MAKING most of the summer and rediscovering the joys of reading I keep on adding to my list of recommendations. It is an ever-expanding list not intended to be strictly followed. It is as wide and disjointed as I can make it, since I swear by reading for the sheer pleasure of it, reading for information, reading for instruction or any rhyme or reason. I started making my list for university students about to start their vacations but you don’t have to be young to enjoy books. You can still be young at heart because that would mean no irrevocable opinions and strong prejudices. So read as much as you can and whatever you want.

If you want to enjoy a novel which is funny but gives you a lump in the throat, then do try out Goat Days by Benyamin. Planning to earn some good money working in the Gulf, poor and sad Najeeb ends up working as a goatherd in a remote Saudi desert area with no other company except the goats he is supposed to tend. You begin to think that he prefers the goats to some of the people he encounters until you come across his daring escape bid from his open-air prison. Benyamin writes in the Malayalam language and participated in the Karachi Literature Festival earlier this year where his novel was strongly recommended by a number of speakers.

On a different note, if you want to mull over the moral pathology afflicting our world, then The Plague by Albert Camus is a must. This is the story of a city besieged by the dreaded plague through which the courage and fortitude of a physician points the way out. For those who have read Camus, they can move on to Jose Saramago’s brilliant Blindness, the parable-like story of a town where people suddenly start losing their eyesight and blindness takes on epidemic proportions. The brave in spirit should try contemporary Chinese master Yan Lianke’s novel Dream of Ding Village about an Aids epidemic caused by HIV-contaminated blood and fuelled by insatiable corruption and greed.

If you are willing to be imaginative and take mental risks, try out the Albanian writer Ismail Kadare and the Japanese author Haruki Murakami, the two greatest living novelists on the face of the planet in my opinion. For Kadare, begin with The Palace of Dreams and you are sure to be hooked for a lifetime of admiration. However, it is hard to say where to begin with Murakami. Since you cannot start with all his work, begin at any single book or story and you are sure to come back hankering for more. How about the short story ‘The Elephant Vanishes’, concerning the sudden disappearance of an elephant from a zoo?

Like everybody else I am fascinated with money. Although I would like to read about methods of controlling my spending urges, I want to learn more about where it came from, how it went down in history, how does capital accumulate and grow, and how does it affect societies. So move over mysticism and tales of the love-inspired Majnun. The History of Money by Jack Weatherford is a fasci-nating account but I mustered up the courage to read Thomas Picketty’s highly recommended Capital in the Twenty-First Century, a giant of a book that is still a bestseller everywhere. I began with bated breath until my head was swimming with wealth accumulation, distribution and inequality. I don’t have to be put under duress to confess that I could not read through the intimidating bulk of the book. I would have been sweating on this one and banging my head at the same time, but I was saved by the Karachi heatwave. As anybody can imagine, I survived to tell the tale.

The rising temperature, the unbearable and stifling heat, and the daily toll of the dead made me pull out this thick tome from the steadily growing pile of must-reads. Karachi would have made an ideal case study for this book. Appropriately it is called This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate, and is the latest book penned by Naomi Klein, the renowned Canadian journalist who is the author of two other important books and has taken on a single-handed crusade against what is described as “the most profound threat humanity has ever received: the war the current economic model is waging against life on earth” — all forms of life that is. Are we going to twiddle our thumbs as we watch another wave of mass extinction?

Klein takes on the issues of climate change and not only does she debunk several myths, she is very clear in identifying corporate greed as the driving force behind the mass destruction. No less than a “civilisational wake-up call”, I can understand why Arundhati Roy speaks of her as “among the most inspirational political thinkers in the world today” and Amitav Ghosh considers it “one of the most important books of the decade.” The part I liked best about the book is that moving on from the problems Klein is very lucid on the solutions: “reining in corporate power, rebuilding local econo-mies and reclaiming democracies,” all lessons which we in Pakistan need to take seriously.

If you are not put off by the title or the theme, then you will be fascinated by The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, by Siddhartha Mukherjee, no less gripping than a thriller in the best sense of the word and presented in such a way as to make cancer a theme you would want to read about. It is a far cry from the jargon-filled do-it-yourself or all-you-needed-to-know kind of books and does not intimidate the reader with medical terminology. Filled with details, nevertheless, it makes cancer come alive as a human concern, a subject worthy of attention.

Not that I am obtuse in picking up vibes about books, but it took strong recommendations from three cousins one after another before I managed to pick up Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, with the enigmatic description “a short history of everybody for the last 13,000 years”. It describes itself as an enquiry but it is really a guide to the question as to why Europe became the “cradle of modern societies” and gave rise to capitalism and science as we know it, which are then defined as the two dominant forces in our contemporary world. Packed with information, the book is highly readable but the best thing is that sceptics such as myself don’t have to agree with the forceful flow of the cold, cutting logic.

Can I sneak in a book I have not read but would very much like to? But then what are reading lists if not extended wish lists? Even more than the novels of the elusive Elena Ferrante, top on my wish list is Only the Longest Threads by Tasneem Zehra Husain, a top physicist-turned-author and I am currently waiting to get a copy. Until then I have to be content with descriptions which are highly unusual: “Science is done by real human beings, with human concerns. Only the Longest Threads tells a story that conveys the human side of science in a way that is as moving as it is accurate”, says the recommendation from Sean Carroll, himself a theoretical physicist and author.