When books speak

Do writers like to read when they are working on a book? What are the books that draw them in? Authors discussed their reading habits at the ‘Writers are Readers First’ session

In the thick of a literary festival that celebrates writers, this session put the spotlight back on the art of reading. At ‘Writers are Readers First’, authors Amitabha Bagchi, Timeri Murari and Manjula Padmanabhan, spoke with Arunava Sinha about their reading habits and the books that made them.

Amitabha, who is also a computer scientist at IIT Delhi, said he read purely for pleasure, to escape into a made-up world in which he could stay for as long as he pleased. “My primary mode is as a day-dreamer. Writing, for me, is a form of day-dreaming and reading is my way of dreaming without actually having to go to sleep.” Even while he wrote, Amitabha said he always frequented certain works to overcome writer’s block. “They’re my kick-in-the-pants books.” At this session, he read an excerpt from Proust’s Swann’s Way, a book about the men and women of leisure in 20th Century France, which he at first never expected to enjoy. “But it caught me by the scruff of my neck and pulled me into its long sentences in ways I could never have imagined. I’m so glad there are six volumes of it!”

For Timeri Murari, asking him to pick a favourite work, he said, was like “asking a Sultan which his favourite wife among a thousand was. I have no Scheherazade.” Even so, Timeri chose Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s

Love in the Time of Cholera to read from, for he said, with each return to Marquez, he was fascinated anew at his sheer talent and the depth of his characters. “It was first with Marquez that I discovered magic realism, rife with mythology, something I could relate to as an Indian.”

Timeri added that he put aside literary fiction while he wrote his own books, choosing instead non-fiction or light genre fiction that wouldn’t interfere with the worlds he was creating.

“I don’t read at all while I’m writing,” said Manjula Padmanabhan. For four years, settled in an apartment in the US to complete her latest book, Manjula said she didn’t read at all, but has “been gorging on books ever since, to make up for lost time”. As a child, she read for sustenance. “I gobbled books; inhaled them, in a way I don’t do anymore. I miss that intense immersion.” From her childhood favourites, Manjula picked a passage from Through the Looking Glass , for the joy she derived from its adventure as a child, and the deeper meanings she discovered in the book as an adult.