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Published on February 17, 2008

Currently reading: A stack of books at once

“I like to read several books simultane¬ously – a couple of novels to broaden my vicarious experiences and one or more professional books to deepen my understanding of my work. At the moment I’m reading ‘A Thousand Splendid Suns’ by Khaled Hosseini, author of the bestselling ‘The Kite Runner’. This is a starkly raw account of the tragically intertwined lives to two heroic women caught up in the terrify¬ing and deadly events of Afghanistan’s recent political and cultural history. Then there’s ‘The Hungry Tide’ by Amitav Ghosh, who is simultaneously an accomplished anthropologist, historian and writer. This complex novel set in the ghostly Sundarbans water jungle of Bangladesh juxtaposes cataclysmic tropical cyclones and ferocious maneating tigers as metaphors each for the other, and both for the destructive storms of human obsession. I’m going through ‘Return to Painting’ by Xingjian Gao, author of ‘Soul Mountain’ and winner of the 2000 Nobel Prize for Literature. Gao has been labelled an ‘antiphilosopher’ due to his opposition to all forms of ideology and his idiosyncratic individualism in the timeless tradition of Taoist eccentrics and visionaries. He is also a gifted painter. In this book he relates his visual art to his writing thereby creating for the reader an intimate, richly nuanced and multidimensional picture of an extraordinary mind, constructing bridges, both imagined and real, between heaven and earth. I’m also reading ‘Right Hand, Left Hand:  The Origins of Asymmetry in Brains, Bodies, Atoms and Cultures’ by Chris McManus, and ‘The World Ahead: Our Future in the Making’ by Federico Mayor, the former directorgeneral of Unesco.”