Here are some of the books I’ve picked up and put down and picked up again this year: David Foster Wallace’s Pale King, Zia Haider Rahman’s In the Light of What We Know and three post-modern Malayalam novels that I got when I was seduced, as I always am, by the sexy atmosphere in different branches of DC Books in different parts of Kerala.
Each time I put a book down, I was terrified that maybe it’s true that people have stopped reading books. By which I mean I was terrified that I have stopped reading books. And then I talked myself out of the panic.
Then came a recent night when I had the fleeting desire to set all my books on fire. It was a mere wisp of smoke, this thought, and it startled me. I told myself that I just needed a plan so that the bookshelves that once seemed like the pinnacle of grown-up achievement don’t feel like the weightiest of adult burdens. When had books become such a chore? And was a reading list the only way out?
In the tradition of Anne Fadiman, I want to pronounce that there are two kinds of ardent readers, those who impose reading lists on themselves and those who don’t. But my investigations reveal that readers are annoyingly non-dual on this front, refusing to lend themselves to snappy categorisation.
Senior commissioning editor and compulsive reader A told me, “Sorry, love, I haven’t. I don’t make resolutions at all; they make me panicky. So, for instance, if I resolve to quit smoking, I start smoking frantically.” And so did a few other friends who were appalled that I’d even ask such an uncool thing. Many reading friends fell into a particular category best represented by Ahmedabad-based journalist Revati Laul. She says, “I don’t have a reading list on paper, but I have aspirational reading lists in my head all the time and constantly fail! But in 2015, I ticked off one big one that I had been embarrassed about: Tolstoy. I hadn’t read him at all and this was building up as a tsunami in my head. But I read War and Peace and fell in love. Instantly.” Built on this achievement, Ms. Laul now has a big list for this year.
I was once like her, Vivek Nityananda, a U.K.-based scientist, tells me. He and I once made a list a decade ago. “It was a list of ‘worthy’ books that we needed to read to tell everyone we were ‘worthy’ people. While I didn’t plunge into reading everything on the list, I’ve kept an eye out for the books and joyfully tick off each one when I put it down with a sigh of relief. The list gave me ‘special’ books to look out for while trawling bookshops that weren’t my usual favourites. Also, I never let it become a task, so it did end up being more fun. Yes, even when I was ploughing my way through Ulysses .”
This was not comforting: the thought of a decade filled with feckless reading.
Borrowed listsI may be frightened by books right now but I’ve been enjoying reading other people’s lists this week. Mumbai-based artist and filmmaker Afrah Shafiq told me, “I always have a sticky note on my desktop, which will have some list or the other. I like reading lists because then I don’t waste too much free time deciding what to read or watch. It’s all kind of chalked out. And if I haven’t read a book or something and it comes up or is spoken about somewhere, I feel reassured that at least it’s on my list.” She explains her method. “Mostly it’s all the works of one particular person, more than theme-based. In 2013, it was all Jeanette Winterson. I do it a lot more for films than books though — did an all Agnes Varda and all Mike Nichols and when Nora Ephron died. If I feel someone is really cool and then they put a list of influential books out, I get pumped to read it. I’m also following Lynda Barry’s tumblr this year (based on her teaching syllabus) so then that reading and viewing list is what I’m on right now.” The breadth and joy of this response made me want to jump into bed with a fake flu and a real pile of books.
Or take my college pal S, a crossword designer. She is currently reading the Inspector Maigret books written by Georges Simenon. She has read 30 out of the 75 novels so far. In this merry Pacman manner, she has devoured great piles of vintage detective novels and crime novels in period settings: all the Dorothy Sayers, all the Martin Becks, all the Inspector Van Veeteren books, 15 out of the 18 Sano Ichiro books by Laura Joh Rowland. This quite apart from some worthies from a must-read-in-2016 list she found in a magazine. “Book lists definitely give me a sense of purpose while reading,” she says.
Jasmine Lovely George, who runs the feminist website, Hidden Pockets , in Delhi, tells me, “Well, I have been stuck to picking up female philosophers, though I never created any list specifically, because I was bit tired of male philosophers and their obsession with tragedy and logic. Reading lists help in keeping a tab of unexplored territories. It’s exciting. Geek.” She mocks herself but this starts me thinking.
Books by men and womenPart of my problem is that I am finding it harder and harder to read books by men. In the same time that I’ve struggled with some books, I’ve breezed through Bee Rowlatt’s In Search of Mary , begun a slow re-reading of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway , intermittently read Claudia Roth Pierpont’s Roth Unbound and leaped about with joy for Ratika Kapur’s The Private Life of Mrs Sharma . I’ve also reread mysteries and romances. All by women. To an extent I am even reading Pierpont’s Roth biography only because I fell ludicrously in love with her profiles of women writers in Passionate Minds .
And there are others readers around me whose political choices have shifted over the years into rather obvious reading choices. A Twitter pal told me that she just can’t read straight romances anymore. She enjoys our new-found plenty of queer romance of varying registers. A serious-minded, gay Kenyan author said aloud several times this week that he was just so grateful for the genre-bending, gender-bending beauteous trash (he said ‘trash’ with such pleasure) of the online publisher, Ellora’s Cave.
Am I really mostly reading women? Apparently I am. Why should it surprise us that politics and aesthetics overlap in this way? None of us thought it was or were told it was a political choice back when we were supposed to be reading only white dudes or when we were supposed to feel for the endless literary sorrows of non-residential Indian Bengali families.
For seven years I was vegetarian and I was astounded at how miserable it was to read descriptions of meals I wouldn’t eat in book after book. My mostly reading only women authors and a young acquaintance who mostly reads only Dalit authors is a bit like that. It is less a smug political choice and more a slow tuning of the universe to find a station we like. It is a version of the delighted discovery of the world that just reading, any reading, gave you once. Back when I assumed that I’d never have enough books to read. And had no desire to set my shelves on fire.
(Nisha Susan is a writer and a co-founder of the online feminist magazine The Ladies Finger .)
