Best books of 2021, featuring spies, dirty money and big ideas

(Illustration by Suneesh K.)

And a Happy New Year to you too.

We have now spent two calendar years with that pestilence called Covid. On December 31, 2019, the World Health Organization was officially informed by China of cases of “pneumonia of unknown cause” in Wuhan City.

The world may never return to the sort of life we led till then. But some lucky ones among us may have also found, in these two anxious years, a solitude that could not have been possible before.

Reading is fundamentally an act of solitude. So, in no particular order, the five books I enjoyed or learnt the most from in 2021:

Murder At The Mushaira, Raza Mir: Raza, outside his day job as a professor of management in a US university, is a scholar of Urdu poetry and especially the works of Mirza Ghalib. His first novel, eight painstaking and perfectionist years in the making, features a middle-aged Ghalib, plagued by alcohol, penury and other personal problems, as the detective in this brilliant murder mystery set in Delhi in the days leading up to the first war of Independence in 1857. Deeply researched and intricately plotted, it brings a time and milieu to life like few novels can. All right, I’ll say it: it is the Indian The Name Of The Rose or My Name Is Red.

India That Is Bharat, J. Sai Deepak: The first part of a planned trilogy, the book introduces the reader to “coloniality”, a concept that underlies the one we are familiar with—colonialism. Sai Deepak provides masses of facts and research to argue how the consciousness of India, a civilizational state that is much deeper than a republic that was born on 26 January 1950, has been battered by invaders and colonizers. He raises some fundamental questions about the assumptions on which we base our opinions and beliefs about India and the values we accept as axioms. An important book.

The Spy And The Traitor, Ben Macintyre: Macintyre is possibly the best living historian of espionage. And his books read like thrillers. The Spy and The Traitor is the story of Oleg Gordievsky, a KGB agent who rose to head the agency’s London station, but actually worked for two decades for British intelligence. It’s an extraordinary tale of how this man, till now unknown to the world, may have played a key role in history—he may have averted a US-Soviet nuclear war and guided the dialogue between the West and the Soviet Union in the 1980s.

In the end, the Soviets caught on, and they called Gordievsky to Moscow. But MI6 had had the extrication plan for him ready for 10 years. The last chapters of the book, detailing his escape from Russia, is as edge-of-the-seat as anything Dan Brown could have conjured.

Macintyre has also written something of a mirror image of this book. His A Spy Among Friends is the definitive biography of Kim Philby, the Soviet agent who rose to a very high position in British intelligence and was the inspiration for John Le Carre’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. A Spy Among Friends is now being made into a film, starring Guy Pearce as Philby and Damian Lewis as Nicholas Elliott, Philby’s lifelong friend and colleague who became his nemesis.

Kleptopia, Tom Burgis: This is an exceptional work of investigative journalism that tracks dirty money across the world, from Kazakhstan to London, Zimbabwe to Paris, Riyadh to the White House. The story is impossible to summarize. One can only say that the revelations are jaw-dropping—the billions of dollars looted, the innocents killed, the political leaders (like former UK prime minister Tony Blair) who were accomplices, knowingly or unknowingly. And every tiny piece of the sordid saga is backed up by impeccable research and documentation.

If you watched and liked McMafia on Amazon Prime, Kleptopia is McMafia raised to the power of 10. And it’s all true.

Rationality, Steven Pinker: In his latest book, Harvard University cognitive science professor Pinker attempts a comprehensive analysis of a quality that all of us human beings claim to possess or at least aspire to, but very few achieve, and certainly not consistently. The spectrum is breathtakingly large—from the timeless logic employed by primitive tribes to Bayesian probability to game theory to neuroscience to what we call morality.

This is a book that cannot be read at one go. Even though written with great lucidity, every page brims with ideas that require serious processing. And every chapter can spring a nasty surprise on the reader about how we interpret the world and make decisions that we think are based on impeccable reason. Enlightening and humbling, but also fun.

This last year, while dusting my bookshelves, I also rediscovered Graham Greene. And was quite surprised when an extremely well-read young Englishman admitted to me that he had never heard of Greene.

I told him that I thought he was one of the greatest British writers of the 20^th century (though he did not seem to have much love for Britain). One may not always agree with his views—for some of us, his lapsed-Roman-Catholic obsession with sin and guilt may be a bit tiresome—but his clinical dissection of human frailties never fails to touch both the mind and the heart.

This was a man who believed that what differentiates human beings from other animals is our ability to betray those who trust us. He was a friend of the double agent Philby and wrote the introduction to the autobiography Philby wrote after escaping to Russia, My Silent War.

Greene helpfully classified his books in two categories—“novel” and “entertainment”. “Start with ‘entertainment’,” I told my English friend. “It’s hard to find a more entertaining book than Our Man In Havana or Travels With My Aunt.”