ONE of the disadvantages of being an avid reader is that at the end of every year as you sit down to evaluate the quality of the vast quantity of books that have been read over the year you tend to forget a lot of the books you may have read. However, for me this means that the ones that stand out in my mind are really exceptional, to have been so memorable. The year 2015 saw superb books written about two of my big interests: Pakistan cricket, and the city of Karachi. Laurent Gayer's Karachi: Ordered Disorder and the Struggle for the City, was the book that was begging to be written for decades, and the author did not disappoint in taking us down the bloodstained history of the city. For years cricket fans like myself had waited for someone to write the seminal history of Pakistan cricket, and like London buses, after ages of nothing, two came along at the same time. Osman Samiuddin's The Unquiet Ones: A History of Pakistan Cricket and Peter Oborne's Wounded Tiger: A History of Cricket in Pakistan, both stood out for different reasons.
Oborne's depth of research, for someone who was neither a cricket journalist nor a Pakistani, is to be admired, especially his in-depth look at the early years of the game in Pakistan. While Samiuddin's treatment of the development of the modern ethos of Pakistan cricket is so compelling that if you shut your eyes, you can just about hear the commentary from Pakistan's glory years playing in the background.
Samiuddin is also to be commended for an exceptional chapter on match fixing, a topic that, curiously, despite all the Greek tragedy undertones that surround it in Pakistan, no one has really chosen to write on in any great depth, at least not since the late 1990s. What else was good? Ben
Macintyre's work on the British Double agent, Kim Philby, A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal, was excellent. And despite my best efforts to read more fiction, I still fell woefully short, but in that category, Jason Goodwin's The Janissary Tree was gripping as a thriller and brought to life Istanbul of the early 19th century.
