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Gay “erotica”, court judgments and crime novels: My best reads in 2011

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Gay “erotica”, court judgments and crime novels along with government reports, memoranda, journal articles make up a substantial part of my reading during the year.  Reading novels, poetry and non-fiction also help me get through the difficult days and months.

My top eleven books for this year are listed in order of enjoyment and appreciation.  TV series, films and DVDs will follow.

Zackie Achmat

  1. The First President: A Life of John L. Dube Founding President of the ANC – Heather Hughes.                      The First President is indisputably my best read and buy of 2011. Even though I have not finished it, I include this phenomenal book because it has diminished my ignorance of  the links between South African and African-American intellectual history. Dube’s life is a political and theological journey rooted in education and intellectual inquiry. Hughes includes fascinating mini-biographies of Black women leaders who had an impact on Dube and other Black male leaders while the politics and economics in The First President is written in exquisite prose. For the first time, I gained a real appreciation for John L. Dube as a leader.  Heather Hughes should be teaching in South Africa not abroad.  Her biography of Dube is one of the finest books on South African history produced in the last decade.
  2. Pity the Nation: Lebanon at War – Robert Fisk       One cannot understand contemporary Middle-East politics without reading Pity the Nation an epic history of the many Lebanese wars. Fisk brings alive people during Lebanon’s occupation by Israel, Syria, US, France and others; the struggle of its oppressed Palestinian refugees and Shia Muslims and the rise of Hezbollah as a resistance movement supported by Iran. Not a single political leader, party, militia or force escapes Fisk’s criticism because his sympathy is given all the people in Lebanon including its Palestinian refugees.  The pernicious role played by the United States in every Lebanese war and its serious miscalculations makes for chilling reading.
  3. Wolf Hall – Hillary Mantel’s award-winning novel Wolf Hall changed my historical view of the Tudors and Thomas Cromwell. I had always regarded Thomas Cromwell (not to be confused with Oliver Cromwell) as a boorish and backward religious fanatic.  Mantel’s novel demonstrates that great fiction can alter historical reading.
  4. Complete Poems  — Federico García Lorca. Poetry helps me sleep, dream and be human. In 2011, I rediscovered Lorca’s poetry. His Ode to Walt Whitman is a particularly haunting, macho tribute to men who love men.
  5. Love in the Time of AIDS: Inequality, Gender and Rights in South Africa – Mark Hunter. Hunter’s Love in the Time of AIDS: Inequality, Gender and Rights in South Africa provides the most rigorous analysis of the HIV epidemic that I have read. Revolutionary in its approach, Hunter’s account of the HIV epidemic interrogates the practices and impact of intimacy, sex and marriage over time through political economy and anthropology. He shows an inextricable link between the collapse of apartheid and the male-led household in Mandeni industrial township and Hlabisa’s rural villages in KwaZulu-Natal where adult HIV prevalence approached 40%.
  6. Homage to Catalonia – George Orwell                                                                           The 2011 Arab Revolutions taught us more North-African and Middle-Eastern geography, history and politics than years of schooling ever could. As the Libyan Revolution unfolded, I re-read Homage to Catalonia one of the classic texts of the Spanish Civil War because I saw the Libyans continuing the traditions of the Catalonian workers (armed and naïve) trying to change their world. The women of Benghazi who resisted Gaddafi and the men who clumsily drove bakkies and guns across the desert to win their freedom from a vicious, armed dictatorship won their victory for Libya, Spain and all of us.
  7. Brooklyn – Colm Tóibín is one of my favourite writers. In 1997, I read his haunting novel The Story of the Night which describes matriarchy, gay sexuality, film, HIV, British colonial conquest, structural adjustment programmes and racism in an Argentina ruled by the generals. Brooklyn is a feminist novel encapsulating the social and economic independence won by  Eilis Lacey an Irish woman who reluctantly emigrates to New York on her own at her sister’s instigation. Tóibín describes Eilis Lacey’s desires, self-education, daily domestic and work routines with simplicity and power.
  8. By Nightfall – Michael Cunningham. I owe my enjoyment of Cunningham to a straight male friend who forced me to read The Hours which I loved, then Specimen Days and now By Nightfall.  Art is central to this novel which explores sexuality, aging, death and dissipation.
  9. Hofmeyr – Alan Paton was an excellent discovery in the CAFDA bookshop in Sea Point.  If you love history, especially South African history then Paton’s biography of Jan Hendrik Hofmeyr makes early 20th century Cape Town and the Union of South Africa come alive. For those interested in academic gossip, Paton’s description of Hofmeyr and his mother’s sojourn at Wits University is hilarious and filled with sex and pussilanimity.
  10. 10. A Painted House – John Grisham.  This novel is inspired by Grisham’s childhood experiences in rural Arkansas with its white class divides and Mexican migrant labourers. Twelve-year old Luke Chandler tells tales of work, sport, sex, murder, church and urbanisation. A great read. A Painted House is Grisham’s first novel outside the crime thriller genre and its poetic observation of life in rural America shows his power as a writer.
  11.  One Hundred Years of Socialism: the West European Left in the Twentieth Century – Donald Sassoon        European and North-American capitalism is convulsed by mass struggle and anxiety because inequality, unemployment, financial crisis and uncertainty.   Sassoon’s magisterial history of European socialism is indispensable to understanding contemporary struggles. Tragically, the South African labour movement has become intellectually impoverished despite its political and economic strength and it will be doomed to repeat many of the mistakes and remain oblivious to the successes of its European counter-parts in their struggles for full-employment and social security.

 


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