reviews – Mythili G. Rao

Second half of 2024: Reviews, interviews, podcasts

As the year comes to a close, here’s a quick round-up of a few projects I’ve worked on over the last six months.

For the the Financial Times, I reviewed Rejection by Tony Tulathiamutte.
For the Guardian I reviewed Breakthrough by William Pao.
For Intelligence Squared, I interviewed Amorina Kingdon about her book Sing Like Fish and Ferris Jabr about his book Becoming Earth.

Finally, working on Zero’s COP29 coverage for Bloomberg Green was a big end-of-year highlight. A few of the half-dozen episodes I produced:

First, a look at the opening of the conference— which reminded me of Girl Scout Thinking Day.
Here’s an interview with ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods taped in front of a live audience in Baku, Azerbaijan (extra context about that appearance in The New York Times here).
Also taped live on stage in Baku: A conversation with the Biden administration’s outgoing climate tzar, Ali Zaidi
And here, I help break down what COP29’s final deal actually achieved.

Recent book reviews: fiction by Walter Kempowski, Camilla Grudova, Andrey Kurkov; nonfiction by Michel Faber, Caspar Henderson, Arash Azizi, and Yuan Yang (plus, podcasts)

I’ve fallen behind on updating this site! Some recent (well, from the last six-ish months) book reviews and podcast projects below.

For the Financial Times:

I reviewed An Ordinary Youth by Walter Kempowski, a 1971 autobiographical German novel now available in English for the first time (translated by Michael Lipkin). It’s a book about the language used by a society complicit in genocide—but also about the sensory experience of childhood. (Some say it’s timely.)
I reviewed The Coiled Serpent, a new collection of creepy short stories by Camilla Grudova, one of Granta’s Best Young British novelists for 2023. (Pairs well with Paula Rego’s paintings.)
I reviewed Andrey Kurkov’s new crime novel, The Silver Bone, a historic crime novel set in wartime Ukraine translated by Boris Dralyuk. It made me consider Kurkov’s fear that the war might destroy Ukrainians’ connection to the language he loves.
I also reviewed Real Americans by Rachel Khong, an ambitious novel about money, migration, dreams, secrets and the lure of scientific progress.

For the Washington Post:

I reviewed two new books about sound—Listen by Michel Faber and A Book of Noises by Caspar Henderson. (They made me think about the relationship the protagonist of The Bloater by Rosemary Tonks has with sound, so I wrote about that too.)

For the Guardian:

I reviewed What Iranians Want: Women, Life, Freedom by Arash Azizi. As a follow-up, Intelligence Squared invited me to interview him; you can hear our conversation here.
I reviewed Private Revolutions: Coming of Age in a New China by Yuan Yang. It’s a wonderful book, and these women’s stories have stayed with me. (Pairs well with The Economist’s excellent Drum Tower podcast.)

A few other projects: The final series I was responsible for overseeing at Novel late last year, a sprawling investigation into wildlife trafficking called “The Wild Life” is now out. It’s built on hundreds of hours of undercover recordings from the spy who brought down one of the biggest African wildlife trafficking syndicates—and so much more. It’s also the first time I’ve shared a production credit with Drake (yes, that Drake).

Also now out in the world is a local news/true crime hybrid pilot I worked on for BBC Sounds. It’s the story of the long, colorful career of a fraudster named David Levi from the town of Lytham St. Annes near Blackpool. Over the years he’s dabbled in eBay phishing, cannabis shipping, and cruise-ship credit card fraud, but in his latest scam, he pocketed hundreds of thousands of pounds impersonating the sacred British icon Pudsey Bear.

And in March, I started a new job as the producer of Zero! It’s a terrific show about the policies, tactics, and technologies taking us to a future of zero emissions. A few highlights have included this barn-burner of an interview with former Conservative MP Chris Skidmore (which caught the attention of the FT) and taking a turn on-mic in this conversation about Microsoft’s rising emissions.

Running memoirs: Reviews of new books from Lauren Fleshman, Kara Goucher, and Caster Semenya

Earlier this year I got to review two new memoirs by Lauren Fleshman and Kara Goucher for the Washington Post. I’ve admired and followed the careers of both for a long time, so it was eye-opening and instructive to find out what they’d really experienced.

Last month, I also had the pleasure of reviewing Caster Semenya’s powerful new memoir for the Guardian as well.

A plan to make feminism better: Make it less White

I reviewed Against White Feminism by Rafia Zakaria for the Washington Post– and just so happened to be in D.C. the day it was published. Read the whole piece here.

In India, the complicated truth behind the killing of two teenagers

I wrote about The Good Girls: An Ordinary Killing by Sonia Faleiro for this weekend’s Washington Post. Here’s a snippet of my review:

As Faleiro probes the case, an extensive supporting cast emerges: meddlesome uncles, drunken police officers, hopelessly unqualified coroners, sensationalizing TV newsmen, a sneering intelligence officer and grandstanding politicians, all with a part — however undignified — to play in this story. … Everyone agrees that the girls’ deaths are a tragedy; no one knows quite whom to blame.

The Crazy Human Heart

I interviewed Daniel Mendelsohn for Virginia Magazine. It was a treat to sit down with a critic whose work I’ve admired for a long time and talk about how he approaches his work. The headline comes from his take on Love Actually. I’ve always loathed that movie, but on his urging, I’m going to try to let my guard down next Christmas when it’s on TV.

Do you believe in “guilty pleasures” of cultural consumption?

I really do believe that the high-low distinction is more invidious than not. The aesthetic components of “guilt”-inducing pleasures are usually melodrama and sentimentality. I have a great aversion to the aversion to sentimentality. To me, what made Mad Men unbearable was its own incredible overweening need to be cool. And because it was so cool and so cynical about everything, I just didn’t care about it, whereas in the first five minutes of watching Friday Night Lights, I thought I was going to die if I didn’t know those people were going to be okay.

Why not love something like Love Actually? What’s so terrible about just caving into your crazy human heart every now and then? You don’t always have to be armored.

Our Diaries, Ourselves

I reviewed The Folded Clock: A Diary by Heidi Julavits and Ongoingness: The End of a Diary Sarah Manguso– and reflected on my own diary-keeping habits– over at The Los Angeles Review of Books. The essay starts like this:

TODAY I DUG OUT an old diary from one of the large cardboard boxes that my husband and I never unpacked after our last move. It’s a spiral notebook with a multicolored cover. Thin lines of text, written in a black Pilot Precise pen, fill its pages, and my handwriting is narrow and mostly neat. The diary begins in the spring of 2005, a few months before I moved to New York. Flipping through it, I hoped to find some observation from my first hours, days, or weeks in New York — some early impression of the city that might foreshadow how the place would shape me.

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