Tishani Doshi

you know, burning and there's this sense of the world is on fire and what do we do?

And part of me feels that reading a book like that, reading someone who is sort of documenting history in a way, it somehow gives me some sense of hope and something to hold on to.

What are you going to read next?

So I really want to read Behrouz Bochani's book, No Friend But the Mountains, because I heard him recently at the Blue Mountains Festival and

I don't know.

I think that that's, again, this huge story of our time, this idea of migration and countries and who gets to belong and who doesn't.

And I think for me to be able to read that book, especially after being in Australia for these few weeks, will be really important.

Absolutely.

So one of the books that I go back to and read every few years is a small, slim book by the Japanese writer Junichiro Tanizaki.

And it is called In Praise of Shadows.

And it's just a book about aesthetics.

And it's talking about how we cannot think of light and dark in terms of binary things because they exist together.

and how light is always seen as clarity, as epiphany.

But in the Japanese tradition, you know, darkness is equally important, more important.

And he talks about, you know, the beauty of eating from a lacquer bowl and how when you take the sweet meat from it and put it in your mouth, it's like swallowing the darkness of the room.

And it's such a beautiful book because I think in this time of great speed and bright lights,

it's a call back to slowness and it's a call back to finding the shadows because he believes that beauty lives in the shadows.

And I really feel that because we are in such murky times, we may as well get used to adjusting our eyesight.