Category: Books, essays and others

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Books, essays and others

[2979] My readings in 2023

Fictions dominated my list this year. In 2022, more than four fifths of my major reads were non-fictions but for 2023, the ratio fell to less than half. There were two reasons behind this.

One, I have gained more responsibilities at work and despite that, I had played Football Manager 2023 quite religiously as a way to alleviate work stress (I do not recommend this because… ‘alleviate’ is not a word in the Football Manager’s dictionary). This had left me with less time to read, and risked having me falling short of my reading goal. To meet that goal, I cheated by turning to fictions. I find fictions are generally easier to read than non-fictions (as long as they are not written by Kafka).

Two, the non-fiction-heavy list in the past few years was really due to my book writing project. By 2022 and definitely by 2023, the project that began in mid-2010s was coming to an end. So, there was a bit of non-fiction fatigue happening.

Here, I am summarizing selected books I read in 2023.

Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

This is my best read this year, and bought from Literati in Ann Arbor. The novel describes the experience of a Nigerian woman moving to the United States and then returning home. While written from a Nigerian perspective, I think the theme would resonate with a lot of foreign students in the US. The author tells the story of a person wanting to run away from home, the racism she faces in the US and eventually the conflicting feeling she have about returning home. I enjoyed how the author describes Lagos: I love novels that tell me more about a place, like The Art of Losing, The Kite Runner and A Bookshop in Algiers, all of which I read in recent years.

The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway

Speaking about places, during a recent visit to George Town, I stumbled upon one of Hemingway’s less known work. The novel tells a story of a group of friends living in 1920s Paris making a trip to Pamplona to watch a bullfight. The highlight of the novel is the bullfight but I found I like the Paris part of the story better. But how do I rate it? The Sun Also Rises is the inferior version of A Moveable Feast, also by Hemingway.

Zazie in the Metro by Raymond Queneau

Yet another novel with place-context heavy set in the 1950s Paris. This was supposed to be a funny breezy read but I ended up struggling to go through it. Originally written in French and quite influential when it first came out, the translated English work lost a whole lot of nuances. There is a movie adaptation of the novel, and I recommend watching that instead of the translated work.

Victory City by Salman Rushdie

Unlike the earlier three, Victory City sets in a semi-fictional place. It is a fictional retelling of Vijayanagara, which was an actual empire in pre-colonial India. Since I have reviewed this in much longer length, I do not want to spend too much time here, except that I recommend the novel.

The Employees by Olga Ravn

I bought this from Kinokuniya Kuala Lumpur because it was shortlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize. I regretted that. It is a science fiction with an interesting theme but its unorthodox structure left me dissatisfied and made reading a burden despite its low word count.

The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran

This must be read with the right frame of mind and at the appropriate turn of your life. You would have to be really sad and in melancholy. I was generally content when I read this and so, I did not really appreciate it.

The Fall of Srivijaya in Malay History by O. W. Wolters

A classic, the work explains that the content of Sejarah Melayu should not be dismissed as myths. Instead, should be read within a certain context. Once the context is set right, the piece of literature could tell a lot about history of the Malays in the Strait of Malacca. The title suggests the work is about Srivijaya, but it is really more about the early days of Malacca, and how Malacca is linked to Srivijaya. I was lucky to found it while visiting Riwayat bookstore in old parts of Kuala Lumpur.

Malay Ideas on Development: From Feudal Lord to Capitalist by Maaruf Shaharuddin

A huge chunk of the book is a continuation or a repeat of points made in another of his work, Concept of a Hero in Malay Society. It is the latter parts of the book that I found interesting, where the author discusses several 20th century Malay personalities who he presents as the leader of their respective school of thoughts. I think the two most important ones are Zaaba’s Malay capitalism (which blames the Malays for their own backwardness) and Abdul Rahim Kajai-Ishak Haji Muhammad’s version of Malay capitalism (that blames other communities, specifically British and Chinese, for Malay backwardness). Maaruf reasons that the synthesis of these two ideas came in the form of Mahathir Mohamad (which is best understood by reading The Malay Dilemma).

The Malaysian Islamic Party 1951-2013 by Farish A. Noor

I think this is the best book about Pas available out there. Farish explains the evolution of the party from the beginning up until the 2013 General Election. In short, Pas began as a provincial insular gouping but in the 1950s, it evolved to become a leftist pan-Islamist political party. But the 1970s, it evolved again to become a Malay nationalist party before shedding its racist skin to become an Islamist party in the 1980s. By the 2000s, the party moderated its stance and became a party of Muslim democrats.

The End of the Nineteen-Nineties by Hafiz Noor Shams

Okay, this is a cheat. I read this multiple times as I went through the proofreading process with my editors. Yes, written my me. More about the book here.

Cover for the The End of the Nineteen-Nineties

Other mentions

The Parade by David Eggers — a fiction about two men building a highway in a war torn country, which people aspired for peace. There is a twist at the end. I recommend this if you need a short but impactful story.

How I Learned to Hate in Ohio by David Stuart MacLean — a story of racism in 1980s Ohio. It gets dark, slowly.

Acts of Resistance: Dol Said and the Naning War by Shaun Adam — it is a bit of retelling of the Naning War.

Categories
Books, essays and others Personal

[2978] Shall we read The End of the Nineteen-Nineties?

It has been a long journey but after seven or eight years of writing it, I am pleased to share that The End of the Nineteen-Nineties, published by Matahari Books, is finally out in the market.[1]

Cover for the The End of the Nineteen-Nineties

The synopsis on the back cover does a good job describing what the book is all about. Still, I feel I should explain it further and the best way to do so is to discuss the title of the book.

The obvious interpretation of the title is that the book is about the nineteen-nineties in Malaysia. The decade is the subject because, as I explained in the book, the period is special in several important aspects. To understand its specialness, I look back far into history to explain certain trends, and then rationalize the decades after through the lens of the 1990s.

One reason the 1990s is special is what I consider the end (as in the purpose) of the decade. That end is the creation of a larger civic nationalism that we commonly call Bangsa Malaysia. That wider nationalism beyond ethnicities was not conceived in the 1990s. It has a long history, but the specialness of the decade created space which civic nationalism could grow and prosper, unlike previous (and latter) attempts that failed.

The 1990s ended in a spectacular fashion with a political upheaval and an economic crisis. One of many victims of the end of the nineteen-nineties was Bangsa Malaysia.

The book is a broad sweep of Malaysian history. It is a bit of retelling by a person who grew up during the decade. It is written by a person who loved the country, fell out of love, and then ends up in a situationship.

Hafiz Noor Shams. Some rights reserved

[1] — The book is slowly making its way to various physical stores. But online purchase is likely the best for most people. Here are several places where you could buy it online:

Finally, there will be several events linked to the book set in February 2024. I hope to see you there.

Categories
Books, essays and others Fiction

[2977] How I learned to stop worrying and love Salman Rushdie’s Victory City

Reading Victory City, I found myself figuring out whether the places and persons mentioned in the book were real. It is like reading Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code: fiction is weaved through real history and that blurs the line separating the two.

But Victory City is worse than that. It is fashioned as a casual modern translation of a supposedly ancient text detailing the rise and fall of the Bisnaga Empire, which is a reference to a real entity that was the Vijayanagar Empire that covered much of southern India.

My knowledge of the Indian subcontinent history is not as good as that of other areas. That shows when I know of Vijayanagar largely from playing Europa Universalis IV.

Already having a superficial understanding of southern Indian history, the novel did not help. Is Victory City, actually based on something like Sejarah Melayu, an actual document however fanciful the details are? At the back of the novel, the author Salman Rushdie, lists sources he referred to, giving an aura of seriousness (aura of non-fiction?) to his work of fiction. He was painting a picture of 14th-15th-16th century southern India on an un-blanked canvas belonging to another painting. I was worried that would give me the wrong impression of Vijayanagar.

So worried was I, that I tried ascertaining the real history behind names and places in the book. Google. Wikipedia. The usual places for a quick lookup. But that worked up as a distraction, slowing my reading pace and disrupting the rhythm set by the book. Reading became a chore by too much.

Realizing that, I stopped my side quests, and enjoyed the book as it is, tracking the fictional life of the founder of Bisnaga, the fantastical almost immortal sage Pampa Kampana, born just before the empire was founded, and died as the empire collapsed more than two hundred years later.

Categories
Books, essays and others Politics & government Society

[2958] Reviewing We Are Marching Now

I try to read (and finish) at least a book a month. That is a slow, given there are hundreds of titles in my to-be-read list. So long is the list, that I have stopped updating them altogether, realizing keeping track of my appetite is a futile exercise. But when We Are Marching Now by Danny Lim came out, I put it right into the list and bought it when the author launched his book at Central Market in downtown Kuala Lumpur. I paused my current read—Bill Hayton’s The South China Sea, which is about the history of China’s territorial claim in the area—and started going through my latest purchase.

I enjoyed the book. It was an easy read.

While reading it, I struggled to think of similar books published in Malaysia. By similar, I mean a book in the style of investigative journalism. There is Billion Dollar Whale but that is not a Malaysian publication, though it is about the country. While I have not read it, Money Logging by Lukas Straumann is another. I have not read too many investigative genre myself. My last read before Billion Dollar Whale was Bob Woodward’s The Agenda about the Clinton administration.

I might be wrong, but it does look like We Are Marching Now is one of its kind, as far as Malaysian publication is concerned. If not, then it has to be a very rare breed at the very least. That makes it refreshing within the context of local publication.

As for the topic of the book itself, I have a short remark: the book is about the genesis of Bersih, understood through various interviews the author had with personalities involved in the early days of the organization. I think the author did a good job weaving the interviews together to form a coherent narrative.

Additionally—others have mentioned this—it is worth highlighting that political parties played a crucial role in making Bersih a success.

I think this is an important point to be remembered by civil activists who value non-partisanship above everything else. It is not easy to gain public support and then corral it towards a cause. More often than not, political parties excel at that, more than anyone else. Yes, party politics are messy and self-interested. Events in the past two or more years have been nothing but angering. But when it is done right, these parties could be a powerful force for good, as in the case of Bersih.

I have been to all of the Bersih protests, and here, I want to leave you with, possibly, the favorite of mine, out of thousands I snapped from those protests:

By Hafiz Noor Shams. Some rights reserved. Creative Commons. By attribution.

Categories
Books, essays and others Economics Politics & government

[2955] Reviewing The Republic of Beliefs

Do laws matter? How do they matter? When do laws work? Why should a law work just because it is written on a piece of paper?

Kaushik Basu explores these questions in his 2018 book The Republic of Beliefs: A New Approach to Law and Economics. He utilizes game theory to answer the questions. Basu is an economist with wide experience in public policy.

By Hafiz Noor Shams

From the very start, he is skeptical of the power of the law as understood through Hobbesian lens. He largely rejects the idea that laws function primarily through the threat of force. In place of coercion, he places beliefs firmly at the center of the answers, with possibility of coercion working only to modify beliefs. We are governed more by beliefs, and less by coercion.

To convince his readers, he lays out the basics of game theory. Luckily for most of us, he does not write down too many formulae. In doing so, he avoids turning a good chunk of the book into a dense game theory textbook. Charts are aplenty to deliver the same messages mathematical formulae would. All I am saying here is that the book is quite readable.

The point of the crash course (or review for those familiar game theory) is to ease readers into the idea of focal points, a concept imported from psychology (was it? I am unclear here). Within the context of game theory, focal points are a subset of equilibria as understood in economics. It’s a signpost to coordinate responses. Once all prerequisites in place, Basu delivers his central thesis: laws work to push society towards a preferred equilibrium, out of many equilibria.

Laws alone do not create equilibrium. A law that forces society towards a non-equilibrium outcome will suffer from serious ineffectiveness. That ineffectiveness translates into frequent violations as rules are ignored, or circumvented via corrupt ways.

This is an important point to be learned by policymakers. I write so because I see lawmakers more often than not prefer non-equilibrium outcomes and propose complicated policy to address problems arising from such non-equilibrium. So complicated, that their proposals end up creating bigger problems (wink wink: chicken prices and palm oil subsidies in Malaysia).

Perhaps, this idea can be better explain through the problem of smuggling. Political commentators and even ministers (BN, PH, PN or whatever) have blamed the smuggling of something (cigarette, rice, gasoline, anything) on imperfect enforcement. And so, their solution is to put more money into greater enforcement. But the primary problem is not enforcement—though weak enforcement itself creates beliefs regarding (in)credibility of laws (but I will skip that part and encourage you to read the book for deeper treatment). It is about the law itself, which attempts to move society to a non-equilibrium outcome. And that non-equilibrium leads to corruption.

The prime problem, typically, lies in demand itself. Here, I believe Basu would claim, to fight smuggling, preference or behavior itself has to change. And behavior depends on beliefs.

More specific to Malaysian context, I think this is where attempt at ‘generational end-game’ for smoking will likely do more at curbing future tobacco smuggling than any ‘greater enforcement’ initiative would. There will be no cigarette to smuggle if people do not like smoking in the first place.

I think that (focal points) is the greatest insight from the book. But there are other points of interest.

One is the history of law and economics. The author goes back to Hobbes and Hume, but I am more interested in his treatment of modern history when Basu writes about neoclassical understanding of laws as provided by Gary Becker. Basu criticizes the modern economics approach towards law by stating a typical neoclassical model ignores the interest of law enforcers and other agents of the state (that include functionaries like judges and prime ministers). He zeroes in on the inconsistency of neoclassical understanding of law: citizens are assumed to be rational agents, but agents of the state taken as robots obeying everything they are told to do. In that way, neoclassical economists working on the intersection of economics and laws regularly sidestep the problem of corruption. Basu suggests, agents of the state should be considered as rational too, and their obedience should not be taken for granted. In that way, economists can tackle corruption problem more directly.

Despite his criticism of the neoclassical approach, Basu does not call for a complete culling of the school. Rather, he wants to improve those models by expanding it in a meaningful way. Indeed, the way he writes the book, it feels like a pioneering work built up on neoclassical approach.