Non-Fiction Books 2024

In 2024, I decided that every time I will read a book till the end, I will note down my comments for my blog, instead of trying to come up with a list of books at the end of the year. Thus, this time making a list of my recommendations has been easier and is comprehensive.

This post is divided into 2 parts - this first part is about non-fiction (6 books) from 2024, while the second part will be about fiction books.

1. Spring Chicken - Stay Young Forever (Or Die Trying) by Bill Gifford  (2015)

It is a 2015 book about ageing, living longer and becoming older with less health-problems. It looks at the whole world of living longer movement - from what does ageing means, what causes ageing, the impact of ageing on different body-systems including muscles and movement, heart, lungs, brain and neurons, metabolism, etc. and and what can be done to slow down this process.

The author talks to the well-known experts and researchers in each domain, as well as to people with crazy ideas who are trying to stay younger and live longer. Most such books are repetitive, they have only a few ideas, but this book takes a wide overview and hardly ever repeats itself. It was my first read in 2024 and it got me straight away. It is a well-written book.

2. Midnight's Machines - A Political History of Technology in India by Arun Mohan Sukumar (2019)

It touches on an unusual theme - the relationship between culture of a people and technology. I had never thought about the cultural attitudes about technology in India in this way before reading it, and it made me rethink about some of my earlier beliefs. In India, we have beliefs about nature, environment, divinity and our own (human) role in the larger scheme of things.

Many of these ideas are expressed in terms like Gandhism, the ideas of self-reliant communities, the beauty of small things, and the distrust of modernity and technology (and of rich industrialists). The book touches on all these and how these affected pre-independence and post-independence developments in India, the role played by Rajiv Gandhi and even greater impact of Y2K disruption in bringing a grudging acceptance of technology to India. Though youth is enthusiastic about this change but the book suggests that the older distrust has not yet disappeared, it continues to shape our decisions even now. A very interesting read.

The Indian Ideology by Perry Anderson (2012)

This book looks at 20th century's India (at the 120 years period going from the birth of Congress party till the last UPA Government). Anderson's main area of interest has been Marxism and his analysis of the recent Indian history is shorn of any romanticism about India's freedom struggle and the role played by Congress in it.

His main criticism of congress in the pre-independence period is that its ideology was not progressive and modern, but was "Hindustani" (biased towards Hinduism). After independence, his judgement is that there was a confused polity. He looks at the ideas of Gandhi and Nehru, finding much to criticise, conceding some good intentions and a lot of bad choices.

He lays the blame for the creation of Pakistan on Gandhi and congress party "because they wanted a strong central government". He also finds fault with Indian electoral system (it is not proportional representation), inclusion of Kashmir in India, crushing of the independence movements in the North-East and the treatment of Muslims in post-independent India.

I feel that in India, we are used to a fawning adulation towards figures like Gandhi and Nehru, and any attempt to look at anyone critically is seen as sacrilegious. In that sense, I found his analysis refreshing and provocative. However, I do not agree with many of his conclusions for example, that aiming for a strong central government or not allowing successions, were bad choices for India. In any case, I feel that this book should be read for an alternate point of view about contemporary India.

Who Ate the First Oyster by Cody Cassidy (2020)

Simple sounding questions like "who ate the first oyster" or "who invented fire" or "who invented clothes" can lead to a profound reflection on human evolution over the past 3 million years and understand the significance of things that we take for granted.

For example, eating oysters required people to understand the science behind the tides of oceans because the oysters can only be gathered at low tides. It required making a connection between high-low tides with phases of the moon and a keen spirit for the observation of the world.

It is a book about human evolution science and I found it very interesting, full of A-Ha moments. If you like reading the natural history and science books, try this book from 2020 - it is full of new insights.

Age of Revolutions by Fareed Zakaria (2024)

I knew Zakaria only as a TV personality and this this was his first book for me. The central theme of the book is that big and transformative changes occurring in short spans of time, are revolutions for the human societies, each of which follows a trajectory ending with an inevitable backlash of some kind. He focuses mainly on the revolutions in Europe over the past 500 years, especially about economical and social organisation of society, including the technical innovations.

I liked the first half of this book more than the second half. I felt that the last part of this book was scattered and confused. However, even in the second part, I found interesting ideas about cultural backlash to explain part of the Putin-Xi Jinping effects in Russia and China. I also agree with his view that today many countries in the world are not looking to the West to copy its ideas of organising societies, but instead, many of them are exploring their own understandings of modernity.

I also felt that the book sidesteps the whole issue of spread of Islamic orthodoxy, which is another huge phenomenon influencing geopolitics today. This orthodoxy can also be seen as a backlash to sudden modernity and changes in those countries. It seems that some of them, especially in the Arab world, seem to be finally overcoming it, while others, especially Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan, seem to be lagging behind.

In conclusion, this book is an interesting read.

The Song of the Cell by Siddhartha Mukherjee (2022)

Pulitzer prize-winning Mukherjee writes big but interesting tomes about themes related to medicine. This book had come out in 2022 and I had been planning to read it for a long time.

In the medical college, I used to love physiology and had been fascinated by the microscopic "organelles" inside the cells, but at that time the understanding about these was fairly superficial. However, over the past decades, thanks to new research and technology (including genetics & molecular biology), our understanding of human anatomy and physiology have improved in ways that I could not have imagined. Thus, I was looking forward to reading Mukherjee's book on this theme.

It is great book, immensely readable, but it is for general reader. For me, it skimmed the surface, giving tantalising glimpses of the new knowledge but not really going deeper into it. For deeper learning about human physiology, I need to read a textbook. However, if you like to learn about the human body, it is an interesting book.

Conclusions

I feel that most non-fiction books do not need to be a full book, they can be much shorter. Most of them have very long initial parts where they talk at length about the context, but most of it is already well-known. When they do touch on their subject, they are often repetitive. Therefore, though I do start reading a lot of non-fiction books, I rarely finish them. Thus, I am really happy that I have 6 books in this list this time.

As the year comes to an end, I am listening to an interesting podcast by Devdutt Patnaik, which is more than 12 hours long. Recently, I had also listened to another interesting podcast with Manu Pillai. Hopefully, in 2025, I will read some books of both of them. This year (2025), I am also hoping to read some biographies, a genre that I have largely ignored so far.

Best wishes of a happy reading 2025 to all of my readers. If you have read a good non-fiction book, do tell me about it in the comments below - thanks in advance.

You can also read about my choice of fiction books that I had liked in 2024.

*****