We’re placing our book club on hiatus over the summer to give us all more time to follow our own interests. Here are some of the books the Eterna team are looking forward to reading.
Serra will be packing Stefan Kanfer’s ‘The Last Empire: De Beers, Diamonds and The World’ on her travels. With Anglo American’s announcement that it will sell its storied De Beers diamond business, she was reminded of this book written nearly 30 years ago, which she’s keen on re-reading. It chronicles the diamond rush in South Africa going back to the days of Cecil Rhodes, its journey to becoming a powerful global business force and details a fascinating story of a billionaire family.
Nigel plans on picking up Amor Towles’ novel ‘A Gentleman in Moscow’. It’s a sympathetic portrait of Russia from the revolution to the 1960s, as imagined through the eyes of a Tsarist aristocrat under permanent house arrest in a grand Moscow hotel. As communism inexorably chips away at the luxuries and civilities of hotel life, Towles gently satirises and exposes the cruelties and contradictions of living under socialist rule.
With the general election looming, Ben will dig into ‘Great Britain? How We Get Our Future Back’ by Torsten Bell. Keir Starmer is all but certain to be handed a large majority, but will he be able to fix the seemingly intractable problems that have plagued Rishi Sunak’s premiership?
‘The World For Sale: Money, Power and the Traders Who Barter the Earth’s Resources’ by Javier Blas and Jack Farchy makes Millie’s reading list. The modern world is built on commodities – from the oil that fuels our cars to the metals that power our smartphones. We rarely stop to consider where they come from. But we should.
Maryellen will be reading ‘How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics’ by N. Katherine Hayles. Blending cultural studies, literary criticism and philosophy, Hayles traces the evolution of our understanding of information, the technologisation of our lives and how these forces influence our conceptualization of our bodies and selves.
Choosing one book per person turned out to be a more difficult process than imagined, so here are some honourable mentions.
‘Long Island’ by Colm Toibin
‘Read Write Own: Building the Next Era of the Internet’ by Chris Dixon
‘The Soul of Civility: Timeless Principles to Heal Society and Ourselves’ by Alexandra Hudson
‘Lessons in Chemistry’ by Bonnie Garmus
‘Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil’ by Susan Neiman
‘The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness’ by Jonathan Haidt
‘Gujarat Under Modi: Laboratory of Today’s India’ by Christophe Jaffrelot
Happy reading!
