2022 in Books — What was going on here?

It goes without saying that it is incredibly self-flattering to think that anyone would be interested in your reading patterns. But I know you are here for book recommendations and I did read some fun stuff this year that you might vibe with. So, if you ended up on this page, come along friend. Let’s look at some fun reads from this year.

I started the year by reading N K Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy. Immediately, I knew why this trilogy had won so many awards. To characterize it as science fantasy would be insufficient. The Broken Earth trilogy was a masterpiece of epic speculative fiction. Every element of the story is so brilliantly constructed and executed. If there is one speculative fiction work you must read, this is it. And here’s the fun question that this series answers: What would happen to the earth if it somehow lost the moon?

There were other brilliant speculative fiction series I read this year. Fonda Lee’s The Greenbone Saga was probably the one that truly deserves an essay of its own. Lee tries to ask one question: What would happen if the narrative of Godfather coalesced with fantastic martial arts and all of it happened in a rich fantasy Asian-esque metropolis setting? She answers this question emphatically and then some. This series is so much more too. Though the trilogy is blockbuster entertaining throughout, it is also a meditative reflection on the passage of time, urbanity, class, gender, global relations, legacies of colonialism, imperialism, and access to precious resources. To top it off, it has some wonderful, mature romance. 10/10 experience.

S. A. Chakraborty’s Daevabad trilogy was another wonderful story. Inspired by Islamic history, mythology, and folklore, Daevabad ended up being one of the greatest epic fantasy series of the past decade. At some point, you have to give this a try. It’s a beautifully crafted story with compelling characters (most of whom are Jinns). It will leave you in tears by the last page. I actually can’t wait to see how this author’s next works turn out. Exciting times!

I didn’t know that I had always wanted to read about a rogue, sardonic, self-aware robot until Martha Wells took me on a wonderful journey with her Murderbot Diaries series. This is science fiction at its very best. I will keep returning to this series in the coming years.

Another brilliant science fiction series that never disappoints is Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan Saga. Bujold is one of the greatest living writers of speculative fiction and it shows. Vorkosigan Saga is a massive series with many arcs. I was able to explore two of the main arcs. This series is immensely powerful in that it is able to show not just the galactic scale of a space opera but also root it in something firmer. It is also an admirable exploration of ethics in a technology-dominated world. Bujold will always be recommended.

I also (re)read Robin Hobb’s Tawny Man trilogy. Robin Hobb is truly one of the greatest writers of epic fantasy. Her story is rich, the characters are real, and the settings are haunting. It was nice to revisit our old friends FitzChivalry Farseer, the greatest royal bastard, and Nighteyes, the most iconic wolf respectively in fantasy literature. As for our dear Fool’s fate, you must read the trilogy. But first, you have to read the Farseer trilogy.

In between, I read some Discworld novels by Terry Pratchett. They were good and extremely hilarious, as always. I also reread William Gibson’s Neuromancer, the original cyberpunk novel. In many ways, William Gibson gave the modern internet its language. That alone makes Neuromancer a must-read. At the same time, I also read the first novel from The Expanse series by James S.A. Corey. I liked it but not enough to get into the whole series as of yet.

P. Djèlí Clark’s Haunting of Tram Car 015, set in an alternative, decolonized Egypt, was a wonderful read too. I am actually planning on reading more of his stuff. To round off the good fantasy fiction I read this year, a special shout-out to Usman Malik’s Midnight Doorways which is a collection of some really haunting, heart-wrenching, but equally intriguing short stories. Usman Malik is one of the key figures and pioneers of the genesis and growth of Anglophone Pakistani speculative fiction. You have to read his work.

Now, we move on to fantasy books that just weren’t good. Sabaa Tahir’s An Ember in the Ashes series promised to give us a setting that would be a great mixture of ancient Rome and South Asia. I do appreciate the ultimately insufficient attempt at doing what she wanted to do but the story had such a regular occurrence of sexual violence and brutality, particularly towards women, that I could not immerse myself in it and continue reading. I had to drop it for now. Maybe her other work would be different, who knows?

The trilogy that truly disappointed me was Joe Abercrombie’s Age of Madness trilogy, his sequel to the First Law trilogy. In Age of Madness, Abercrombie showed us a fantasy world undergoing its own industrial revolution. The premise was exciting, the setting was masterfully laid out, and the characters were compelling, but the plot just didn’t pull through. The route Abercrombie went in this trilogy was as conservative as it could get. What could have been a delightful exploration of a revolutionary moment became a paranoid description of a world not immediately controlled by the elite. The trilogy could have had an immensely powerful conclusion but unfortunately, it simply fizzled out into literally nothing.

Anyways, now that we are done with fantasy/scifi, I would bring in the greatest work of fiction I read this year.

The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandar Dumas is hands down one of the greatest works of epic fiction that we have ever seen. It is not just a revenge story. Count of Monte Cristo was written in a serialized form which makes the process of reading it all the more thrilling. Each and every chapter is full of drama, intrigue, and lots of delicious characterization. You have to read the unabridged version. It is as good as traditional genre fiction gets. You need to go through this experience at least once.

So, that’s a wrap on fiction this year. Now we talk about non-fiction.

I again picked up The Dawn Of Everything: A New History Of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow. This book is David Graeber’s final publication and what a wonderful swan song it is. He may be gone but in the Dawn of Everything, he has left us with two clear messages: inequality is not inevitable and we humans have always possessed agency. Graeber and Wengrow take no prisoners in this massive book. They deconstruct the mainstream metanarratives — as spread by mediocre works such as Sapiens — and at the same time offer us a fresh insight into our past. They show us that our ancestors were smart, creative, and full of ideas. This is an extremely important book. David Graeber’s Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology was a breezy and informative read as well.

Then, I revisited some interesting works in pedagogy, education, and epistemology. First off, I re(read) Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed. This is as foundational as a text can be. If you want to work in education in any capacity, you have to engage with this book. Freire was one of the most critical thinkers of the 20th century and his ideas about the emancipatory potentialities of education continue to be relevant in 2022. Another interesting companion read along with Freire was bell hooks’ Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. This book is bell hooks’ contribution to critical pedagogy and an interesting build-up on the work of Freire. Both of these authors deserve multiple reads. Other critical pedagogy text I read was Critical Pedagogy Primer by Joe L. Kincheloe, which was a good but inadequate summary of what this theory entails.

Perhaps the most challenging and difficult book I read this year was Epistemologies of the South by Boaventura de Sousa Santos. This valuable piece of critical theory shows us the limits of Western epistemologies and that there are other ways of knowing and being. I would definitely need to reread this at some point but for now, this book was a powerful rejoinder on the concept of cognitive justice, which is as central to our collective emancipation as social justice.

On the philosophy side of things, I explored some incredibly mainstream but still refreshingly readable books such as How to be a Stoic by Massimo Pigliucci and some hard-hitting books about culture and identity such as The Argumentative Indian by Amartya Sen. However, the philosophy book that really captured my attention was Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation by Jonathan Lear. This book uses the very real and tragic career of a certain Native American chief to discuss what it means to hope when your known world is no longer there. It was a powerful text. The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World by Wade Davis was an illuminating read as well as it explored the other ways of being and living we find in marginalized and forgotten cultures.

In 2022, I once again entered the world of Islamic history. My first task was to re(read) Marshall G. S. Hodgson’s Venture of Islam series. This three-volume work is a must-read. I have talked elsewhere about Marshall Hodgson and how, nearly six decades later, he is still one of the best historians of Islam. He understood that Islamic history is world history through and through. We would all do well to read his history of Islam.

Within that same vein, I also read Lost Enlightenment by S. Frederick Starr, which is a comprehensive intellectual history of Central Asian thought that flourished in medieval times and which continues to exert a major influence on our modern world. Along with that, I also read Maxime Rodinson’s Muhammad which is an empathetic and nuanced portrayal of the prophet of Islam. Even though some of it is outdated, I still think it is worth a read.

One of the key thinkers for me in 2022 was Wael Hallaq. I had read his Restating Orientalism a while back but this year I explored him in depth. I read The Impossible State: Islam, Politics, and Modernity’s Moral Predicament, an interesting analysis that shows how the traditional Islamic state, as envisaged by Sharia law, is simply incompatible with the violence required for a modern nation-state. Some of the main ideas in that book are also explored in his An Introduction to Islamic Law. I do not completely agree with Wael Hallaq but his perspective is nevertheless important in how we conceive Islam and modernity.

Another Islamic history book that piqued my interest was Noah Feldman’s The Fall and Rise of the Islamic State, which explored the evolution of Islamic law, the democratic role of the Ulema in Islamic history, and how imperialism changed it forever. This book was an important narrative on how Islamic societies evolved. Though Salman Sayyid’s Recalling the Caliphate: Decolonisation and World Order was a fun read, I will be hesitant to recommend it because of the many levels of mental acrobatics involved in agreeing with the book’s thesis.

I also explored works that were tangentially related to Islamic history. For instance, I read Stewart Gordon’s When Asia Was the World, which was a collection of travelogues by Asian travelers spanning nearly a millennium. The book showed us how interconnected Asia was throughout history. I think it is a must-read work. Another work in a similar tradition was The Adventures of Ibn Battuta: A Muslim Traveler of the Fourteenth Century by Ross E. Dunn, a dedicated study of how a certain Moroccan traveler was able to travel halfway across the world, from the shores of the Atlantic to the heart of Indian Ocean, to become a qadi in India. The whole journey is worth a read.

Once I was done with Islamic history, I read some books that were on my TBR for a while. I finished Audrey Truschke’s Aurangzeb: The Man and the Myth. Though I do not fully agree with Truschke’s optimistic interpretation of Aurangzeb, I must appreciate her intellectual rigor and skill in trying to find an alternative explanation for one of the most enigmatic rulers in Indian history. I also read Vijay Prashad’s The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World, which was particularly illuminating and equally tragic in how it chronicled the history of the Third World and the anti-imperialist politics surrounding it.

The other history books I read this year included David Harvey’s A Brief History of Neoliberalism, which was a good reminder of the world-dominating ideology we call neoliberalism. I also read Humankind: A Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman, a cozy and optimistic view of humanity. Sometimes, you need that sort of optimism.

Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge by Bernard S. Cohn was a great read. It is essentially an anthropologist's attempt at understanding colonialism, particularly in India. For anyone interested in these topics, this book is a necessary read.

I had a period in the middle of the year when I was obsessed with reading about Pakistan. And specifically, I was looking for ethnographies set in Pakistan. This led me to some wonderful books. Foremost is Ayesha Siddiqi’s In the Wake of Disaster: Islamists, the State and a Social Contract in Pakistan. This is one of the few works on human geography in Pakistan. It explores how the State responded to the 2010 floods and offers an important, evidence-based critique of the simplistic idea that Islamists have moved into the spaces vacated by the State. Also, Matthew S. Hull’s Government of Paper is by far one of the best books ever written on urban Pakistan. It explores Islamabad’s governance and tries to understand the crucial role that paperwork plays in how Islamabad was envisioned and is now inhabited by various groups and institutions.

Nausheen Anwar’s Infrastructure Redux: Crisis, Progress in Industrial Pakistan & Beyond explores the historical trajectory of industrialization in Pakistan (particularly in Sialkot and Faisalabad) and how the business community and State engaged with each other. It also problematizes the idea of ‘neoliberalism’ for a country like Pakistan. Rosita Armytage’s Big Capital in an Unequal World: The Micropolitics of Wealth in Pakistan is an extremely interesting and nuanced ethnography of the Pakistani elite and their place in the local, national, and global settings. I think of it as a companion book to Ammara Maqsood’s brilliant ethnographic book, The New Pakistani Middle-class.

Aasim Sajjad Akhter’s The Struggle for Hegemony in Pakistan: Fear, Desire and Revolutionary Horizons explores the digital aspects of Pakistan’s current society and the ways in which the current youth population is dealing with this Neoliberal era. I think his Politics of Common Sense should be read before this.

From here on, my interests took a spatial turn. First, I reread Imagining Lahore by Haroon Khalid. Though this book generalizes a lot, it is still a readable conceptualization of the urban collectivity that is Lahore. In comparison, Laurent Gayer’s Karachi: Ordered Disorder and the Struggle for the City was a better urban study. this book is a good primer on Karachi and all its spatial aspects, violence, politics, and demographics.

Keeping up with my fascination with ‘space’, I read Seeing Like a City by Ash Amin and Nigel J Thrift. In this enjoyable book, they show us how the infrastructure of the city has an organic presence of its own. Another important book in this regard was Spatiality by Robert T. Tally Jr, an informative survey of how space has been conceptualized in modern critical and literary theory. I also wanted to explore how space and education interact so I really had a great time reading Critical Geographies of Education: Space, Place, and Curriculum Inquiry by Robert J Helfenbein. This is a thematic area I will keep exploring in the future.

Before I discuss my favorite set of books this year, a special mention for Stuart Schaar’s beautiful and revealing biography of Eqbal Ahmed. Also, I read The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin, an experience that was both saddening and fulfilling. Baldwin remains one of the most important thinkers about masculinity. One outlier book that I had no particular reason for reading was Friedrich Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty. It was silly and poorly written. I barely finished it.

Anyways, time for the final three books. These three books really blew my mind. First up is Anand Vivek Taneja’s Jinnealogy: Time, Islam, and Ecological Thought in the Medieval Ruins of Delhi. This beautiful ethnography of old ruins in Delhi ended up bringing together a lot of highly relevant themes about history, time, memory, and the subversive possibilities inherent in rituals. In the process, the author took us from the juvenile notion of ‘haunting’ to a much more all-embracing concept of ‘enchantment’. Also, the name of the book itself is such a packed pun that you can’t but help admire it.

Jinnealogy then led me to Akeel Bilgrami, who I think is one of the most important philosophers of our time. I plan on reading more of him. His Secularism, Identity, and Enchantment is a wonderful collection of essays which are dealing not just with secularism or Muslim identity, but also with broader political questions. In this book, Bilgrami is bringing Gandhi into conversation with Marx, which is as fun to read as it sounds.

Now, for the final book of the year, we have the Australianama: The South Asian Odyssey in Australia by Samia Khatun. This magnificent book is ostensibly about South Asian pioneers in the Australian desert but there is a lot more going on. At one level, it is a revealing look into the Indian Ocean world. On another, it is a study built on non-Western epistemologies and ways of thinking. The implications are many. This is definitely one of the best social science books I have ever read.

Whew, so that was 2022 in books. If you are still here, thanks for hanging out. I hope you got some nice recommendations.