10 Books : With lenses

For this post I have put together a list of 10 books, which from my point of view, have a distinct lens in each of them. (I am hoping somebody will get the pun) Looking at the world through a lens is a softer way to interact in an ever-growing opinionated landscape. It is accommodative and one can stand firm in the way one is looking at the world, simultaneously considering that there are equally engaging ways to view the world. Lenses can help us to write an essay or a book, do a research thesis or a phd, put a lecture together or have a meaningful discussion with a friend. It can work at different scales. I think this trait I carry comes from my training as a student of history and theory. This approach did not arrive in a straightforward and obvious manner but in a gentle and laboured way. Here I am sharing a list of books which have distinct lenses which hold the structure of the book. The lens has allowed the author to engage with their field (many a time across many disciplines) with an oblique and absorbing approach.

As a disclaimer this list contains books I have read many times, read once, yet reading and yet to read. Putting the list is openly committing myself to finish reading all these books soon.

Here is short description / extract from the book, which give a quick glimpse of the book (all emphasis mine) :

1. Travel Through South Indian Kitchens, Nao Saito :In this book the lens of the kitchen becomes a wonderful point of entry into insightful cultural study. Nao Saito uses her architectural training to draw the kitchens she visits. The kitchens become a portal for the author to understand a contrasting culture, which is very different from her own. Nao Saito blends texts, drawings, photos. She writes of her experience of being in the kitchen with the person cooking. The book also contains the recipe of the dish which was made during her visit. The photos are sort of a collage of the event of cooking. The beautiful drawings capture the mood of the place.

Extract from the Introduction:
“This book is the result of that three month stay. In these pages, I’ve tried to capture the air I breathed during that time, but through a particular lens: the kitchen. The idea to focus my experience around kitchens arose serendipitously, when I walked into the cooking area of my apartment in Chennai. It was familiar, but also quite strange. I’ve always been interested in food and kitchen tools and this, combined with my interest in architecture and people, gave rise to the idea behind this project: I wanted to travel through a place not by exploring its public spaces, but through the heart of people’s homes -their kitchens. I wanted to focus not only on architecture, but also capture a lived sense of space, cooking, people and conversation. For a traveller, a household kitchen in an alien land is a remote place, something she rarely encounters. Yet each of us has a kitchen at home, and we associate it with distinctive scents, tastes, conversation, laughter, and perhaps also solitude. And this makes it possible for us to actually reach out and try to understand what is going on in a kitchen in a faraway land. “

2. A Burglars Guide to the City, Geoff Manaugh : This book has a delightful structure : architecture and city seen through the eyes of a burglar. If you are an architect + fan of heist movies (like me), this book is a perfect companion.

From the Back Cover:
“Studying architecture the way a burglar would, Geoff Manaugh takes readers through walls, down elevator shafts, into panic rooms, and out across the rooftops of an unsuspecting city. At the core of A Burglar’s Guide to the City is an unexpected and thrilling insight: how any building transforms when seen through the eyes of someone hoping to break into it. Encompassing nearly 2,000 years of heists and break-ins, the book draws on the expertise of reformed bank robbers, FBI Special Agents, private security consultants, the L.A.P.D. Air Support Division, and architects past and present. Whether picking locks or climbing the walls of high-rise apartments, finding gaps in a museum’s surveillance routine or discussing home invasions in ancient Rome, A Burglar’s Guide to the City ensures readers will never enter a bank again without imagining how to loot the vault or walk down the street without planning the perfect getaway.“

3. Following Fish; Travels Around in the West Coast, Samanth Subramaniam : This is the key book which led to the curating this post. A book with a seemingly simple title. It starts with eating fish and i assumed the whole book will be about eating fish. But then the book deviates into more delicious territories. It gives a cross section of costal culture in India. As a creative process too, this book gives me so much hope. The hope to grow a rich and layered narrative from a seemingly undemanding and elementary start with a fish.

Extract From the Publishers Note :
” In a coastline as long and diverse as India’s, fish inhabit the heart of many worlds – food of course, but also culture, commerce, sport, history and society. Journeying along the edge of the peninsula, Samanth Subramanian reports upon a kaleidoscope of extraordinary stories. In nine essays, Following Fish conducts rich journalistic investigations: among others, of the famed fish treatment for asthmatics in Hyderabad; of the preparation and the process of eating West Bengal’s prized hilsa; of the ancient art of building fishing boats in Gujarat; of the fiery cuisine and the singular spirit of Kerala’s toddy shops; of the food and the lives of Mumbai’s first peoples; of the history of an old Catholic fishing community in Tamil Nadu; of the hunt for the world’s fastest fish near Goa. Throughout his travels, Subramanian observes the cosmopolitanism and diverse influences absorbed by India’s coastal societies, the withdrawing of traditional fishermen from their craft, the corresponding growth of fishing as pure and voluminous commerce, and the degradation of waters and beaches from over-fishing. Pulsating with pleasure, adventure and discovery, and tempered by nostalgia and loss, Following Fish speaks as eloquently to the armchair traveller as to lovers of the sea and its lore.”

4. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing : In this book the anthropologist Tsing weaves a narrative on the challenges of capitalism through the story of the surviving trade of single species of the mushroom.

From the cover
” Matsutake is the most valuable mushroom in the world—and a weed that grows in human-disturbed forests across the northern hemisphere. Through its ability to nurture trees, matsutake helps forests to grow in daunting places. It is also an edible delicacy in Japan, where it sometimes commands astronomical prices. In all its contradictions, matsutake offers insights into areas far beyond just mushrooms and addresses a crucial question: what manages to live in the ruins we have made? A tale of diversity within our damaged landscapes, The Mushroom at the End of the World follows one of the strangest commodity chains of our times to explore the unexpected corners of capitalism. Here, we witness the varied and peculiar worlds of matsutake commerce: the worlds of Japanese gourmets, capitalist traders, Hmong jungle fighters, industrial forests, Yi Chinese goat herders, Finnish nature guides, and more. These companions also lead us into fungal ecologies and forest histories to better understand the promise of cohabitation in a time of massive human destruction. By investigating one of the world’s most sought-after fungi, The Mushroom at the End of the World presents an original examination into the relation between capitalist destruction and collaborative survival within multispecies landscapes, the prerequisite for continuing life on earth.“

In another place : Anna Tsing writes “My favourite thing about anthropology is its ability to go back and forth between what you rightly identify as ‘ordinary, lived detail’ and ‘abstract frames of intelligibility’. To me, it’s the best gift of the discipline, the feature I am most passionate about sharing with my students. The best anthropology does not merely add scraps of information to the stockpile of scholarly knowledge; it asks big questions. At the same time, abstract thought alone is not enough. It is in the encounter between the details of life and the big questions that anthropologists find their insights”

This book is a manifestation of this idea.

5. Manual of Section, Paul Lewis, Marc Tsurumaki, and David J. Lewis : This book contains architectural sections of sixty three significant built projects. This book has been instrumental to me in the studio on how to think about and explore sections – “which is often understood as a reductive drawing type produced at the end of the design process” . This book has allowed me to discuss architectural form and experience in dynamic and constructive way.

From the Introduction : “What are the different types of section, and what do they do? How does one produce those sections? Why would one choose to use one configuration of section over another? This book explores these questions and provides a conceptual, material, and instrumental framework for understanding section as a means to create architecture…forces. Moreover. the section is the site where space, form, and material intersect with human experience establishing most clearly the relationship of the body to the building as well as the interplay between architecture and its context.“

6. Architecture and Movement; the Dynamic Experience of Buildings and Landscapes, Peter Blundell Jones, Mark Meagher : Similar to the Manual of Section book. Here movement becomes lens to understand architecture. When it comes to movement, generally the book is heavy on Corbusier and ‘Architectural Promenade’ but this book goes beyond that to Japanese tea ceremonies and multiple situations and theories on movement in architecture.

From the Introduction :
“The experience of movement, of moving through buildings, cities, landscapes and in everyday life, is the only involvement most individuals have with the built environment on a daily basis. User experience is so often neglected in architectural study and practice. Architecture and Movement tackles this complex subject for the first time, providing the wide range of perspectives needed to tackle this multidisciplinary topic. Organised in four parts, it:

• documents the architect’s, planner’s or designer’s approach, looking at how they have sought to deploy buildings as a promenade and how they have thought or written about it;
• concentrates on the individual’s experience, and particularly on the primacy of walking which engages other senses besides the visual;
• engages with society and social rituals, and how mutually we define the spaces through which we move, both by laying out routes and boundaries and by celebrating thresholds;
• analyses how we deal with promenades that are not experienced directly but via other media, such as computer models, drawings, film and television.”

7. Masala Lab: The Science of Indian Cooking, Krish Ashok : This book is just brilliant. Looks at Indian Food through the lens of science. And why? – Krish Ashok in his own words from the introduction

“By treating our culinary tradition as something sacred, artistic and borderline spiritual, we are doing it a grave disservice. Let me take music as a metaphor here. Indian classical music, one of the most sophisticated artistic traditions in the world, has, I would argue, suffered from the lack of documentation and archiving. In fact, the insistence on purely oral traditions of transmission of knowledge have ended up making the art a very elitist affair not accessible to the wider population. Western music, in contrast, has a simple, visual system of notation that is able to accurately capture every nuance. Because of this, we are able to perform a Bach concerto in exactly the same way as he intended in the eighteenth century. As an amateur musician myself, my teachers would often tell me that Indian classical music cannot be described and documented because its nuances are beyond the ability of language to describe it with fidelity. With due respect, I think that’s bullshit. What we are doing with food is rather similar. By not using the tools and language of modern science and engineering to continuously analyse and document different Indian culinary traditions, and instead just writing down recipes, we are doing the food equivalent of lip-syncing to a pre-recorded track”

This book has completely changed how i look at food and also made cooking a less intimidating act for me.

8. The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic – and How it Changed Science, Cities and the Modern World, Steven Johnson : This is again from one of my favourite authors – Steven Johnson. In this book he uses a single map to weave a story of science, medicine, health, hygiene and human ingenuity.

From the Introduction:
“This is a story with four protagonists: a deadly bacterium, a vast city, and two gifted but very different men. One dark week a hundred fifty years ago, in the midst of great terror and human suffering, their lives collided on London’s Broad Street, on the western edge of Soho. This book is an attempt to tell the story of that collision in a way that does justice to the multiple scales of existence that helped bring it about: from the invisible kingdom of microscopic bacteria, to the tragedy and courage and camaraderie of individual lives, to the cultural realm of ideas and ideologies, all the way up to the sprawling metropolis of London itself. It is the story of a map that lies at the intersection of all those different vectors, a map created to help make sense of an experience that defied human understanding. It is also a case study in how change happens in human society, the turbulent way in which wrong or ineffectual ideas are overthrown by better ones. More than anything else, though, it is an argument for seeing that terrible week as one of the defining moments in the invention of modern life.”

9. Desperately Seeking Shah Rukh: India’s Lonely Young Women and the Search for Intimacy and Independence, Shrayana Bhattacharya : This book amalgamates a reading of social structure + pop culture

From the Introduction:
“In this pathbreaking work, Shrayana Bhattacharya maps the economic and personal trajectories–the jobs, desires, prayers, love affairs and rivalries–of a diverse group of women. Divided by class but united in fandom, they remain steadfast in their search for intimacy, independence and fun. Embracing Hindi film idol Shah Rukh Khan allows them a small respite from an oppressive culture, a fillip to their fantasies of a friendlier masculinity in Indian men. Most struggle to find the freedom-or income-to follow their favourite actor. Bobbing along in this stream of multiple lives for more than a decade-from Manju’s boredom in ‘rurban’ Rampur and Gold’s anger at having to compete with Western women for male attention in Delhi’s nightclubs, to Zahira’s break from domestic abuse in Ahmedabad-Bhattacharya gleans the details on what Indian women think about men, money, movies, beauty, helplessness, agency and love. A most unusual and compelling book on the female gaze, this is the story of how women have experienced post-liberalization India.”

10. The Forest of Enchantments, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni : This book is a retelling of an epic we are so familiar. The story is written from the perspective of Sita, and that completely changes the perpspective of the story. A retelling which is both relevant to see the past and present in careful ways.