We read like this only

It’s the season for lists. The Flipkart ‘Best of 2014’ newsletter tells me that Ravinder Singh’s Your Dreams are Mine Now “engaged, entertained and enlightened” as much as Arun Sharma’s How to Prepare for Quantitative Aptitude for the CAT . I’m clearly behind the times, because I haven’t read either. The Guardian says 2014 was the year when young adult fiction surprisingly outsold the staple crime bestsellers and Booker Prize winners, which means I should’ve been reading the Minecraft series (essentially, fictional video game manuals), four of which are on the top 10, to keep up. But, what do I get about complex hand-eye-brain coordination to build blocks and battle evil? Nothing!

It’s also the season for promises; for when you draw up resolution charts that play catch-up with all you should’ve read in 2014, and all you’re expected to read in 2015. For assistance with the past, there are the literary prizes — the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature and The Hindu Prize For Fiction, for example, both with shortlists out and results forthcoming. If some of your year’s reading features there, then you and the nation’s book critics can amicably shake hands. For direction to the future, the Internet abounds with reading advice. Twitter has been abuzz with the ‘2015 Reading Challenge’ that exhorts you to read 30 books this year, one each that fits into categories such as a book over 500 pages, or one you can finish in a day, a graphic novel, or a book that scares you, or one you were supposed to read in school, but didn’t. As comedian Akshar Pathak pointed out, you’re fairly well covered if you’ve either read Harry Potter or R.D. Sharma’s Objective Mathematics .

In all seriousness, though, what really determines our reading choices in this age of virtual bombardment? Do Goodreads’star reviews egg you on to your next book or do you trust your taste to the website algorithms of online retailers? Once, just after I’d picked up James Baldwin’s powerful personal memoir

Go Tell It On The Mountain , Amazon suggested I follow up with Toni Morrison’s

The

Bluest Eye . That was sound counsel. I lost some faith, though, when I was recommended Durjoy Dutta’s

Ohh Yes, I’m Single..! And So Is My Girlfriend! after Gabriel Marquez’s

Love In The Time of Cholera. It’s a question I’ve asked many people all last year and the answers have always differed. Someone told me they stacked related books by their bedside — philosophy and self-help together and poetry and short-fiction together, for example — and systematically worked through them, often jumping piles when bored. Another reader said she picked a “fat, tough” book for the mornings and gentler fiction to sleep off to by nights.

For my part, it’s been a story of obsessing over genres, the latest fad being gospel-romantic fiction, or resolutely swearing to alternate between the classics and contemporary fiction, and systematically failing. What’s kept me content, though, has been a tendency to trace book trails. In Chimamanda Adiche’s

Americanah , for instance, she writes of Chinua Achebe, which lead me to his Things Fall Apart , which in turn references, and hence I read, W.B. Yeats’ The Second Coming . Will this method get us to cover the ‘Best of 2015’ list when it comes? I doubt it. But does it really matter, though, when you’re happily burrowing through the rabbit-hole of discovery that literature can be one book at a time? Here’s wishing you a wonderfully happy, book-filled 2015!