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Murtaza Hussain
@mazmhussain
For more than a decade I’ve worked at a job where I got free books. I could either expense them or contact the publisher and they’d send me a copy of any book I wanted. Sometimes they’d even invite me over and give me a bag and let me walk around their storehouse taking whichever books I liked. The first time this happened I felt like I was a kid in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. I’m leaving this and moving on to new projects and am fine with that. This also means no more free book bonanza; but I think that might be a good thing. When you have unlimited reading material sometimes you start going for quantity over depth. Now that normal scarcity has returned, I’m going to finish my unread stack and then go and reread all my old favorites. I want them to really sink in deeply like books only can after many readings. Most of all, I’m going to reread my old V.S. Naipaul books — my problematic yet favorite English writer. My take on him: https://unherd.com/2021/11/vs-naipaul-was-no-victim/
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HH
@hamud
post bookshelf
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Aaina
@aaina
amazing this was great.
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Omar
@dromar.eth
Such an underrated writer. Love the piece. I read Naipaul in high school after finishing Lapierre’s Freedom at Midnight which had a much more positive take on independence, especially perceived through their close relationship with the Nehrus. Was my grandfathers rec. It led to a reflection on how much the new post-colonial world was unprepared for independence both in governance but also as a collective psyche, especially the Indian and Muslim worlds. A few years later, I spent a couple years living in the Caribbean and revisited Naipaul. It amazed me how much he was loved and taken to heart by the West Indies despite his conflicted history with the region. Every secondary student there read Naipaul as their own.
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