Lit with Charles

At first glance, the book I’m talking about today seems like the ultimate odd-couple pairing – a insightful analysis of the condition & economic prospects of women in India, combined with the adoration of a national movie icon. However, as it turns out, these two subjects might not be so disparate after all.

Today I had the pleasure of speaking with Shrayana Bhattacharya, an Indian economist about her 2021 book, Desperately Seeking Shah Rukh. The book follows Shrayana’s time spent collecting data on women’s ambiguously defined and chronically undervalued employment across India. Over time, she started to notice a thread common to many of the women and girls she spoke to: a love for a certain Bollywood superstar called Shah Rukh Khan – a love which she in fact shared. Unlike other male action movie stars in India who are big on muscle and short on emotion, Shah Rukh, with his sad, gentle eyes, slighter frame, and willingness to help his cinematic leading ladies peel carrots and wash dishes, has struck a unique chord with the country’s women.

A lack of financial freedom and bodily autonomy hangs over the lives of the women Shrayana talks to – eighty percent of Indian women need approval from a family member to go outside the home to visit a health centre (171), and three in five adolescent girls feel unsafe in public places (196), she tells us. However, what shines through this text is the off-the-charts wattage of respect and affection with which she tells their stories – allowing both the harsh realities of these women’s day-to-day lives and their playful, pragmatic crush on a good-looking movie star to exist simultaneously.

Even though the book is a rigorous and detailed sociological analysis, the writing is accessible, fun and witty. It would be a perfect read for someone who is interested in feminism, economics and politics, but who might equally be a little apprehensive about approaching the drier tomes that tend to populate non-fiction bestseller lists.

Books mentioned in the episode:

⁠⁠Find Shrayana:

Instagram: ⁠@bshrayana

Twitter: @bshrayana

Buy her book: https://amzn.eu/d/2YpWR4A

Follow me ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@litwithcharles⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ for more book reviews and recommendations!

In today’s episode, I speak to the writer Avery Carpenter Forrey, who wrote the fun & enjoyable debut novel “Social Engagement”. It’s a young woman’s journey to getting married that is full of obstacles & revelations. At first glance, this may seem like standard chick-lit fare but I was pleasantly surprised to find that there was a darker undertone to this work that gave it an interesting shape. Aside from struggling with the aftermath of a past relationship as well as family trauma, the young woman at the heart of this novel deals with an eating disorder, and there’s a whole angle of body symbolism that gives it an unusual flavour. It is Edith Wharton in the age of TikTok, with David Cronenberg as a cameo guest star. Its' tribe of privileged Upper East Siders are well-defined and certainly more palatable than the brats of Bret Easton Ellis, and it’s no spoiler to reveal that the wedding at the heart of this novel is a total car crash – and who doesn’t love a good car crash at a wedding – given that the novel opens at the end. 

In this episode, Avery & I talk about her work and how it came to be, and we meander down her literary path to uncover her literary influences in her journey to becoming a writer. 

Books mentioned in the episode:

Instagram: @averycarpenterforrey

Buy her book: https://amzn.eu/d/6lBZlkh

Follow me ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@litwithcharles⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ for more book reviews and recommendations!

There are classic books from a few centuries ago, and then there are classic classic books from distant and remote regions covering events that are long-lost to the sands of time. Today’s episode is about this kind of book: the Icelandic sagas written in the 1300s and covering events from the start of the second millennium.

The saga I read for this week’s episode is called Njal’s Saga and it is written anonymously, as many of the texts at the time were, probably through a long oral tradition and it is a fictionalized history of the start of what was called the Icelandic Commonwealth, which was a pretty unique society, largely agrarian, with no king or aristocracy and a system of laws and norms that maintained some form of stability. 

However, that stability would soon come under grave threat with a series of spiralling feud, mostly based on stupid slurs leading to bloody murders, that would eventually lead to the collapse of the Icelandic Commonwealth.

My guest today is Dr. Matthew Roby, who’s an assistant professor at Mount Saint Vincent University in Nova Scotia, Canada, and he’s a leading academic on the sagas and medieval literature in general. Today, he takes us through what exactly are the Icelandic sagas, why and how they were written, what influenced them and what did they influence (e.g The Lord of the Rings) and all sort of other fascinating tidbits on this long-lost form of story-telling. 

Books mentioned in the episode:

Follow me ⁠⁠⁠⁠@litwithcharles⁠⁠⁠⁠ for more book reviews and recommendations!

One of the best propulsive forces in literature, the force that keeps me turning pages as I read a novel is the question “Where on earth is this going?”

And that question kept coming back to me as I read a very exciting debut novel called “How To Be A French Girl” by Rose Cleary, a young British writer. In the book, a twentysomething young girl who’s given up on a promising art education to work a boring temp job in London in order to survive starts to develop an unhealthy obsession in an elegant French colleague called Gustave (you’ll hear that name a few times in the interview) . Inspired by tropes driven by our technological world, she tried to transform herself into the titular & idealized French Girl.

Her romantic pursuit & evolution twists & turns in ways that are increasingly uncomfortable but potentially, maybe justified? Overall, this novel felt to me like the secret love child of Bridget Jones and Fatal Attraction, with a touch of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. 

Anyway, this is a fun book, it went places that were genuinely surprising and uncomfortable and I recommend it. In this episode, Rose Cleary and I go through some of the themes featured in the book like power, identity, technology, art, class and all the other themes that populate this great novel. 

Find Rose:

Website: https://rosecleary.com/

Instagram: @rclearyrcleary

Buy her book: https://amzn.eu/d/fij3FI8

Follow me ⁠⁠⁠@litwithcharles⁠⁠⁠ for more book reviews and recommendations!

Sometimes a single act can resonate across the ages, its impact felt through generations, both politically and personally. In 1914, the feminist suffragette Mary Richardson slashed a painting called “The Rokeby Venus” by Diego Velasquez in the National Gallery in London, to raise awareness for the feminist cause.

This event is the central trauma driving the great novel “Asunder”, written by my guest today, the Mexican & American novelist Chloe Aridjis and published 10 years ago. Her main protagonist, Marie, is a museum guard at the National Gallery, for whom the slashing has a very personal aspect, as her great-grandfather was the guard on duty at the time of the attack in 1914, who failed to stop the attack. 

This is a subtle and contemplative novel that asks questions around the small crack and large tears around our lives. In today’s episode, we talk about Chloe’s writing process and methods, the direction of her novel, the central event of the 1914 slashing and how it compares to today’s actions. As usual, I also ask Chloe about her inspirations and recommendations in terms of books she’s read and enjoyed. 

Buy Asunder: https://amzn.eu/d/0PBQJy2

Follow me ⁠⁠⁠@litwithcharles⁠⁠⁠ for more book reviews and recommendations!

The impact of war on art - specifically on literature - is a subject that I find pretty fascinating. The First World War is maybe one of the first conflicts to incubate some brilliant writers. Some of the most prominent literary figures of the First World War were two British war poets called Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen. I didn’t know much about their story until I read an excellent book called “Soldiers Don’t Go Mad” by Charles Glass which was published this year. 

In this book, the journalist Charles Glass who was the Middle East correspondent for ABC for ten years and the author of numerous books on war, describes the story of these two poets specifically in terms of their mental health, and the treatment they received for what was then called “shell shock”, which today we might call Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). These two great poets were treated together at a mental hospital called Craiglockhart at Edinburgh.

Both those poets came to Craiglockhart using different paths but connected in that institution and the book does an incredible job of describing the interplay of mental health, war and the creation of art. Siegfried Sassoon was an established poet and a war hero, whereas Wilfred Owen was just getting started but their stay together at this mental hospital would affect them both, personally and artistically. 

Siegfried Sassoon lived well into his eighties but Wilfred Owen was tragically killed on November 4th 1918, only a week before the war ended on November 11th. 

In this interview, Charles Glass & I discuss his book and specifically the themes of war, mental health and how they impact the creation of art.

Books mentioned in this episode:

Find Charles Glass:

Website: https://www.charlesglass.net/

Books: https://www.charlesglass.net/books/

Follow me ⁠⁠⁠@litwithcharles⁠⁠⁠ for more book reviews and recommendations!

We live in a changing world with geopolitical forces and academic ideas that are challenging our democratic norms. Extreme politics, both on the right and the left, are very much on the rise in many different countries.

Both of these extreme forms of politics are undermining our classic democratic norms of universalism, principles that originated with and were enshrined by the American and French Revolutions. 

Today’s guest is Yascha Mounk, a German-American political scientist who teaches at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. He is the author of numerous books and articles defending the liberal and universal values of free democratic societies, but today we’re going to focus on just two of his books. 

The first of these two books is called “The Great Experiment” which was published last year. In that book, he writes that our modern multi-cultural societies in the West are under tremendous pressure to integrate these diverse populations in ways that ensure prosperity for all, and most importantly that manage to maintain our democratic norms.

This year, he’s back with a new book that focuses specifically on one of those traps, the book is called “The Identity Trap” and in it, he examines the meteoric rise of an ideology which he calls the identity synthesis, in the last couple of decades, especially in the United States from obscure academic environments to the mainstream.

In this episode, we talk about what needs to happen to ensure the success of multicultural democracies, we talk about the origins of the identity synthesis and its development, and how different countries have different models to meet these challenges head-on. I hope you enjoy this episode.

Books mentioned in the episode:

Find Yascha:

Website: https://www.yaschamounk.com/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/yaschamounk/

Pre-order his new book: https://amzn.eu/d/gePpkZ8

Follow me ⁠⁠⁠@litwithcharles⁠⁠⁠ for more book reviews and recommendations!

Today’s episode follows an interesting literary path. The first stop in that path is a book written in 1974 by Robert Caro, called The Power Broker. It’s one of the most brilliant biographies of all time. If you’re looking for a magnificently researched, and totally gripping book on the life of one of the most influential men of the 20th century, then this the one. It’s the story of Robert Moses. 

That name may not mean much to a lot of people but in short, he’s basically the man who built New York City from the 1930s to the 1960s. Through a finely tuned network of money and power that he put together, he was able to decide, pretty much single-handedly, what was built in New York: roads, parks, bridges, buildings.
Robert Moses’ ideas started spinning out of control and he developed visions of massive highways ploughing through New York and to do that, he was going to tear down vast neighbourhoods of the city. 

The person who ignited the opposition to Robert Moses was a journalist and urban activist called Jane Jacobs. In 1961, she wrote a book called “The Death and Life of Great American Cities” in which she outlined a very different path for urban planning, one that was more focused on organic human interaction, based on historic urban traditions, as opposed to abstract planning based on data.

I was curious to know how she and her book were perceived today in the urban planning community and how this book had aged. I was very lucky to connect with today’s guest, Chuck Marohn who is the founder of Strong Towns, a movement based in Minnesota, dedicated to helping cities and towns in the United States achieve financial resiliency through civic engagement, and seeks to improve communities through urban planning concepts such as walkability, mixed-use zoning, and infill development. Strong Towns manages a blog and a podcast of the same name, hosted by Chuck.

In today’s episode, we discuss the influence of Jane Jacobs’ book, the context that surrounded its publication and how the urban planning debate has evolved over time and what’s at stake for cities today.

Links:

Chuck's Book: https://amzn.eu/d/4tpGm1I

Strong Towns Website: https://www.strongtowns.org/contributors-journal/charles-marohn

Follow me ⁠⁠⁠@litwithcharles⁠⁠⁠ for more book reviews and recommendations!

If ever there was a need for a single definition of the novel’s function, it may well be to establish an architecture around characters that leads them directly to unique moral quandaries. These shorts of choices are ultimately what drives some of the greatest novels. 

And what better framework than war to create situations that lead characters towards real perplexity? After all, it consists of two sides fighting for what both believe to be right, with outcomes involving ruin, destruction and death. 

Now throw in the fact that the novel may or may not be based on true events, perhaps embellished by the novelist’s pen but ultimately rooted in history, and you find that the membrane between fact and fiction becomes very porous indeed.

My guest today is the novelist James MacManus who is a former journalist, a correspondent for the Guardian in Africa and the Middle East. Currently, he’s also the Managing Director of The TLS (The Times Literary Supplement), an august weekly literary review.

During his time in Africa, he covered the Zimbabwe War for Independence, and his sixth novel “Love in a Lost Land”, is based on these experiences in Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, at a time of guerrilla warfare. It’s a very authentic read which looks at both sides of the conflict and features a love story that bridges those factions. The setting brings to life the work of a journalist in a perilous environment and the plot created moral quandaries that were reminiscent, to me, of Graham Greene novels.

A list of books mentioned in the interview:

How do we, as readers, detect new and emerging talent in writing? We can look at book sales or book prizes but young writers don’t necessarily gain huge commercial success or awards early on in their careers. One list that has proved almost oracular in the last 40 years has been established by the venerable literary magazine Granta and that's the list of Best Young British Novelists.

My guest today, Olivia Sudjic, is a young British writer, who was included on the latest lists published this year. She has now published two novels as well as an extended essay on the art & process of writing. Her first novel, “Sympathy” was published in 2017 and is a tale of obsession & connection in our ever-creeping technological age. This was followed by “Exposure”, an essay published in 2018, which allowed her to look back and reflect on this momentous step of writing and how that had impacted her. It was a great look into the mindset, approach and perception of a young female writer in today’s world. This was then followed by another novel, “Asylum Road” in 2021, about the voyages of a young woman in the UK who is in a relationship on the brink.

I was excited to speak to Olivia to learn about her journey as a writer, her inspirations, her voice and of course her recommendations.

Books mentioned throughout the episode:

Find Olivia:

Instagram: @olivia.sudjic

Buy Asylum Road: https://amzn.eu/d/hiAKTJI

Follow me ⁠⁠⁠@litwithcharles⁠⁠⁠ for more book reviews and recommendations!