This is one of those childhood stories I have no conscious memory of. I’ve conjured its unfurling solely from my grandmother’s numerous retellings of it. She remembers a lazy afternoon after playschool, when I plonked on her bed for my ritual pre-nap story and instead of reading me one aloud, she opened a book and said, “Today, you try.” I first said each letter her forefinger pointed to, slowly strung them together into familiar word sounds, segued them into hazy sentences, and as my eyes grew wide with wonder, there it was, I’d realised that simplest of joys, that I could actually read for myself.
We’ve all got these stories, of being taken by the hand and gently led into literacy, but somewhere on the path of outgrowing childhood, reading has become a solitary pleasure. We’ve become a community of loners; curled up over bent spines, head in the clouds, or between pages, oblivious of the world outside words. After two decades of thus self-directing my reading choices and patterns, I did something brave last academic year. I let myself be coaxed into, not one, but two reading groups, merely curious about being hand-led once again into new literary adventures.
The beginnings were innocuous enough. At the first meeting, I was the youngest by a decade in a roomful of strangers with whom I was soon laughing my lungs out and snorting unceremoniously as we read excerpts from What Ho!: The Best of P.G. Wodehouse . Over the following months, I re-discovered the pleasures of being read aloud to, hearing anew passages I’d gone over in my head, now imbued in fresh intonation, fresh expression. Over time, I was also gently bullied out of the deep well of South Asian writing in English that I’d gladly been wallowing in and drawn into worlds as widely disparate as Peter Carey’s Australian world of orthodox religion and obsessive gambling in Oscar and Lucinda , and the turn of the 20th Century Hungarian mountain life of Sandor Marai’s Embers .
Habit had taught me to read in interrelated stacks of books, each work foraying way into another akin to it. In the strange offshoots my reading groups took me on, I found unexpected links to my staple diet too. For instance, I happened to read Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist alongside Embers and realised that a century and several continents apart, Hamid and Marai had identical narrative structures in the single one-sided conversation their entire books unfold within. By the year’s close, our groups had fought battles over whether Jane Austen in Emma was simply a spinner of familial potboilers or one of the most insightful writers of the female psyche; and revelled together in the deep wisdom of Julian Barnes’ Sense of an Ending , each person’s takeaways made richer by the other’s interpretations.
It’s now been three months since I moved cities and been left reading group-less, but what’s the Internet’s resourcefulness but for times such as these. My solace has been BBC’s decade-old World Book Club, the vast audio archives of which feature discussions with authors and readers, a book each month. Sure, it’s no physical company of people, but to misquote Julia Child, “people who love to read are always the best people,” even if they’re just voices over a headphone.
