It is that time of the year again, when, like several others I see on Substack, I take stock of the books I read in 2025. (Here is a link to check the books and movies I watched in 2024.)
2026 is upon us. And like how. The world seems to have gone mad. As it turned out, 2025 was already a challenging year. 2024, before that. And 2023. And 2022. And COVID-19 before that.
Come 2026, and Trump, the US leader, has already struck Venezuela, gotten hold of the dictator, Nicolas Maduro, and brought him to the United States on the pretext of involvement with drug supply. But, as Trump himself has made it clear, it is all about oil. With Venezuela out of the way, Trump’s focus has already shifted towards Greenland, which is an autonomous territory of Denmark.
Besides that, the Russian war in Ukraine continues to rage on. Genocide in Gaza continues, albeit with a brief hiatus. Against this backdrop of geopolitical turmoil, there is also an onslaught of AI capitalism. AI companies are out to transform our world almost entirely, both literally and metaphorically.
Witnessing such socio-political upheavals and transformations, and pursuing a PhD simultaneously, is a considerable amount of work. In such circumstances, even as the world begins to fall apart, one brick at a time, I take refuge in books.
I started 2025 reading Emily Herring’s Herald of a Restless World, a book about the life, times, and philosophy of Henry Bergson. Sometime in the mid-1910s, when a woman walked up to him after his class and asked him what his philosophy was, Bergson replied: “I simply argue, Madam, that time is not space”. What did it mean? When philosophers theorised time, they treated it as something stable—frozen in symbolic representations of a clock, calendar, or the points on the graph. Bergson’s conceptualisation of durée refutes this. I write about the book as follows:
Herring tells Bergson’s story with sheer brilliance. In tracing his life, Herring creatively draws on the lives and stories of people around him to portray the life of the philosopher. By opening each chapter with engaging anecdotes about Bergson, Herring places him in the limelight and foreshadows him, just as his conception of durée would inform us about time. By doing so, Herring brings Bergson—the man and the philosopher—to the people.
Click here to read the full review of Emily Herring’s Herald of a Restless World.