Azadi, Arundhati Roy

I’m currently reading Sarah Mesle’s awesome book Reasons and Feelings with a bunch of colleagues (you know me, I love a book club) and one of the (many) cool things about it is that it makes you think about the different styles and modalities of sharing ideas, and their varying durations and speeds. Lectures are odd in that they’re seemingly meant to be occasionally and ephemeral, yet they are also often repeated, and sometimes published! Even more odd if you listen to them in audiobook form, as I did with this book — but read by someone else.

Anyhow, this collection is especially interesting as a series of freeze frames, or time capsules, within a longer arc of thought. You get to see Arundhati Roy grappling with current events, folding the constantly changing present into this cumulative accretion of knowledge. It’s somewhat repetitive as a collection, but then you’ll get these absolute knock-out lines that make it all worth it.

It’s a hard book, in that it deals directly with many of the most upsetting and horrific aspects of the present (and the past) and is unsparing (though thankfully not sensationalizing) in its insistence that we reckon with the open brutality of our world and its political realities. That people can turn violently on their neighbors, murderous mobs storming through villages — we know it happens but we rarely seem able to recognize that it can happen (and has happened) anywhere, including where we live.