Reading as an act can take up many meanings: it can be a site of internal dialogue, a means of escape, a means of deeper engagement or simply a highly annoying assignment. Often in academia, every line on every page is meticulously underlined and deconstructed, leaving little room for reading just for the sake of it: an opportunity we can have in winter break.

Selected for all kinds of reasons, here are The Gazelle editorial board’s reading picks for the winter break. Read on for two surprise entries at the end.

The Sorrow of War is the single best piece of media ever written about the VietNam War. Written by a former NVA soldier who actually served in the conflict, the non-linear narrative weaves its storylines to perfectly encapsulate almost every Vietnamese perspective on the conflict and its legacy. Examining themes ranging from nationalism, the disenchantment with that concept, youth naivety and romance to alcoholism and honor, the book presents an incredibly balanced, nuanced and heartbreaking examination of what it means to be both a veteran and a Vietnamese person. Despite introducing a perspective that is fundamentally divorced from and even critical of the traditionally American narratives that dominate the genre, The Sorrow of War is also a book that is banned by the Vietnamese government for its supposedly subversive stance. It occupies the rare position of being so brutally honest in its subjectivity that it cannot be coerced to fit any politicized narrative of the war. Although Viet Thanh Nguyen's The Sympathizer is often regarded as the pinnacle postmodern analysis of the war and its influence on the Vietnamese individual — in fact it somehow won a Pulitzer prize for this — I would argue that even it pales in comparison to the depth of reflection that bleeds from every page of Ninh's book.

All About Love has been passed around and shared by almost everyone in our friend group. Our old copy of the book has been highlighted, annotated and written on by all of us at different moments in life and every single note highlights a different curiosity. Some read it during moments of intense heartbreak, recent break ups in the backdrop, others read it to simply examine why we think about love the way we do and to reexamine our relationships.

All About Love is an intensely personal exploration of society's failure to create a model for learning how to love and give love. It examines the ways in which our own families and childhoods inform how we understand love. It touches upon grief, heartbreak, love as a social justice guiding principle, and provides a Black feminist lens to understand how our ideas of love are defined by the oppressive, capitalist and patriarchal structures that surround us.

This is a cliché and it's overly said and done, but particularly as the pandemic pushes us to question and really distill our relationships, confront intimacy and distance and put grief in front of us in a way that we can't ignore, this book feels all the more urgent to read (and re read).

If there was ever a worthy sequel to Edward Said’s Orientalism, it is Pankaj Mishra’s From the Ruins of Empire. The latter may not necessarily be an easy read, but it is singular in its ability to articulate an intellectual political history of the modern world, or at least modern Asia and the colonial encounter. The book looks at three Asian intellectuals: the Persian-born activist Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, the Chinese reformer Liang Qichao and Rabindranath Tagore, the Indian poet and Nobel laureate.

From the discussion of al-Afghani’s escapades across the Middle East to the description of the destruction of the Old Summer Palace of Beijing, the enticing subnarratives and Mishra’s lucid writing provide enough intrigue even for those interested in the intellectual histories of Asia. But more importantly, the book helps one understand so many of the intellectual foundations of contemporary Asia, from Chinese notions of national sovereignty formulated by Liang to the revivalist pan-Islamism of al-Afghani. By the end of the book, one is left with the inescapable conclusion that the present is as much a product of al-Afghani, Liang and Tagore as it is of Rousseau, Locke and Hobbes.

The pandemic, along with the recent emergence of populism across the world, has called into question the neoliberal consensus of the West, with its intense focus on individualism and markets. From the Ruins of Empire is a worthy introduction to different ways of thinking, from al-Afghani’s views on religion’s role in the state to Liang’s theories of power to Tagore’s critique of the modern Western civilizational machine. One may not necessarily be convinced by the entirety of these ideas —this reader certainly was not — but at a moment of intense economic and political rupture from the past, it is worth revisiting conceptions of human society that differ from the Western consensus.

An oldie but a goodie. Jane Austen, a household name because of Pride and Prejudice, has retained her relevance throughout the years. Let her transport you to a different time and place, introduce you to the small stupidities of the 1800s and maybe tell you a thing or two about yourself. Prepare yourself for the most romantic letter ever written and a sarcastic narrator to keep you company during quarantine.

I think there was this pressure to read and learn and do during the pandemic. To fundamentally improve or change ourselves into better versions. For a while, I fell prey to that and read book after book, filling every empty space with words and thoughts. But ultimately, all these characters were strangers. Diverting, of course, and good company for a bit in isolation. After shaking off the idea that I needed to accomplish something, I began to re-read old favorites, slowly and enjoying it. It felt nice to immerse myself in something familiar and known in a time of uncertainty.

Photo courtesy of Sarah Afaneh

For those who know me — a figure optimistically estimated at four — hearing about my obsession with Salman Rushdie has wholly transformed into a nuisance to be avoided at all costs. I now bring this nuisance to you. My pick: Midnight’s Children, by Salman Rushdie.

We begin at the stroke of the midnight hour on Aug.15, 1947, when one boy and two new nations, irrevocably severed from one British colony, tumble forth into history. It is said that a 1001 children born within the first hour of India’s arrival to a tumultuous freedom were bestowed with magical powers, scattered all over India, and the narrator Saleem has the power to flow through the minds of anyone, akin to picking up radio signals.

We follow his fate for 31 years, and with him the fate of India: the two are inextricable, handcuffed, flying off to Ayub Khan’s Pakistan, the formation of Bangladesh, with a final act set in Delhi besieged by Indira Gandhi’s emergency rule.

From the very first page, the narrative draws the reader in, washing them over in an insurmountable tide of prosaic mastery and magical realist absurdity. The narrator, it seems, has the ability to step through time and space, recounting events from his own familial history — which is set metonymic to the history of pre-post-colonial India — as if it is his own memory, his own lived experience. And yet, his agency is unquestionable, unwavering, even as he openly distorts timelines of historical events. A greater truth is hinted at, it seems; a truth well beyond colonial constructs of historiography.

It is a story performed as much as written, simmering in its own multitudinous excesses. Once you’re done reading the 500 plus pages, you’ll wonder how the story sits contained in the dimensions of its covers. Keep it carefully, for you might spill it all out.

Photo courtesy of Bryan Waterman

When the Class of 2021 started its NYU Abu Dhabi adventure, our Summer Colloquium text was Exit West, by the Lahore-based novelist Mohsin Hamid. It’s fitting as we head into the last semester of their undergraduate career that all of NYU will be encouraged to take up the same novel for the next installment of NYU Reads. Exit West tells the story of Saeed and Nadia, who flee their unnamed city after it falls under fundamentalist rule. Their migrant experience — facilitated, fantastically, by passage through secret portals that whisk them away to unknown destinations — evokes ongoing global migration crises and also suggests that migration may be a permanent condition of modernity. The challenges these characters face, including the evolution of their own relationship, require them to define and redefine their notions of love, loss, belief and identity. For NYUAD students who continually leave one home and make a new one somewhere else, their story — by turns tender, humorous and harrowing — may have additional resonance. How do individuals and cultures change when migration forces them to recognize difference? What happens when migration isn’t a choice but a necessity? Can a novel like Hamid’s help us imagine better futures for the world’s mobile populations?

Photo courtesy of Tishani Doshi. / A selection of Doshi’s other recent reads.

Primo Levi's If This Is A Man is an account of his 11 month incarceration in Auschwitz. This book devastated me on many levels. The writing is restrained, matter-of-fact, but full of small detonations. Never shrill, instead it is a book about quiet observations of the day to day, of how humans can be so brutal that language fails us, of the daily hallucination of finding the world around you changed. Levi uses a phrase: the drowned and the saved, explaining how there is always a power structure at play, a complicity and complexity around survival. Reading this during the pandemic reinforced the inequalities of the power structures in our world — who is saved, who is drowned? What is the role of the individual in a community, and what is the responsibility of the state? What makes us human — our capacity for cruelty, our capacity for beauty, our capacity to be able to write in opposition to silence, to fill that with a sound of remembrance? Ultimately, Levi reminds us that there is dignity in human life and human death, and we must find it.