Readers Write In #870: Books and Reading and Why we do it

By Rahini David

There is only one reason I have not been writing a bunch of RWI. It is because I have only one topic in mind and it seemed super-extensive. It is books, my only obsession. If there is a huge regret that gnaws me, it is that I still do not feel immersed with the most popular books, don’t identify with most protagonists, or easily admire an author. I don’t get super-possessive of physical books and won’t bite your head off if you don’t return a book you borrowed from me.

It is one thing to not be able to sing the most intricate of melodies or lift super heavy weights or earn enough to travel the world. I am mostly comfortable with setting my own achievable goals and feeling content in what I can do and what I do have. I am not competitive and don’t compare myself with what others achieve.

But that is never the case when it comes to books.

My ideal self spends hours on a weekend immersed in a book, and you can drop a small Diwali cracker next to me, and I would be too immersed in said book to notice anything amiss. My real self isn’t immersed enough. My ideal self would rip your head off if you damaged any part of my books; my real self would reassure you that it isn’t a big deal, and I would mean it. Damaged books don’t fill me with the rage I believe a true reader should feel. I am lukewarm about books, and I wish I were boiling all the time. It is weird but I wish I were crazier and wilder about books.

Don’t get me wrong, I do read a lot, especially when I count the audiobooks. I frequent libraries and book shops and get filled with awe. I watch a considerable amount of BookTube and listen to a handful of bookish podcasts and have a passion that is adjacent to the person I wish I was, but still pretty book obsessed. It is just that my obession is not transferred to specific books. Rather, it remains a fascination with the overall concept of bookishness.

Six years back, my husband gave me a Kindle Paperwhite as a birthday gift as I had turned 39. And despite it being an ideal gift for me, and my usual expressions of gratitude and excitement, my real reaction was “Well, that is the person I used to be, the person I wished I was, but I didn’t turn out like that after all.”.

After that, I spent 30 minutes a day adding bookmarks and folders and notes to my Kindle, reading the first 2-3 pages of every book I had heard about in recent times. Genre, no bar. Age Category, no bar. Quality, no bar. I wanted all the books in the world. A passion that I thought was dead was slowly getting rekindled. I started to listen to book reviews and audiobooks on my commute in favor of the music that I was listening to. I heard about more authors who were getting popular and more books that took everyone’s breath away.

This Two and a Half Men clip expresses best what I was feeling. I was desperate and wondered why.

Looking back, I feel that part of what I was feeling was a mid-life crisis. After all, 39 is the last year of the 30s and you want to be a certain someone by then and to have found themselves in a way. The covid lockdowns started a few months after that, and the time that I used to spend commuting was now available for reading.

As time went on, I became more comfortable with what I wanted to read, how much of my reading I wanted to be strictly physical books, how much time I was able to spend in concentration etc.

I can’t write a single RWI about books. It wouldn’t cover all that I can say, and all that is worth discussing. I want to write and discuss Audiobooks and Kindle and Reading Journals and Goodreads and Non-Fiction books and Reading Challenges and Book Fairs and Libraries and Magazines and Comics and Book Clubs and Young Adult and Children’s books and censors and AI books, and a lot more. I also have a lot of other topics that are bangers, but I don’t think I would do justice to the topic in question. But I still want to have a conversation about those topics.

So, I have come up with a plan. I will write about one topic every alternate Friday. I will try to do justice, but it is meant to be a starter to discuss books. I am sure we have so much to discuss. What do you say.