Women love playing sport – and writing about it. Here are 6 fascinating and surprising sports books by women

Kasey Symons, Deakin University and Lee McGowan, University of the Sunshine Coast

Australians love a good sport story, because we love our sport.

While many of us think of sporting narratives playing out on fields and courts, there are some wonderful sporting stories captured in our country’s rich literature. And just as women have always been playing sport, they have also been writing about it.

Here are some books by women and non-binary writers for your summer reading list. They look at sport in a range of ways. Whether you enjoy histories, non-fiction, poetry, crime or even romance, there is a sporting story to suit all readers. These books seek to connect with diverse sports fans, or anyone looking for something a little different.

The first women’s Ashes

Marion Stell’s The Bodyline Fix: How Women Saved Cricket delves into a fascinating yet often overlooked chapter of cricket history. The book explores how Australian women cricketers in the 1930s played a crucial role in restoring the integrity of the sport, following the infamous men’s Bodyline series of 1932-33, which strained relations between Australia and England.

Stell is one of Australia’s foremost sports historians. She has gathered the stories of women’s sport in Australia, tracking down documents from scrapbooks kept by athletes and their families, mining storage units and garages for historical gems, and peering through miles of microfilm.

She is the author of the germinal book Half the Race: A History of Australian Women in Sport (1991), and her co-authored work with women’s football pioneer Heather Reid, Women in Boots: Football and Feminism in the 1970s (2020), is also excellent reading.

In The Bodyline Fix, Stell tells the story of the inaugural women’s test series, played against England in the summer of 1934-35. The series put women’s cricket in the spotlight. It brought together players from diverse backgrounds and social classes, and different levels of cricketing experience, to represent Australia. The women who played defied societal norms, family pressure and public scrutiny to pursue their passion. Their trailblazing spirit has contributed the strong Australian women’s cricket culture we have today.

The series is now known as the first women’s Ashes. The event’s 90th anniversary will be celebrated with a historic test at the Melbourne Cricket Ground, starting on January 30, 2025. Now is the perfect time to learn more about those pioneering women and their legacy.

Footy in literature

When we think of books about Australian rules football, we tend to think of the many memoirs, biographies and other non-fiction works documenting the game’s history, cultural influence and place in collective memory.

Despite the game being the country’s dominant football code, it has not strayed too far into the world of fiction. Fictional footy narratives are rare. Those written by women even rarer. In 2014, Ed Wright observed in the Australian that “for something so culturally unique, Aussie rules football is under-represented in our literature, especially given the obsession with the game of our UNESCO City of Literature, Melbourne”.

Yet around this time three intriguing novels written by women about Australian rules football were published: The Family Men by Catherine Harris (2014), Game Day by Miriam Sved (2014) and The Whole of My World by Nicole Hayes (2013).

These books depicted the ways women work to connect with the game and the joy that fandom can bring. They also examined the dark side of the sport, such as the effects of toxic masculinity.

More recently, Sarah Thornton published Lapse, a crime thriller set in rural Australia, where the protagonist, former lawyer Clementine Jones heads to the country and ends up coaching at the local footy club.

Lapse is an interesting look at Australian rural life, racial tensions in small communities and the dynamics of country footy through the tropes of the thriller genre. The novel has lots of suspense to keep you turning the pages. The plot is a refreshing take on the “stranger arriving in a small town with a secret”, featuring a woman protagonist who comes into a hypermasculine environment.

Another footy book to add to your reading list is the newly published The Season by Australian literary legend Helen Garner.

The Season depicts Garner’s experience following her grandson’s under-16s football team for a season. It is full of reflections on developing masculinity and the role of sport in crafting identity. Garner also writes about connection to her AFL team the Western Bulldogs and what being a supporter means to her.

The book is a valuable contribution to the footy book genre. Seeing the sports we love through the eyes of those not as close to the game helps us see it in a new light.

Matildas’ momentum

Who didn’t get caught up the excitement of the 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup? One of the successes of the event was how many new fans were welcomed into the women’s football family.

Now we have some fantastic publications to speak to those new fans, celebrate the trailblazers, and reflect on the future of women’s football.

Football historian and academic Fiona Crawford has been busy over the last couple of years documenting the increased focus on Australia’s national women’s team the Matildas.

She published The Matilda Effect (2023) in the lead up to the 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup. She also co-authored Never Say Die: The Hundred-Year Overnight Success of Australian Women’s Football (2019) with Lee McGowan, which is another great read.

Her recently released The Rise of the Matildas reflects on the Matilda’s World Cup experience. Crawford writes with expertise, consideration for the game’s pioneers, and respect for fans. Her engaging style instantly connects you to the historic moment that we hope will change Australian women’s football forever.

First Nations people and sport

Personal Score: Sport, Culture, Identity by Ellen van Neerven is a compelling blend of memoir, poetry and cultural commentary.

Through essays, reflections and poems, van Neerven explores the intersections of sport, culture and identity, with a focus on their lived experience as a queer, non-binary First Nations person.

Personal Score is incredibly powerful, alternating between intimate reflection and sharp political critique. It explores what it means to play sport on stolen land, to love football – and questions the game’s colonial history.

The book tells stories of trauma and resilience. Van Neerven’s considered writing not only provides hope that Australian sport can change to become more inclusive, it details practical steps we can all take.

Tennis anyone?

Romance fiction book sales are on the rise. You might be surprised to learn that sports romance has become a major player in this growing market – so much so that from February 28 to March 2, 2025, the world’s first Sports Romance Convention will be held in Minneapolis, USA.

As we gear up for the Australian Open, a timely title is Abra Pressler’s Love and Other Scores. Pressler tells the story of an international tennis star with a secret coming to compete in Melbourne’s grand slam tournament. When he falls in love with a local, he finds he can’t hide his secret much longer.

Pressler’s novel explores how diverse sexualities are still stigmatised in men’s sport, at the same time as it depicts an environment where there are more intersectional identities. And of course, as is necessary in the romance genre, it gives us a “happily ever after” ending that allows us to imagine a sporting world where these issues are not only resolved, but celebrated.

Love and Other Scores is a sexy, queer romance with a diverse cast of characters. It is an excellent example of intersectional representation in sport and it is also a fun summer read.

Kasey Symons, Lecturer of Communication, Sports Media, Deakin University and Lee McGowan, Senior Lecturer, Creative Writing, University of the Sunshine Coast

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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A novel look at how stories may change the brain

“We already knew that good stories can put you in someone else’s shoes in a figurative sense. Now we’re seeing that something may also be happening biologically," says neuroscientist Gregory Berns.

By Carol Clark

Many people can recall reading at least one cherished story that they say changed their life. Now researchers at Emory University have detected what may be biological traces related to this feeling: Actual changes in the brain that linger, at least for a few days, after reading a novel.

Their findings, that reading a novel may cause changes in resting-state connectivity of the brain that persist, were published by the journal Brain Connectivity.

“Stories shape our lives and in some cases help define a person,” says neuroscientist Gregory Berns, lead author of the study and the director of Emory’s Center for Neuropolicy. “We want to understand how stories get into your brain, and what they do to it.”

His co-authors included Kristina Blaine and Brandon Pye from the Center for Neuropolicy, and Michael Prietula, professor of information systems and operations management at Emory’s Goizueta Business School.

Neurobiological research using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has begun to identify brain networks associated with reading stories. Most previous studies have focused on the cognitive processes involved in short stories, while subjects are actually reading them as they are in the fMRI scanner.

The Emory study focused on the lingering neural effects of reading a narrative. Twenty-one Emory undergraduates participated in the experiment, which was conducted over 19 consecutive days.

The researchers chose the novel "Pompeii" for the experiment, due to its strong narrative and page-turning plot.

All of the study subjects read the same novel, “Pompeii,” a 2003 thriller by Robert Harris that is based on the real-life eruption of Mount Vesuvius in ancient Italy. “The story follows a protagonist, who is outside the city of Pompeii and notices steam and strange things happening around the volcano,” Berns says. “He tries to get back to Pompeii in time to save the woman he loves. Meanwhile, the volcano continues to bubble and nobody in the city recognizes the signs.”

The researchers chose the book due to its page-turning plot. “It depicts true events in a fictional and dramatic way,” Berns says. “It was important to us that the book had a strong narrative line.”

For the first five days, the participants came in each morning for a base-line fMRI scan of their brains in a resting state. Then they were given nine sections of the novel, about 30 pages each, over a nine-day period. They were asked to read the assigned section in the evening, and come in the following morning. After taking a quiz to ensure they had finished the assigned reading, the participants underwent an fMRI scan of their brain in a non-reading, resting state. After completing all nine sections of the novel, the participants returned for five more mornings to undergo additional scans in a resting state.

The results showed heightened connectivity in the left temporal cortex, an area of the brain associated with receptivity for language, on the mornings following the reading assignments. “Even though the participants were not actually reading the novel while they were in the scanner, they retained this heightened connectivity,” Berns says. “We call that a ‘shadow activity,’ almost like a muscle memory.”

Read any mind-altering books lately? Writer Joyce Carol Oates once cited "Alice in Wonderland" as a big influence on her imaginative life.

Heightened connectivity was also seen in the central sulcus of the brain, the primary sensory motor region of the brain. Neurons of this region have been associated with making representations of sensation for the body, a phenomenon known as grounded cognition. Just thinking about running, for instance, can activate the neurons associated with the physical act of running.

“The neural changes that we found associated with physical sensation and movement systems suggest that reading a novel can transport you into the body of the protagonist,” Berns says. “We already knew that good stories can put you in someone else’s shoes in a figurative sense. Now we’re seeing that something may also be happening biologically.”

The neural changes were not just immediate reactions, Berns says, since they persisted the morning after the readings, and for the five days after the participants completed the novel.

“It remains an open question how long these neural changes might last,” Berns says. “But the fact that we’re detecting them over a few days for a randomly assigned novel suggests that your favorite novels could certainly have a bigger and longer-lasting effect on the biology of your brain.”

Credits: Top image by iStockphoto.com. Middle and bottom photos by Carol Clark. eScienceCommons: A novel look at how stories may change the brain

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Romance fiction rewrites the rulebook

The Kiss - Francesco Hayez (1859). Wikimedia commons Beth Driscoll, The University of Melbourne and Kim Wilkins, The University of Queensland

Romance fiction has one of the most recognisable brands in book culture. It is known for a handful of attributes: its happy-ever-after endings, the pocket Mills & Boon and Harlequin editions, the covers featuring Fabio (in the 1990s) or naked male torsos (the hot trend in the 21st century). It is known for being overwhelmingly written and read by women, and for being mass-produced. But romance fiction is also the most innovative and uncontrollable of all genres. It is the genre least able to be contained by established models of how the publishing industry works, or how readers and writers behave. Contemporary romance fiction is challenging the prevailing wisdom about how books come into being and find their readers. For our book Genre Worlds: Popular Fiction and Twenty-First Century Book Culture, coauthored with Lisa Fletcher, we conducted nearly 100 interviews with contemporary authors and publishing professionals. Our research shows that fiction genres are not static. They do not constrain artistic originality, but provide the kind of structure that sparks creativity and passion.

Genre fiction can be understood as having three dimensions. The textual dimension is what happens on the page. The industrial dimension is how the books are produced. And the social dimension is the people who write, read and talk about genre fiction. These three dimensions interact to create what we have called a “genre world”. Each distinct genre world (such as fantasy or crime) combines textual conventions, social communities and industry expectations in its own way. And romance is the most fast-paced, rapidly changing genre world of them all. When it comes to genres of articles, we have a soft spot for the listicle. So, here are five things you may not know about contemporary romance fiction – five things that show the dynamism at the heart of book culture. 1. Romance is at the forefront of digital innovation: Twenty-first century publishing has seen fundamental shifts in the way books are produced, distributed and consumed, largely thanks to digital technology. The romance genre is notable historically for its rapid production and consumption cycle. As a result, it has been well placed to adapt to the widespread uptake of digital publishing, which also moves rapidly. Romance writers and publishers are entrepreneurial and comfortable taking risks. The moment constraints are released, romance writers rush in. This is exactly what has happened with self-publishing. Since the advent of Kindle Direct Publishing in 2007, hundreds of thousands of romance books have been self-published there. Other opportunities have blossomed on sites such as Wattpad or through print-on-demand services such as IngramSpark. In Australia, for example, there was a 1,000% increase in the number of self-published romance novels between 2010 and 2016. 

Some self-published romance novels have achieved mind-boggling success. Anna Todd’s 2014 romance novel After, originally fan fiction based on the band One Direction, drew more than 1.5 billion reads on Wattpad. It was subsequently acquired by Simon & Schuster and has spawned a movie series. In other cases, romance authors have formed co-ops to publish work together. Tule Publishing is a small, largely digital publisher with a limited print-on-demand service that produces multi-author continuity series as part of its publishing model. The Tule authors we interviewed spoke of their strong community and creative connections. The self-publishing of genre fiction has blurred the lines between author, agent, editor, cover designer, typesetter, publisher and bookseller. Stephanie Laurens, one of the world’s most successful romance novelists, began writing with Mills & Boon before moving to HarperCollins. In 2012, she gave a keynote address to the Romance Writers of America convention. She used the opportunity to reflect on industry change. Soon after, she began reconfiguring her own publishing arrangements.

Now Harlequin publishes her print novels, while she self-publishes the e-book versions. She also self-publishes novellas that are prequels to, or that sit between, the novels in her traditionally published series. Laurens is a prolific author with loyal fans, an author who can afford to take risks. She realises that self-publishing potentially offers her a better deal and has been able to pursue that while retaining ties to a traditional publisher. Her career complicates any view of self-publishing as second best. Her example has been much emulated among romance writers. Such a career move challenges how we might typically theorise the power relations of literary culture. 2. Romance readers are active and engaged: The dynamism of romance fiction is intimately linked with its engaged readers. Unlike other kinds of publishing, where the fate of each book is relatively unpredictable, romance has historically had many loyal readers who subscribe through mail-order systems to receive books regularly – a model that has not worked successfully at scale for any other genre. In the 21st century, many of these loyal romance readers are online. They tweet about their favourite authors, write Goodreads reviews, and run blogs and podcasts. 

People read romance fiction for different reasons. They might be drawn to its focus on the emotional nuances of relationships, its escape into various times and places (romance subgenres really do cover the gamut), or its gold-plated promise of happy endings and pleasure. They might read casually or intensely, with curiosity, scepticism or devotion. All of these are active modes; they can’t be reduced to consumerism. There is an element of feeling to the involvement. The shared pleasure and sense of belonging that comes with being in the genre world came up regularly in our interviews. Author Rachael Johns, speaking of romance fiction, said “this is my passion, I fell in love with the romance genre”. Agent Amy Tannenbaum described the romance community as “tight-knit”. Harlequin marketing specialist Adam Van Roojen suggested the romance community’s supportive nature makes it “so distinctive I think from other genres”. People say the same thing about other genres, of course, but these claims show how people imagine genre worlds as a kind of community. Communities have boundaries and can be exclusionary. Kristina Busse has written about the impulse to police borders in fan-fiction communities, and of how ascribing positive values to some members of a community may exclude other people. 

This dynamic is at work in genre worlds, even if it is low-key or not openly acknowledged. What’s more, the inside world of romance fiction has an inside of its own. This is evident in the way readers relate to one another (there is an implicit hierarchy of fans) and in the industrial underpinnings of the genre. For example, there is a distinction between a writer’s core audience and fringe audience that affects sales formats and international editions. Core romance readers tend to read digitally, and therefore can often access US editions of a book. Casual romance readers are more likely to pick up a print book from a store like Big W or Target and are therefore more likely to be the target audience for local editions. In general, though, both core and fringe romance readers know how to read romance fiction. They are attuned to the codes that run through the novels. Back in 1992, Jayne Ann Krentz and Linda Barlow argued that certain words and phrases in romance fiction act as a hidden code “opaque to others”. Committed romance readers have a deep knowledge that makes them experts in their genre. When these readers express their views online, authors and publishers take note. One recent example involves a tweet from romance fiction author, podcaster and blogger Sarah McLean. She asked her nearly 40,000 Twitter followers to “Tell me the best romance you’ve read in the last week. Bonus points for it being 🔥🔥🔥.” The tweet was directed at the hardcore readers of the romance genre world. It assumed an audience that reads more than one romance novel per week. The 300 or so replies constitute a mega-thread of recommendations. Romance readers are generous to one another this way, as the sheer abundance of commercially and self-published romance fiction makes it hard to sort and choose. The replies also offer an up-to-the-minute map of the subgenres and tropes to which readers are responding. These include shape-shifters, second-chance love stories, queer romance, and dukes and duchesses (possibly a Bridgerton effect). 3. Romance fiction is global: Far from being circumscribed by small horizons, romance fiction is globally connected and inflected. This is amply demonstrated by the example of Australian romance fiction, which is formed and sustained across international literary markets and creative communities.Pascale Casanova’s theory of the world republic of letters notes the cultural force of London and New York as anglophone publishing centres. This mitigates against the inclusion of Australian content in popular fiction. Stories set in New York or London seem to have no limits in terms of international portability. But stories set in Australia, or another peripheral market, can be harder to pitch. Australian writers are conscious of this, as it directly affects the viability of their careers. But export success is possible for Australian work. The subgenre of Australian rural romance or “RuRo” is the best-known example. Authors like Rachel Johns are bestsellers in other territories. Romance novels set in Australia are popular in Germany – the Germans even have a name for them, the “Australien-Roman”. 

Popular Australian romance author Rachel Johns. Goodreads

Romance fiction is energised by transnational communities of readers and writers, often mediated online. Australian romance author Kylie Scott, for instance, credits American romance bloggers with driving the popularity of her books, and thanks book bloggers in the acknowledgements of her books.

These cultural mediators assist the transnational movement of books in genre worlds. The development of digital-first genre fiction publishers and imprints also supports such movement, not least through promoting global release dates and world rights, so that genre books can be simultaneously accessible to readers worldwide. But nothing comes close to the romance fiction convention, or “con”, in demonstrating the international cooperative links of the romance community. Cons, such as Romance Writers of America, support romance writers by providing professional development opportunities; they offer structure to participants’ professional lives. For example, Regency romance writer Anna Campbell has oriented her career towards the United States. Campbell began to professionalise by joining the Romance Writers of Australia, but then entered professional prizes run through US networks, and it was these that gained attention for her writing and enabled her to get an agent. American success followed: My agent ended up setting up an auction in New York, and three of the big houses wanted to buy it. The auction went for a week, and at the end of Good Friday 2006, I was a published author and they paid me enough money to become a full-time writer. Campbell went on to write five books with Avon, then moved to Hachette for a number of books. She has now moved to self-publishing. The majority of her readership remains in the US. Romance’s capacity to reflect the local concerns of writers and readers, coupled with its responsiveness to global industrial processes, makes it one of the most intriguing genres for considering what “Australian books” might look like in the 21st century. 4. Romance can be socially progressive 

It has been more than 50 years since Germaine Greer, in The Female Eunuch, dismissed romance fiction as women “cherishing the chains of their bondage”. The perception that the genre is conservative persists. But romance writers and readers are more and more concerned with inequality across gender, race and sexuality. They are pushing back against old conventions. In 2018, Kate Cuthbert, then managing editor of Harlequin’s Escape imprint, gave a speech that revealed romance’s internal debates. She addressed the responsibilities of romance fiction writers and publishers in the #MeToo era, arguing that if we want to call ourselves a feminist genre, if we want to hold ourselves up as an example of women being centred, of representing the female gaze, of creating women heroes who not only survive but thrive, then we have to lead. For Cuthbert, this means “breaking up” with some familiar romance fiction tropes, such as the coercion of women: many of the behaviors that are now being called out – sexual innuendo, workplace advances, stolen kisses because the kisser couldn’t resist – feel in many ways like an old friend. They exist in the romance bubble […] and they readily tap into that shared emotional history over and over again in a way that feels familiar and safe. Cuthbert’s compassionate acknowledgement of readers’ and writers’ attachment to established genre norms sits alongside her call for evolution, for renewed attention to “recognising the heroine’s bodily autonomy, her right to decide what happens to it at every point”. Structural hostility in the publishing industry towards people of colour has also become a cause romance writers and readers rally behind. In 2018, Cole McCade, a queer romance writer with a multiracial background, revealed that his editor at Riptide had written to him: We don’t mind POC But I will warn you – and you have NO idea how much I hate having to say this – we won’t put them on the cover, because we like the book to, you know, sell :-(.In the wake of this revelation, multiple authors pulled their books from Riptide, as a further series of revelations about the publisher’s bad behaviour emerged. The following year, the Romance Writers of America examined the past 18 years of its RITA Awards finalists and published the results: no black author had ever won a RITA, and the percentage of black authors represented on shortlists was less than half a per cent. In response, the board published a “Commitment to RITAs and Inclusivity”, in which it called the shocking results a “systemic issue” that “needs to be addressed”. In 2020, they announced they were employing diversity and inclusion experts to help diversify their board, train staff, and help “design and structure” more inclusive membership programs and events, including the annual conference. The Romance Writers of America’s intentions have not always been successful. The ongoing visibility of marginalised groups in the genre continues nonetheless, in part driven by romance’s rapid and robust uptake of digital publishing. Access to publishing platforms has allowed micro-niche genres to proliferate. LGBTQIA+ romance subgenres have become particularly visible: from lesbian military romance to gay alien romance to realist asexual love stories.

Sometimes these stories go spectacularly mainstream, as with C.S. Pacat’s The Captive Prince, a gay erotic fantasy about a prince who is given to the ruler of a neighbouring kingdom as a pleasure slave. Originally self-published, The Captive Prince started as a web serial that gathered 30,000 signed-up fans and spawned Tumblrs dedicated to fan fiction and speculation about where the series would go.The book was rejected by major publishers, so Pacat self-published to Amazon and within 24 hours it had reached number 1 in LGBTQIA+ fiction. A New York agent approached Pacat and secured her a seven-figure publication deal with Penguin. The queer fantasy or paranormal romance has continued to thrive in Pacat’s wake. In our interviews with romance authors, questions of diversity, inclusion, representation and inequity arose again and again. In representation and amplifying marginalised voices, romance has enormous potential to lead the way. 5. Romance has gates that are kept: Romance fiction is more progressive than some stereotypes might suggest, but it is not free from exclusion or discrimination. The genre is influenced by its gatekeepers – human and digital. One form of gatekeeping takes place through the same voluntary associations that nurture community. In late 2019, the board of the Romance Writers of America censured prominent writer of colour, Courtney Milan, suspending her from the organisation for a year and banning her from leadership positions for life. 

The decision was made following complaints by two white women, author Katherine Lynn Davis and publisher Suzan Tisdale, about statements Milan had made on Twitter, including calling a specific book a “fucking racist mess”. This use of the organisation’s formal mechanisms to condemn a woman of colour and support white women was controversial, provoking widespread debate across social media and email lists. Milan had long been an advocate for greater inclusion and diversity within Romance Writers of America and the romance genre. As the Guardian reported, the choice not to discipline anyone for “actually racist speech” made punishing someone for “calling something racist” seem like a particularly troubling double standard. “People saw it as an attempt to silence marginalised people,” observed Milan. The board retracted its decision about Milan. It is difficult, however, to calculate the damage that may have been done to readers and writers of colour in the romance genre world. Conversely, the use of Twitter to extend debate and eventually correct the Romance Writers of America shows change happening, in real time. 

Another form of gatekeeping in romance fiction happens through the same digital platforms that put the genre at the forefront of industry change. Safiya Umoja Noble’s book Algorithms of Oppression demonstrates how apparently neutral automated processes can work against women of colour — for example, the different results that come up from a Google search of “black girls” compared with “white girls.” In the world of romance fiction, Claire Parnell’s research has shown the multiple ways in which the algorithms, moderation processes and site designs of Amazon and Wattpad work against writers of colour. For example, they make use of image-recognition systems that flag romance covers with dark-skinned models as “adult content” and remove them from search results. They can also override the author’s chosen metadata to move books into niche categories where fewer readers will find them, such as “African American romance” rather than the general “romance fiction”. Concerted activism and attention is needed to work against this kind of digital discrimination, which risks replicating the discrimination in traditional publishing. There is no simple way to account for the dynamics of contemporary romance fiction. It is inclusive and policed; it is public and intimate. Its industrial, social and textual dimensions are not static, but interact dynamically, incorporating the possibility of change. Only by understanding these interactions can we gain a complete picture of the work of popular fiction. Contemporary romance fiction is formally tight, emotionally intense and digitally advanced. It’s where the heartbeat of change and action is in book culture. Beth Driscoll, Associate Professor in Publishing and Communications, The University of Melbourne and Kim Wilkins, Professor in Writing, Deputy Associate Dean (Research), Faculty of HASS, The University of Queensland, The University of Queensland This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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The philosophical side to luxury

Luxe Inferno is the third of the luxe trilogy. While your previous book explored the dark side of luxury, this one is a philosophical outlook to luxury. How did the idea of the philosophy of luxury come to you?

• Luxury commentator and columnist, Dr Mahul Brahma, the author of The Luxe trilogy — Decoding Luxe, Dark Luxe and Luxe Inferno. He heads CSR, Corporate Communications and Branding for Tata Group company, Mjunction Services Ltd. He is an award-winning communicator, CSR expert and film-maker. He is an alumnus of St Xavier’s College, MICA, IIM-Calcutta, SSSUTMS and University of Cambridge Judge Business School. He loves to paint and play golf. 
• In this interview with Swetha Amit, Brahma talks about his perception of luxe, millennial millionaires and his learnings after penning down Luxe Inferno. 
• Decoding Luxe, the first book of the Luxe trilogy traces the evolution of luxe or dazzle. While as you rightly said the second one, Dark Luxe, is all about the darkness that hides behind this dazzle. Now, once you have the Ying and Yang covered, I thought the next logical step was a philosophical approach to find the true meaning of luxury. So, in a way, the third book was a natural extension of the thought process. 
• While the three books are very different and independent reads, the over-arching idea of the trilogy is to make luxury inclusive so that more and more people can enjoy and appreciate luxe. My fight has always been to free luxury from the myopic vision of price tags and unaffordability. This myopic notion is created by luxury brands for their profits because unaffordability as well as so-called luxury literature, which is basically product catalogue, aim to alienate people and create aspiration that makes the market. The trilogy aims to break that nexus and bring luxury to everyone. 
• Luxe inferno is an intersection between fact and fiction in other words faction. Was the book intended to belong to this novel genre called faction when you began writing it? 
• I have always been against compartmentalisation, even for genres. Creativity has to be fluid and so I had planned to experiment with the genre with Luxe Inferno. I had a huge assumption behind it – the maturity of my readers. I was confident that my readers will be able to accept this experiment. This trilogy thus has a very interesting mix with the first one being non-fiction, the second one fiction and the final one as ‘faction’. Dr Bibek Debroy, Chairman of PM Economic Advisory Council, had framed this term ‘faction’ while describing the book in his foreword. 
• The luxury industry is set to run on created perceptions. So, what is your perception of luxe? 
• Luxury is all about perceptions. It is all about notional value, the dazzle. Luxe Inferno is a reflection of how my perception of luxe has evolved over the years. Luxe historically has a very exclusive perception that exudes power, for example, only the royalty or rather billionaires can afford it. The next in line will be the royalty-adjacent and the millionaires, and so on. Thus, the perception cascades from there, purely based on economic status. The super-set being the “haves”, excluding the so-called “have-nots”. Over the decades, however, my perception of luxe has evolved and widened with more inclusive perception wherein everyone can enjoy and appreciate the dazzle. 
• The characters of Dante and Virgil are an interesting lot and quite relatable. what led you to it? 
• While the characters in the book are a figment of my imagination, they are certainly not limited by it. There are certain elements and potions mixed from my personal journey in finding the true meaning of luxury. Dante’s affair with luxe has been somewhat similar to that of my own. So initially I was also quite distant from luxury till I encountered my Virgil, who introduced me to this dazzle. So, my life and my quest for luxe have been the inspiration behind the characters Dante and Virgil. 
• It’s easy to get enticed into the world of luxe and feel powerful. Such was the case with Dante, who is otherwise supposed to be an objective person as a journalist. How does one balance this aspect of not falling prey to luxury and remaining objective? 
• Luxe lures its admirers like a seductress, you can’t help falling prey to luxury. The balancing act is impossible at this stage. So, for any luxury admirer, you have to give in completely and fall for charms of luxury. At that point in time, there is no room for objectivity. The lure keeps pulling you inside the luxe inferno very slowly at first and very quickly you are consumed by it. Your objectivity will start setting in only when you hit a bump. If only then you can let objectivity fight the lure, you can strike the right balance and that will give you the escape velocity to move out of the luxe inferno. It is only through these rites of passage that you understand the true meaning of luxury. 
• You have talked about the Catch 22 situation in Chapter 8 where the aspects of faceless brands and brands with a face are discussed. Do you think the value of a brand remains the same even after the face of the brand is gone? 
• In some cases, the value of the brand indeed falls but in many other cases, the value was seen shooting up manifold. In the world of luxury fashion, when the face of the brand is gone, the value has witnessed an erosion almost in all cases except a few like Chanel and Versace. The face becomes so synonymous with the brand that consumers find it very hard to go back to it when the face is no longer is associated with it. Channel and Versace have been able to build a model wherein the faces no longer represent the collections of the fashion houses. These faces remain like mentors who form the ethos of the brand and so consumers do not associate the purchase of the latest collection with say Coco, Chanel or Gianni Versace. 
• On the other hand, if you follow the art scene, then you will know the value of painting increases manifold after the artist is dead. There have been many instances wherein the Sotheby’s of the world have managed to collect hundreds of millions as their price rises manifold after the artist’s death. In the world of art, the brand is worth more when the face is gone. 
• Luxury is usually associated with power, ego, 'flaunt quotient' and supremacy. Amongst these factors, what is it that drives people to it the most? 
• Ego has always been the most powerful driver of luxury. Ego takes over when you start identifying with the luxury brands that you use or aspire to use. Let me share a bit from Decoding Luxe: "Ego is very tricky. It can make you, it can break you. Sometimes you may also like to say like John Lennon: “Part of me suspects that I'm a loser, and the other part of me thinks I'm God Almighty.” Just like with people, brands also have to be careful in dealing with ego." 
• Ego creates brands, makes them reach heights that they could have never reached with humility. 
• My dear Watson, said Sherlock Holmes, I cannot agree with those who rank modesty among the virtues. However, some other times it pulls them down and crushes them. Your brand has to be worth its ego. A luxury car brand once run an ad where the car did not have a fuel tank. The arrogant tagline said: “A car that runs on reputation”.

• You have addressed the concept of millennial millionaires. Considering their impatience and high demands, how do you attract luxury brands to this particular segment? 
• All luxury brands need to take a deep dive into the lives of these millennial millionaires to understand their choices and preferences. The objective of this customer immersion is to understand a very fundamental question – what dazzles them? Given their lack of patience and high demand, no amount of 'old wine in a new bottle' strategy will work for them. What has worked, will work no more. Luxury brands have to bring in a “cool” quotient to woo them. 
• Traditional marketing and conventional ads in Forbes or Fortune will not work. Digital media takes precedence with stories in video formats as the attention span of this generation is reduced to five seconds. Finally, millennial millionaires swear by technology, and thus, the latest in technology carries the most “cool” quotient for them. So, all luxury brands have to keep an eye on the latest technology trends and products that lure these millennials and shape their strategy accordingly. 
• There have been many instances, which showcase the downside of luxury. Even in the case of Dante where falling prey to luxury cost him. Despite this known phenomenon, what is it that evades the sensibilities of people and lures them towards it? 
• The way luxury brands have been showcasing luxury over centuries using every available dream merchant is to be blamed for this. Over centuries these luxury brands have been wielding stories of aspiration wherein they have showcased luxury as something unaffordable, making the market in the process. It is only due to this conditioning that we are made to feel part of an imagined community. So, if I use a luxury product that was earlier used by a King or Queen, I feel a part of that legacy. 
• These dreams have forced people to evade sensitivities, luring them towards luxury. These dreams have forced people to believe that luxury is much more than just expensive goods, they are valued for what they represent – an identity. So, by owning these brands you feel part of that coveted “aspirational” identity of the imagined community. When you have such a deluded view of something it is only natural that you the only way to go will be down, down the circles of hell, the luxe inferno. 
• What have been your learnings after penning down this book? 
• When I had started the book, my assets were my life’s experience, my trysts with luxury and my decade-long research. Writing the book has been a great learning process as it has enriched my thought process and has taken me to nooks and corners that I had never explored earlier. The book has made me shape my notion of luxe and reaffirmed my faith in the inclusiveness of luxury. Luxe Inferno has been an emotional roller coaster ride as the dynamics between Dante and Virgil is nuanced thus demanded a high-level emotional engagement. It has been a very fulfilling exercise for an author.
• Finally, what next in the pipeline? 
• I keep writing, so once a book is over I start working on the next. This keeps me going. So, while I am busy releasing the book or marketing it, I am already working on the next. I always pen my thoughts as and when they come so there is always substantial matter that can be put together in a book. So, the next book should be ready in a few months as I have been working on it from June last year. For the time being, let the title remain a secret.The philosophical side to luxury

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Wars’ bloopers & feats

The books provide a comprehensive narrative of wars and major military engagements that the Indian armed forces have faced in the first 24 years of India’s independence

Dinesh KumarIn recent weeks, two books pertaining to wars fought by Independent India has added to the existing literature on India’s military history. While 1962 — The War That Wasn’t delves exclusively into the Sino-Indian War, the more recent India’s Wars: A Military History 1947-1971 is a narrative of wars and major military engagements that the Indian armed forces have engaged in the first 24 years of India’s independence. The more recent of the two books, India’s Wars: A Military History 1947-1971 is authored by Arjun Subramaniam, a serving Air Vice Marshal. What is unique about this book is that it presents a tri-service narrative of all the wars that occurred in this period starting with the 1947-48 India-Pakistan War over Kashmir. It is the first-ever book to take a joint approach, which is in contrast to other books on India’s wars that are usually centered on an individual service. The 72 pages of endnotes bear testimony to the extensive sourcing of secondary sources while compiling accounts of the various military engagements which include the two prominent nation consolidation operations — Hyderabad (1948) and Goa (1961) — apart from the wars with Pakistan (1947-48, 1965 and 1971) and China (1962). But the book is more than a mere compilation as it is supplemented by primary sources such as interviews with about 30 defence officers, reports prepared by the Ministry of Defence, documents examined in libraries and the historical and pictorial archives of various regiments. It has thus ended up being a hybrid narrative that seeks to interpret and analyse the existing secondary sources to come up with a fresh synthesis of this intense and difficult phase of India’s military history. All this has combined to provide the reader with newer and fresh perspectives to the various battles and operations in the book which examines the entire spectrum of the wars — from the policy and strategic to the tactical and human. On the whole, the book communicates well as it is written in a style that makes the complex subject of India’s wars easy to read and understand and hence accessible to the common man even as it draws a delicate line between the popular narrative and academic research. The book, 1962: The War That Wasn’t, is authored by Shiv Kunal Verma, son of a retired Major General whose battalion, the 2 Rajput, was decimated during India’s humiliating defeat by China. The book provides an interesting insight into the key battles fought in what was then known as NEFA (North East Frontier Agency) and Ladakh. Whether it was Nam Ka Chu, Bum-La, Tawang, Se-La, Thembang or Bomdi La, the book brings out how terribly mismanaged, misdirected, ill-prepared and under-equipped the Indian Army was and yet how soldiers and junior officers fought valiantly and in vain against all odds. Verma joins issue with the Australian-British journalist Neville Maxwell. His book India’s China War was based on the still-classified Henderson-Brookes Bhagat Report, a large section of which he posted on the internet in 2014. However, Verma questions Maxwell’s assertion that India was the aggressor and that Beijing only defended its claims by bringing out that Mao’s army had been planning their offensive for months and that essentially India fell into a Chinese trap. Although the theme is the same, what is unique about Verma’s book on the 1962 War is the descriptive account of the several landmark battles fought by the Indian Army and how China’s well-prepared Peoples Liberation Army (PLA) had prior intelligence on the Indian Army before they launched their massive two-pronged attack in Ladakh and NEFA (Arunachal Pradesh) during which over 2000 soldiers were killed, over 4,000 taken prisoner and an entire Division of over 15,000 soldiers routed. Unlike other books, many of these accounts are those of soldiers, and not just officers, who fought the war. The book is holistic considering that it begins by describing the historical and political events dating back to over a century prior to the conflict, the policy-level political and military blunders committed before the start of the war, thanks to Nehru’s ill-advised and incompetent coterie and also Nehru’s politicisation of the military followed by a descriptive account of the battles including a particularly interesting chapter on ‘When Generals Fail’. To a first-time reader, the book provides a fairly comprehensive account of the war and is easy to read. For a young officer, the book provides a refreshing account of the battles that is likely to contain lessons of tactical value. Considering that the defence community in India is more receptive to revelations about a war in which India fared dismally at every level, the book is full of lessons for policymakers and military leaders alike. Source: http://www.tribuneindia.com/

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That 'on top of the world' feeling

Arunima Sinha, is the first woman amputee to climb Mount Everest. She is currently setting up a free sports academy for the poor and differently- abled. Sinha, a former national volleyball and football player, boarded the Padmavat Express train at Lucknow for Delhi on 11 April 2011, to take an examination to join the CISF. She was pushed out of a general coach of the train by thieves wanting to snatch her bag and gold chain and lost both her legs in the process. Inspired by cricketer Yuvraj Singh, who had successfully battled cancer, "to do something" with her life, she trained and excelled in the basic mountaineering course from the Nehru Institute of Mountaineering, Uttarkashi. She telephoned Bachendri Pal, the first Indian woman to climb Mount Everest, in 2011 and signed up for training under her at the Uttarkashi camp of the Tata Steel Adventure Foundation (TSAF) 2012. Under the guidance of Bachendri Pal, she started her ascent of Mount Everest. After toiling up for 17 hours, Sinha reached the summit of Mount Everest at 10:55 am on 21 May 2013, as a part of the Tata Group-sponsored Eco Everest Expedition, becoming the first woman amputee to scale Everest, a feat that won her praise from then sports minister Jitendra Singh, and an award from Uttar Pradesh chief minister Akhilesh Yadav. She was awarded the Padma Shri , the fourth highest civillian award of India, in 2015. In this interview with Swetha Amit, Sinha talks about her Everest expedition and plans to set up a sports academy for the differently abled.  

• Born Again on The Mountain is a title that spells grit and determination. How did you initially come up with the idea of writing this book?
• The idea occurred to me while I lay on my hospital bed, recovering from the injuries and wounds inflicted on me by the asault on the train. I wanted to document each moment of my journey. Initially I wrote it in Hindi as I am not as proficient in English. Later, Hindustan Times journalist Manish Chandra Pandey helped me translate it into English. Born Again on The Mountain is available in Hindi as well as in Marathi. On 27 November 2015, the Hindi edition of the book was launched by Uttar Pradesh chief minister Akhilesh Yadav and Ratan Tata.
• That horrific incident on the train, changed the course of your life. Such tragedy can either make or break a person. What was your source of strength during that phase?
• My weakest point was the amputation of both my legs, which left me shattered. However, I decided to convert this weakness into my biggest strength, which I managed to do. As a saying goes, 'when one door of happiness shuts, another opens.' I believe that when God takes a part of your body for good, he blesses you with another. If one door closed for me, I made sure that I opened nine other doors.
• You had initially received a lot of support and coverage from the media. Later, the same media who stood by you branded you as an opportunist and questioned the credibility of your story of your accident. How did you handle this sudden shift in attitude? Actually I do not blame the media. They said whatever they had to say. If you consider an ECG, a straight line indicates you are no more. However, if it goes up and down, it means that you are alive. I consider such instances as the ups and downs in my life which means that I am alive. Considering how I almost lost my life, I regarded this a blessing. 
• What inspired you to scale Mt Everest? : I decided to take up this challenge from my hospital bed. An article in a newspaper triggered this inspiration. I immediately asked my bhaisaab (brother-in-law) if I could actually scale mountains. He responded in the affirmative saying that if you have the passion, grit and determination, you can reach great heights.
• When you initially took up the challenge to scale Mt Everest, how did you handle the cynical reactions of people around you? Some of them had even termed you insane? If you look at history, whoever society has mocked at, are the ones who have been successful. As Mahatma Gandhi has quoted, 'First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.' So I made sure I focused on my goal, worked towards it gradually and when I actually accomplished this mission, the same people who called me crazy were the first ones to applaud and shower praises upon me.
• At the Hillary step, which is cited to be one of the most difficult stretches of Mt. Everest, you were losing energy, hope and support. Even one of the leaders refused your request for support. What kept you going even at this stage when the odds were stacked against you?
• This particular juncture was the most painful part as I was bleeding considerably. However, I went with a mind-set of wanting to instill pride among people. There were two choices that lay ahead of me. To turn back and go and lead an ordinary life. Or, scale Mt. Everest - the ultimate destination that would make the whole world proud of me. I chose the latter to channel all my energies into making it to the top.
• It is said that nature offers some vital lessons to mankind. What did you learn from this entire expedition of being in the midst of powerful forces of nature?
• From nature, I learnt how to achieve my goal and also remain humble after that. In mountaineering I realized that you cannot conquer mountains with your head raised high. With every step you take as you climb higher, you tend to bend your head down. Nature offers great lessons in humility.
• After your horrific ordeal, do you think the government has managed to implement better safety measures for women in trains?
• Well there is a lot that can actually be done for the safety of women. However, I don't want to blame anyone as it's not practical to put up security measures behind each and every woman. So I will just say that each girl should be made stronger in order to combat such untoward incidents. My sincere request to both the central and state governments is that they should make self-defence and martial arts mandatory for all women in schools. Had I trained in karate, perhaps I wouldn't have lost my legs today.
• You had plans to set up a free sports academy for the poor and differently-abled persons. How has the support and response been so far? It has been good so far. I have now taken up land, so I can say that the sprouts have grown from the idea that was seeded in my head sometime back. I have 100 per cent confidence that it will materialise and grow further. I can forsee players like Sania Mirza and Mary Kom emerging from this sports academy.
• What are your future plans? Out of seven continents, I have scaled peaks in four continents already and I hope to do the remaining three successfully. In fact I am leaving to South America in January. Then I will head to Antarctica and then to North America. It is my personal dream to do a mission-seven summit [scaling the seven highest peaks in the seven continents]. My other dream, is to make this sports academy a success.

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Technology-wise, worldly-wiser

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Strategy Rules: Five Timeless Lessons from Bill Gates, Andy Grove and Steve Jobs, by David B Yoffie and Michael A Cusumano, Pages 272. Rs 1,347

Gaurav Kanthwal: Strategy Rules establishes five commonalities in the professional lives of Bill Gates, Andy Grove and Steve Jobs and encases them as universal formulae to become an effective master strategist. Harvard Business School professor David B Yoffie and Michael A Cusumano from the MIT Sloan School of Management have not gone about crunching extraordinary attributes of the three CEOs but focused on the ways they took to build an edifice for Microsoft, Intel and Apple, respectively. The authors have had the advantage of knowing the big shots personally. Their research includes interviews of close associates, colleagues and rivals, access to internal memos, presentations and e-mails. They are a privy to the water-cooler talks of these organisations. All of it is showing in the book. Normally, comparative analysis is the procedure followed to study two or more subjects, but here it is a comparison of ideas that are formed after closely observing the highs and lows of their life. By the time the 254-page book comes to an end, a clear image of each subject and how he achieved success is formed in the reader’s mind. Behind the façade of a tech geek
(Bill  Gates), the engineer (Andy Grove) and an aesthete (Steve Jobs), there is a deep understanding of software as a technology and business; intense commitment to instill engineering-like discipline in management; and a unique understanding of product design. Their philosophies have been tersely conveyed. Gates mantra to success is simple, ‘Let’s embrace what’s been done well by our competitors and go beyond that.’ Andy Grove believed, ‘Execution is God’ and the philosopher in Steve Jobs is guided by, ‘God is in the details.’ These could well have been the punch lines of Microsoft, Intel and Apple. Inspirational figures are expected to deliver quotable quotes also. This book fulfills those expectations by quoting other sources. There is Wayne Gretzky, ice hockey great, saying, ‘The job is to skate where the puck’s going, not where it’s been’; metaphysical poet John Donne writes, ‘No man is an island, entire of itself, every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main (Mediatation XVII). Though Gates, Grove and Jobs were perceived as innocent and genial in the outer world, inside the dog-eat-dog universe of high technology, they have been portrayed as mean, wily, and ruthless bullies. Both Gates and Jobs loved to indulge in one-upmanship and left no opportunity to humiliate their rivals within and outside their organisations. Gates and Jobs were hated figures in their organisations, the authors claim. Steve Jobs used to remove the license plate of his Mercedes and park it at the space reserved for physically
challenged in Apple’s parking lot. Alluding to Microsoft’s characteristic sloppiness in its products, Jobs snide would be, ‘If something isn’t right, you can’t just ignore it and say you’ll fix it later. That’s what other companies (read Microsoft) do.” The chapter 4 Exploit Leverage and Power — Play Sumo Judo and Sumo is worth reading for the predatory and domineering skills of the CEOs. Often strategy and tactics are mixed up, but here Gates, Grove and Jobs have elucidated the difference by referring to the former as a playing field and the latter as how you play the game. As a validation of strategy rules, the authors say that they find a reflection of these master-strategists in Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg (a hacker, Harvard dropout like Gates), Google’s Larry Page (trained in science and an engineer like Grove) and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos (a compulsive consumer-oriented non-conformist like Jobs) in the current scenario. The notes and index section at the back of the book have been prepared meticulously by the authors but the book is tediously repetitive. Occasionally, a grammatical error too can be spotted in a book published by Harper Collins.Source: Article

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Amazing Me: A yoga book for kids

We all know that it’s never too early to get your kids reap the benefits of yoga. But it can be challenging to get a kid interested in learning it. “Lie on your back, knees bent, feet flat on the floor hips distance apart. Listen to your breathing and observe the cycle of breathing…” This may seem confusing to a kid trying to learn a thing or two about yoga. You might hear them giggle because they don’t understand, while some might chuckle not about the lesson, but because their interest is caught by something else. Imagine storytelling and play as a means of getting the kids to engage and learn, with mooing and other sounds that make lessons more fascinating. Nica Hechanova, a certified yoga teacher for four years, graphic artist, illustrator and founding member of Kids Yoga Philippines, created a book that will cater to children aged 3-12. Amazing Me is a book that captured Hechanova’s way of teaching yoga to kids as an imaginative and playful story. “High, higher, I soar! I am an eagle! My arms are wings I spread wide, I glide slowly down, I am light.” It is easy to imagine how a child will respond to these words. The verse spoke of the pose “Standing Forward Bend.” In the book, it is illustrated with colorful clouds, the sun, an eagle gliding, and a kid doing the yoga pose.  The book can be used by parents and teachers to engage and connect with kids. “Amazing Me inspired me to incorporate yoga in the classroom. My kids love copying the poses because they feel challenged. Guided by adults, they feel like experts, “ says Rodita Lemon Salonga, an international school teacher for Lower School. Amazing Me is composed of 11 yoga poses that are easily interpreted to kids via fun descriptions and colorful graphics. At the back of the book, parents and teachers can find a guide for getting into the poses. Amazing Me is available at Urban Ashram Manila branches, BGC, Brixton Street in Kapitolyo, and at 6780 Ayala Avenue in Makati. Source: Article

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‘Romantic comedies are difficult to write’

He wrote his first novel Just Friends at the age of 17. And now, at 22, Sumrit Shahi has written his third novel Never Kiss Your Best Friend. He is one of the youngest scriptwriters in the Indian television industry and currently writing the shows, Sadda Haq and Million Dollar Girl on Channel V, India.

• Which genre draws you the most as a reader and a writer? Broadly, the genre of relationship drama. Relationships and emotions intrigue and I’m a sucker for such writings.
• Does inspiration strike you at the oddest of moments and places?  I’m pretty much the coffee shop voyeur, overhearing conversations and issues being discussed, you’ll find me lurking in the smoking lounge in a club as unfiltered stories and smoke flow around. Yes, inspiration does strike me at odd places, like one night a friend of mine drunk-dialled me at 3 am and told me about how he had kissed his best friend and it was going to be all super awkward now. Instead of consoling him, I cajoled the story out of him, I had the idea for my next book.
• A fictional character close to your heart... Sutter Keely from the novel The Incredible Now. The character is so real, charming yet so painfully flawed. He’s a 17-year-old alcoholic who wants everyone around him to be happy and live in the moment even as he escapes his own battles. He’s definitely not the ideal hero but he’s so real and that’s what is important. 
• Who among the pantheon of writers (past/present) would you like to have coffee with?  I really want to meet this young adult writer called David Levithan. He co-writes with John Green and has a terrific sense of plot and flawed characters. Also he writes in this zone of quirky, witty, romantic comedies, which I believe is very difficult to write. 
• What is your antidote for writer’s block? Just stop thinking about writing for a bit. Don’t be too hard on yourself. Go out. And then just dive back into writing again. Has worked well for me, till date. And oh, reading helps too.‘Source: The Asian Age

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An American cow’s Indian dream

Sarju Kaul: Living in India has made our encounters with cows and bulls rather commonplace. Almost everyone has a favourite story about their close brush with the sacred bovine while driving on roads, walking on footpaths, or just in the vicinity of the garbage dumps. Despite these close encounters, have any of us ever wondered how cows view us humans — engrossed in driving, honking, phones, and basically just ourselves. An unexpected comic take on a cow’s life, her view of humans and their obsessions and her ensuing adventures by Hollywood actor David Duchovny, famous for his role as FBI special agent Fox Mulder in television show The X-Files, is an amusing read. The coming of age book is written in a first-person narrative by Elsie Bovary, the happy milk cow with horns (at least on the book cover), who decides to flee to India from an upstate New York farm on discovering industrial meat farms. On her journey to safety in India, Elsie is accompanied by a pig called Shalom and Tom the turkey, who too are seeking safe havens in Israel and Turkey. Elsie, who has opinion on just about everything, from end-of-the-chapter cliff-hangers to writing in screenplay form to pop culture and pitching the “memoir” to Hollywood producers, is emphatic in her opinions. “Most people think cows can’t think. Hello. Let me rephrase that, most people think cows can’t think, and have no feelings. Hello, again. I’m a cow, my name is Elsie, yes, I know. And that’s no bull,” she writes in her introduction. ”See what I did there? I left you on a poetic cliffhanger. And a chapter title again. Gives you a chance to take a break, maybe dog-ear a page, get something to eat, and when you come back the chapter heading will refocus you on the story. Like a Jedi, I tell you, a Jedi.” The sheltered cow on the milk farm is happy providing milk for humans, but cannot get over the weirdness of humans having cow milk. “Humans love us. Or I thought so, we all thought so. They love our milk. Now personally, I think it’s a little weird to drink another animal’s milk. You don’t see me walking up to some human lady who just gave birth, saying, ‘Yo, can I get a taste?’ Weird, right? Not gonna happen. It’s kinda nasty. But that’s why you love us. The ol’ milk. Leche,” Smart Elsie does not wait for the reader to make an inevitable comparison with George Orwell’s Animal Farm and blockbuster Hollywood film Babe, but jumps right in with references to allegories and talking animals. Fifty-four-year-old Duchovny, who is launching his debut album Hell or High Water soon, first wrote his debut novel as a screenplay for an animated film. The English literature student from Princeton and Yale Universities revealed in a recent interview to The Guardian that he turned the screenplay into a novel when it was passed over by producers as it involved a Jewish pig in Israel. Elsie, who wants Jennifer Lawrence to play her in a film, writes that her editor, who pitched the “memoir” as a children’s book, told her, “Sugar, there’s no way Hollywood will make a movie about a Jewish pig in Israel being stoned by Muslims. Too many hot buttons. Too niche. Too indie. We have to think tent pole. Not Sony Classics. Can’t the pig go to New York, you know, and meet a girl? Kind of like Babe meets My Big Fat Greek Wedding?” An easy and quick read, the book subtly makes a statement about the treatment of farm animals and the voracious appetite of humans. “Humans will eat almost anything, if you put a little salt and butter on it. And butter is made from our milk, It makes me feel oddly complicit and guilty,” says Elsie. “Humans have to earn the right to be called animals again.” Source: Asian Age

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The Top 10 Cities in Literature

PW - Mark Binelli | Nov 09, 2012": Mark Binelli's Detroit City Is the Place to Be is a nuanced portrait of a once-great American industrial city's fall into decay, and its recent, tentative renaissance. Binelli, also a novelist and contributing editor for Rolling Stone, tells us the 10 cities that have received the finest treatment in literature, and the books to read for each. When I started thinking about my favorite cities in literature, I quickly realized I’d need to impose a minimal number of arbitrary constraints on the game or otherwise risk burying myself. And so: no to the excruciatingly obvious (Ulysses, A Moveable Feast), and no repeat cities, either (with the exception of New York, because, come on, it’s New York; henceforth this exemption shall be referred to as “the Joseph Mitchell Clause”), and my list would be divided equally between works of fiction and nonfiction. Also, the city in question, and this particularly applies to the novels, needed to be more than mere setting. Whatever that means; it’s fairly subjective, I know. As annoying as it can be when people refer to a city as “another character” in a book, I guess that comes closest to the sense of this last criterion.Here’s the list, in alphabetical order:

Watermark by Joseph Brodsky - A slender meditation on Venice by the exiled Russian poet, filled with lines like this: “‘Depict! Depict!’ [the morning light] cries to you, either mistaking you for some Canaletto or Carpaccio or Guardi, or because it doesn’t trust your retina’s ability to retain what it makes available... Perhaps art is simply an organism’s reaction against its retentive limitations.”

Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino - Calvino’s books were some of the first that made me want to write fiction. Much later, I mined Invisible Cities, one of his masterpieces — a dialogue between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan that’s also a series of prose poems about the metaphorical potential of the city — for the epigraph to Detroit City Is the Place to Be, Detroit being a city that’s long existed as a sort of (to borrow the apt phrasing of one headline writer) “Metaphoropolis.”

City of Quartz by Mike Davis - Davis has written extensively, and brilliantly, about Los Angeles, butCity of Quartz, for my money, is his greatest book about one of my favorite American cities. As simultaneously visionary and paranoid as a Philip K. Dick novel, it is populated with an eccentric cast of characters ranging from L. Ron Hubbard to Ornette Coleman.

Miami by Joan Didion - Speaking of California, Didion remains unmatched when she’s writing about her home state in essential collections like Slouching Towards Bethelem and The White Album. But it’s so much fun watching her cruel precision trained upon wildly unfamiliar terrain, like, say, Miami Vice-era Miami — oh, don’t you wish she and Michael Mann had taken a breakfast meeting at the Sunset Marquis in the Eighties? — a city where, she notes acidly in the book’s opening lines, “Havana vanities come to dust.”

The Jew of New York by Ben Katchor - An overstuffed, Pynchonesque graphic novel by one of the medium’s best, set, as all of Katchor’s comics are, in a quasi-historical Gotham(ish) fantasia that will make you nostalgic for block-long button districts that probably never actually existed. His two collections of Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer strips cover similar terrain, and are also highly recommended.

City Primeval by Elmore Leonard - Detroit! As you can imagine, picking one Motor City book wasn’t easy for me. I almost went with Getting Ghost, Luke Bergmann’s account of his harrowing embed with a pair of teenage drug dealers, which is as visceral and moving as any season of The Wire. But this Elmore Leonard novel perfectly captures the bad old Detroit of a different era (the late Seventies), and citing it gives me the opportunity to ask: why hasn’t any filmmaker adapted this book as a period piece yet?!

Leaving the Atocha Station by Ben Lerner - I spent a summer living in Barcelona, but only a few days in Madrid, and never loved it. I did love this debut novel by a young poet, though, which takes place at the time of the 2004 Madrid subway bombings and channels W.G. Sebald in way that’s far more interesting, for my money, than another Sebaldian homage published the same year, Teju Cole’s Open City.

Between Meals by A.J. Liebling - Liebling on New York would have been a solid choice, of course —and if you’re in the mood for that, definitely check out the longtime New Yorker staffer’s Back Where I Came From and The Telephone Booth Indian — but I had to go with his Paris eating memoir. Bringing a true glutton’s zeal to his task, Liebling lovingly conjures favorite bistros of his youth and describes a dozen (“or possibly eighteen”) oysters and a thick marrow-topped steak as a “sensibly light meal.”

A Map of Tulsa by Benjamin Lytal - I had a chance to read an early copy of this debut novel, out next year, and set in the only city on this list I’ve never visited. I can’t say the book will make you rush out and book a flight to Oklahoma, but it’s a wonderful portait of a particular time in a young person’s life and how the most aching significance can be projected onto a place (like Tulsa), simply because it used to be yours.

Up in the Old Hotel by Joseph Mitchell - The Master; there’s really no better book about New York. The opening sentence of the title essay —“Every now and then, seeking to rid my mind of thoughts of death and doom, I get up early and go down to Fulton Fish Market”—might call to mind the first few lines uttered by Ishmael. Which is fitting: taken in total, the stories in Up in the Old Hotel comprise a tour de force as vital, eccentric and distinctively American as Moby-Dick.Posted by Source: Bookman Beattie

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Book Review: Curiosity

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(image by Andre Martins de Barros)

Curiosity by Joan Thomas. If you know anything about the history of earth science, you will know the name Lyme Regis, neither as English beach resort, nor as the set of Persuasion but as cliffs which were key to early 19th century understanding of the very nature of fossils, and the beginning of paleontology.Curiosity is a novel based on the life of Mary Anning, "fossilist", dealer and paleontologist. Anning was an outsider in every way - a working class woman, a religious dissenter, whose natural intelligence, insight, sense of injustice and largely self-taught knowledge set her apart. At a time when women were not even allowed to attend the meetings of the Geological Society of London, let alone belong to the Society, some upper class gentlemen-scientists seemed barely capable of acknowledging the daughter of a cabinet maker as a fellow human being (citing the gentlemen who purchased her fossil finds, rather than name her), most of her siblings did not even survive childhood and geologists were still trying to explain dinosaur fossils in terms of the Biblical flood story, Anning single-handedly found, identified and excavated dinosaur, fish and marine fossils (the first ichthyosaur skeleton to be correctly identified, the first two plesiosaur skeletons ever found, the first pterosaur skeleton located outside Germany). Other real-life characters appear in the novel, including, Henry De la Beche, William Buckland, William Conybeare and Elizabath Philpot - all of whom owe certainly their fossil collections, and some of their fame and success in science to the discoveries of Anning. This is a novel, and a love story. Joan Thomas relied on primary sources which allude to a secret of Anning's, possibly thwarted love. She takes the liberty to interpret this as a love between Mary and Anning's great supporter and friend, who eulogized her to the Geological Society, Henry De la Beche. De la Beche was a bit of an iconoclast himself - expelled from military college for insubordination, willing to question received wisdom and be an actual scientist, rather than a theological apologist, and able to recognize genius in a woman, and a working-class woman at that. Nontheless, he also was a plantation -and slave-owner in Jamaica, for all his otherwise progressive beliefs. It makes for a rich story, of memorable, rounded characters, in a time of change and discovery. Source: Maqpie And Whiskeyjack

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