News2Novel - Food, Urban Planning and Investing In Biodiversity #12

3 novel suggestions based on recent news

Happy New Year! This is the 12th issue of News2Novel - the newsletter that suggests novels to read based on weekly news.

Before we dive in, here’s an update on how I’m approaching

Lit Visions

for the next three months:

• I’ll be publishing twice per week:

  • News2Novel on Tuesdays (at 10am GMT)

  • Essays, podcasts or speculative stories on Thursdays (at 10am GMT)

• All posts will be themed around fiction, reality and the liminal space in between

I’m excited to ship a lot more this year and hope to also grow my subscriber base. You can help me out by sharing Lit Visions with friends, family, colleagues and anyone else who might find it interesting:

Thanks a ton for your support. Now, here’s News2Novel.

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#Food ➡️ The Mistress of Spices

• Families around the world have spent the past few weeks bonding over their favourite winter meals

• Festive foods like brussels sprouts and cranberries not only bring people together but also contain vitamins that support brain function

• Nutritional psychiatry is an emerging field that investigates the relationship between food and mental health

• Food and healing are themes explored in The Mistress of Spices by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, a novel that follows Tilo, a young Indian woman trained in the ancient art of spices

• Tilo has magical abilities and travels through time to Oakland, California where she opens a spice shop and helps people with their ailments, wants and desires

• One day, she breaks the rules of her training by falling for a handsome male customer; her spices retaliate with punishment inflicted on her and her loved ones…

#UrbanPlanning ➡️ Invisible Cities

• The city grid is the oldest form of city planning and is falling out of fashion

• This is due to the rise of digital mapping, cars and the need for more complex road networks

• Grid layouts were first seen around 2600 BC in ancient cities like Mohenjo-Daro (southeastern Pakistan) and also in ancient Greece; in modern times, Chicago is considered to have the world’s most consistent and orderly grid layout

• A modern classic that depicts creative possibilities for city design and urban theory is Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino, first published in 1972

• The novel is structured as a series of discussions between the Venetian explorer Marco Polo and Mongol ruler Kublai Khan, in which Polo poetically describes the various cities he has travelled to

• Polo’s cities range from the surreal (e.g. Octavia, a city made of spider webs and suspended above an abyss) to ones more grounded in reality; they also inspire commentary on topics like memory, identity and the nature of civilisation

#Biodiversity ➡️ The Overstory

• 196 governments recently pledged to protect and restore 30% or more of the Earth’s water and land by 2030

• The destruction of natural environments is a big contributor to climate change, but most companies do not include biodiversity in their plans

• Projects like reforestation can help safeguard biodiversity and thus offset carbon emissions

• Deforestation is a central theme in The Overstory, Richard Powers’s Pultizer Prize-winning novel, published in 2018

• It tells the story of a group of people whose lives become intertwined through their connections to trees

• As they wrestle with the modern world and its impact on the environment, they come to value the things that truly matter

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Before you go…

Here are some final morsels and thoughts:

What Can We Learn from Barnes & Noble's Surprising Turnaround?

• I just loved this piece by

  Ted Gioia
  in
  The Honest Broker
  . It's about how Barnes & Noble, the US bookseller, is thriving again after a long decline. The story contains so many lessons about leadership, focus and the importance of caring deeply.

• This was an intriguing conversation with Robin Miles on her journey through audiobook narration. It’s always a delight to see someone so in love with their craft.

News2Novel - Your New Year Reflections #11

• Thanks to everyone who shared their reflections with me in last week’s special edition of News2Novel - I hope y’all enjoyed the corresponding novel suggestions!

• If you end up reading any of the novels mentioned in News2Novel, I’d love to hear about it! Just drop a comment, reply to this email or tweet me @dhrupadkarwa

Have a beautiful week filled with fiction and possibilities! ✨

Dhru