On staying away from managers recommending you books

The very thought of being handed a reading list, particularly one that strives to "improve" you, should cause some alarm. 

It is one of my great fears that I will one day be stranded in a terminal with only a Malcolm Gladwell book or perhaps Sapiens as reading material. Such nightmares are doubtless compounded when I see a vast array of book lists (their themes range from Year-End highlights to books I apparently need to read before I die) that are curated with little to no thought of literary value. 

Or any value, for that matter. 

There are two sides to this nefarious phenomenon of yuppie reading recommendations. One is the slow co-opting of decent literature to gain credibility. 

Barack Obama is a perfect example of this. For years he has been posting his book and music recommendations, and every year we pretend that he really has the literary taste of someone working in Literary Hub and the music taste of someone from Pitchfork. We are supposed to believe he has read the latest from Hanya Yanagihara, Emily St. John Mandel and Jennifer Egan in a given year. 

One cannot deny of course that the more eyes go toward authors as poetic as Hanif Abbdurraqib the better it is for the state of literature, and surely he has done much to steer the audience to a few clearly gifted authors. Still, it is frankly absurd to imagine Obama pumping out the music of Wet Leg and Doechii. This is an obvious attempt of the rich and managerial to trespass into the humanities to stave off their own emptiness. 

Their recommendations only help themselves. It is nothing new. Managers—and I use the term with some contempt—buying or liking "art" to look tasteful is an old trope.

But wait, it gets worse. 

There are managers with literary aspirations themselves. We have a fair share of them here in my country, bankers and NGO directors, who are immensely talented at being litigious than at writing. 

Illustration: TBS

A better target is Shashi Tharoor, who embodies the studious, over-achieving, politically ambitious, suit-wearing centrist-type figure who can write book reviews on one hand and bring intellectual legitimacy to his party on the other. And as awful as his literary works are (The Great Indian Novel is a grandly unimaginative work with nothing to offer other than puns and stylistic "connections" that even schoolboys will tire of after a dozen pages), he can fire up an Oxford Union auditorium or provide snark when his party needs it from him. His elevation as a literary author of the note is part of the problem.

I don't mean to say that any writer known to be of a "managerial" background cannot be a legitimate writer. Zia Haider Rahman is a similar over-achiever and can definitely write, though not as well as some fawning critics will have you believe. However, one should not see his talent as a writer and attribute the same intellectual ability to someone like Ruchir Sharma, who unsurprisingly makes it on many of the  lists I am talking about, with works such as The Rise and Fall of Nations and Democracy on the Road. He is no writer. He is a manager. The blandness and mediocrity of his books prove it. 

This brings me to the other side of corporatised recommendations. The safeness and sameness of the mediocrities you see. There is a reason why titles such as Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari, Atomic Habits by James Clear or the latest by Steven Pinker so readily make it. 

Back in the day, Paolo Coelho and Jared Diamond, too, used to be all the rage among billionaires pretending to know about reading. They are championed because they provide no meaningful conversation. 

Rarely would you find a book such as Debt by the late David Graeber, a brilliant and criminally underrated work of nonfiction which explores the history of money through a series of profound discussions that encompass violence, slavery, colonialism and tradition. 

How Fiction Works by James Wood is a book that despite its sellable title is bound to rarely appear on book lists that promises to improve us. Wood's own limitations as a writer of fiction non-withstanding, the book is a superb celebration of reading novels and will no doubt show the uninitiated beauty of Naipaul or Iris Murdoch. 

The inclusion of such titles risks exposing people to a reality where certain systems of power may not be as naturally dominant as they are claimed to be, for "true" improvement can only come through watered-down history and incremental and pointless changes in individual daily habits for the inevitable benefits of corporations. 

Perhaps my takeaway here is that the next time Bill Gates comes out with his book recommendations, you might want to treat it with a little suspicion. Instead, have more faith in your librarian or the books section of your newspaper.  

Shahriar Shaams is a writer and also an amateur boxer. He has written for Singapore Unbound, Third Lane, Six Seasons Review, and The Daily Star Books. Find him on twitter @shahriarshaams.