I had to combine the reviews for these two books because 1. I read one and listened to the other concurrently, and 2. their power only multiplied in combination. The two books examine inequality in elite colleges in America at two different stages — the admissions process and actual campus life, but have much in common. Most importantly, they illustrate how the same power structures reproduce across stages of college life. …

I dragged my feet on reading Becoming because I assumed that it would be like any other celebrity memoir — hackneyed writing in big font with many cliches and platitudes, written to sell to a large audience of already committed fans. I was pleasantly surprised to find that I was totally wrong. Becoming is an honestly and empathetically written book — Michelle Obama exhibits a surprising amount of frankness when discussing her struggles, skepticism of Barack’s political runs, the office of the First Lady et cetera.

The book truly shines in the first two thirds, when Obama writes about her life growing up in Chicago’s South Side, her family’s struggles, her father’s illness, her time at Princeton and Harvard, and then as a corporate lawyer till she met Barack. I appreciated the honesty with which she wrote about her marital troubles, as in moments when she noted that Barack would find time to go to the gym while she was overwhelmed managing her job and raising her daughters. Her admission of her skepticism regarding Barack’s political campaigns was refreshing and unexpected, as well as her account of participating in his 2008 Presidential campaign and even there, feeling like she wasn’t being given adequate resources and support till she advocated for herself. …

This book left me with a lot of thoughts. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism is complex and I had to listen to the 24 hour audiobook at basically 1–1.2x speed (I usually listen to books at 2x) which meant it took me nearly four weeks to get through it all.

Zuboff is an academic and she doesn’t back off from using novel terminology or referencing obscure theory. She argues, and I agree, that given the phenomena she is describing as so novel, our lexicon needs to adapt accordingly. …

The Buddha in the Attic is a unique book — there is no single perspective or central cast of characters. Instead, we get to experience the lives of Japanese mail-order brides from their ship voyages to America till the second World War and their experiences of internment. The prose is extremely lyrical, with gems like “And so we learned to think twice before saying yes and looking into another man’s eyes, because in America you got nothing for free.” Though I was apprehensive about the writing style (in the anonymised plural perspective) at first, it soon grew on me.

It’s clearly evident that Otsuka has done tremendous amounts of research, but we don’t really get to experience much of that in depth. The material in this book could’ve easily been a full-fledged historical saga running into several hundreds of pages. However, by adopting the plural perspective Otsuka describes in a sentence or two, experiences that would’ve occupied entire pages in more conventionally written books. …

Daily Rituals is an interesting book that outlines the daily routines of people who are famous for their creative work. I turned to the book in the middle of quarantine season, when my own days had started to feel quite unstructured and I had hoped to find inspiration to organize my life in favor of my creative pursuits.

I largely skimmed this book, reading the entries of the people I was interested (mostly authors I had read, architects, and artists). I think the concept is interesting and I am sure the blog it was adapted from was fascinating. …

Wuhan Diary is a collection of blog posts written by Chinese author Fang Fang, over the course of 60 days of Wuhan’s citywide quarantine starting January 25, 2020 during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. The blog posts were originally written in Chinese and shared on social media platforms like WeChat and Weibo as an account of Fang Fang’s daily life under quarantine. …

Having spent the better part of the last four years neck-deep in statistics, I didn’t expect learn much new material from this book but I was pleasantly surprised. In The Art of Statistics. Spiegelhalter covers all the topics you would expect to see in an introductory statistics lecture, but without agonising numbers and equations. Instead, Spiegelhalter focuses on helping the reader build an intuition for the topics through case studies and visualizations. …

I am a big fan of Ezra Klein’s podcast and listening to Why We Are Polarized in the audiobook format made the book feel like a 7-hour long podcast episode.

In the book, Klein provides a detailed history of polarization in American politics, focussing on changes taking place during the 20th and 21st centuries. He draws on research in political science and psychology to explore how identities and political values align/diverge, and how the current moment in American politics is different from/similar to all the others. His central argument is essentially that the last two decades have given rise to “political mega-identities” where the members of the two parties are more sorted not just in political preferences, but also socio-demographic aspects such as race, religion, sexuality etc. but also more mundane identities such as eating habits (vegans are more likely to be democrats). …