From the flashback folio

Amitava Kumar

The Abu Ghraib Effect, which I read during the summer, is a fine reminder of why scholarship matters. Written by art historian Stephen Eisenman, it shows that the demeaning poses in which American soldiers photographed Iraqi prisoners had their provenance in a 2,000-year-old tradition of Western art devoted to aestheticizing and eroticizing pain.

Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist was a success in the West. I would like to think it was because of the book’s artfulness and charming candour, but I wonder whether the truth might not be more crude. The suave protagonist was someone White readers hadn’t met before, a Muslim man who looked and acted differently from all those they had seen on TV.

I liked Don DeLillo’s Falling Man for its simple surprises. The performer who, in the days following the 11 September attacks, used a cable and a harness to throw himself down from tall buildings. The image caught something about how flagrant art can be. Had DeLillo intended his novel to be like that too?

I am only a few pages into Denis Johnson’s Tree of Smoke, but even a few lines are enough to know that this is a big book. The voice of a major artist reaching into the violence and pain inside the world’s soul.

Sonia Faleiro

My favourites this year have all been non-fiction, although I did, occasionally, submit to the guilty pleasure of a book such as The Gardener’s Song by Kalpana Swaminathan. The second in a series of crime novels set in Mumbai, its silver-haired detective, Lalli, unravelling murder and mayhem, will have readers begging for a sequel.

My non-fiction list tops with The Washington Post’s Rajiv Chandrasekaran, whose prize-winning Imperial Life in the Emerald City offers an ironic contrast between American decadence in Iraq’s Green Zone, and scarcity and bungling outside of it. Still on politics, I was completely taken by Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier. Twenty six seems young to write a memoir, until you discover that at 13, Beah was hand-picked by the government army in his native Sierra Leone to “shoot everything that moved”.

No less startling was Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s Infidel, a powerfully rendered account of a journey that began in an Islamic state antithetical to women, and led to a seat in the Dutch parliament only 10 years after Hirsi sought refugee status in Holland. Lastly, reporter Christopher de Bellaigue takes up territory covered one generation previously by V.S. Naipaul and Ryszard Kapuscinski, and offers a fresh and entertaining account of Iran’s society, polity, art and literature in his book The Struggle for Iran.

Kalpish Ratna—Kalpana Swaminathan and Ishrat Syed

Friends indulgently call me a listomaniac. But the list I most enjoy is the one I make every December—of books I particularly liked, admired and reread in the year past.