were still exposed and vulnerable. The value extractors, on whose work lives did not critically hinge, nonetheless got richer — with reports of the world’s wealthiest growing their fortunes to nearly $10.2tn, as millions lost their jobs, healthcare, and plunged into precariousness across the world.
Mazzucato urges to distinguish between value “creation” and value “extraction,” suggesting that the blurred edges between the two have allowed certain actors (particularly in the financial services sector) to claim value creation, while in reality they were just moving existing value around or, even worse, destroying it. Far from a mere excoriation of the finance industry, however, Mazzucato argues instead that “the real challenge is not to label finance as value-creating or value-extracting, but to fundamentally transform it so that it is genuinely value-creating.” Mazzucato’s words soothe and provoke at the same time, forcing us to really grapple with the underlying gears that, if we could shift, could shift us towards a positive economic trajectory post pandemic.
While the book was written pre COVID, Mazzucato’s arguments on value extraction and rent-seeking within the pharmaceutical industry seems prescient in advance of the complexities of vaccine pricing we face today. My favourite arguments from her book include her views on the role of government in value creation, for example, in the military’s funding of GPS or the US government’s funding of basic research that eventually benefits pharmaceutical companies, but that are rarely credited back towards government.
She offers detailed historical analysis of how national accounts have been defined — and what has been included and where (e.g. the financialization of the economy, the lack of attribution of value created by the government to the public sector) and what has been excluded — care work, for example. Our omissions and inclusions offer valuable insights into economic decisions that have shaped many of the forces we see in motion today — inequality, the rise of individual entrepreneurship, the narrative of the public sector as a failure, the platform economy’s insufficient reciprocity towards value-creating users.
Indeed, if we were to combat the macro forces plaguing us today — the rise of inequality, the unfettered monopolistic growth of tech companies such as Amazon and Facebook, the lack of emphasis on care and sustainability, Mazzucato urges us to not just reimagine the future but to build it with deliberate policy: “The assumption is that policy should be about ‘levelling the playing field’. But achieving innovation-led growth and innovation of a particular type (e.g. green innovation) will require not levelling but tilting the playing field.”
#3: Just Mercy: Bryan Stevenson
I had read Just Mercy before George Floyd’s death and the surge of the Black Lives Matter protests across the world. However, I kept going back to some of its key principles and tenets as I flipped screens and doomscrolled between the coverage of the pandemic and instances of police brutality from across the world — the United States, Nigeria, Kenya, India, South Africa — countries that I have lived in for many years and that I care deeply about. No one in those instances of brutality merited those acts.
And yet, I kept thinking of Stevenson’s powerful words “Each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve ever done,” and that the “opposite of poverty is not wealth; the opposite of poverty is justice.”
Stevenson’s words were hardest to swallow when many of us watched those culpable walk free — from the decision on Breonna Taylor’s shooting, to insufficient responses to the #EndSARS protests in Nigeria and police brutality in Kenya and India. And yet, despite suffering great injustices himself, Stevenson encourages us at every step to respond to our better angels and build the society that we want for the future.
Stevenson’s brilliant mind, his insightful and poetic words, and his emphasis on radical love were constant reminders when I could barely confront this year’s harshest realities. “We are all implicated when we allow other people to be mistreated,” he says. “An absence of compassion can corrupt the decency of a community, a state, a nation. Fear and anger can make us vindictive and abusive, unjust and unfair, until we all suffer from the absence of mercy and we condemn ourselves as much as we victimize others….The closer we get to mass incarceration and extreme levels of punishment, the more I believe it’s necessary to recognize that we all need mercy, we all need justice, and — perhaps — we all need some measure of unmerited grace.”
#2: The Age of Dignity: Ai-jen Poo
I’ve been following Ai-jen Poo’s incredible work on improving the lives and working conditions of domestic workers for a few years now. But the pandemic threw into sharper relief her rallying cry over all these years — that domestic work and care work is essential work.
Ai-jen Poo’s descriptions of spending her childhood with her grandparents reminded me of my incredible maternal grandmother, Savithri Patti. Border closures and strict lockdowns had scuttled my plans to spend all of July working out of India, where I would have been able to see my frail, blind, 93-year old Patti, hold her soft hand, and revive her memory of who I was to her. I would have had to repay her countless hours of storytelling with gentle, frequent reminders of what she used to cook for me, reminders of the songs she taught me when I was little, the shape of my children’s faces and the texture of their hair.
My Patti now lives with my parents in a retirement village an hour away from the large town of Coimbatore in Tamilnadu, India. She (and my parents) are lucky to receive high quality home-based care and regular medical check-ups in the surrounding of a quiet and familiar village context. In my community, like many others, respecting the aged is a high social priority, which is why I resonate so deeply with Ai-jen Poo’s reminder that “People getting older is not a crisis; it’s a blessing.”
However, as the pandemic has shown us, it is both the elderly and those that provide their care that are at greatest risk to this cruel virus. Ageism has worsened the pandemic’s already huge impact on the elderly, and our modern ways of life have built scant regard for the elderly.
Care work and care workers proved themselves to be both essential and unprotected in the pandemic — an invisible, omnipresent force that we now see and experience everywhere once our “eyes have been opened.” Many of us had to clean our homes, home-school our children, all while working from home, with this burden falling disproportionately on women and women of colour, setting the clock of progress back by decades. Ai-jen Poo’s slim call to action is prescient of the future — the future of work will need more carers, and more care of the elderly: “Care is something we do; it’s something we want; its something we can improve. But more than anything, it’s the solution to the personal and economic challenges we face…. It doesn’t just heal or comfort people individual; it really is going to save us all.”
#1: Ministry for the Future: Kim Stanley Robinson
“It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism,” quotes Robinson.
What if a heat wave were to exterminate 20million residents in a matter of weeks? What if that triggered a backlash — coordinated acts of eco-terrorism against the real villains in our carbon-fueled climate dystopia — fossil fuel giants, airlines companies?
This is a chilling and yet invigorating book. I read this in December after listening to Ezra Klein’s podcast about it, and could not evangelize it enough to my friends and family.
I am lucky to have spent the year of lockdown in a green, forested part of Nairobi, Kenya. We’ve had a lot of rain and the area around us is lush with indigenous flora and fauna, and I’ve had the luxury of starting bird watching as a hobby. However, not just a few kilometres away from our paradise, deadly locust invasions have killed crops and decimated harvests, and 2021 forecasters predict devastating drought and hunger in the East African region.
Part of Robinson’s book is speculative fiction, but it reads like a non-fiction book in a way, portraying headlines from a haunting, not-so-distant future if we were not to act swiftly enough.
It’s clear that Robinson has been thinking deeply of a myriad innovative solutions to curb the climate crisis — from the geo-engineering required to slow glacier melt, to a carbon coin, “a digital currency, disbursed on proof of carbon sequestration to provide carrot as well as stick, thus enticing loose global capital into virtuous actions on carbon burn reduction.” Robinson is scathing of our current systems — saying that if we think we’re doing enough, we’re not, by a long shot . Even if we were to listen to climate scientists and deploy all of our resources, it would still not be enough.
In perhaps my favourite quote of the year, Robinson says “the invisible hand never picks up the check.” We’ll need all our collective power — of individuals, communities, states and markets — to actively architect the just, equitable, and sustainable future that we want.
Robinson is a truth-teller and soothsayer at the same time, pushing for equality and climate justice at the same time: “there is enough for all. So there should be no more people living in poverty. And there should be no more billionaries. Enough should be a human right, a floor below which no one can fall; also a ceiling above which no one can rise. Enough is as good as a feast — or better.”
