Dear Reader,
“92 books this year. Only 8 more to go for a hundred…”
I look at my reading stats on the Goodreads app. And find myself in a reading race. Two days later, I finish Never by Ken Follett and head for my app to update my books tracker. After that I read a YA book called Almond with a sense of triumph – I’m now at 94 !
I notice many of my reader friends are also in reading races.
“I can’t read Nexus by Yuval Noah Harari, it’s too long. I need novellas to hit this year’s reading target“ says a friend.
Huge numbers of books are being published every day and we now have access to them all. The new Sally Rooney, the new Amor Towles, the new Richard Osman, the new Manu Pillai, the new Malcolm Gladwell… the list is limitless.
Then there are the literary prizes – the Booker, the Pulitzer, the Nobel, the Woman’s prize, the JCB, the Lit Live , the Crossword Awards etc. Each prize produces a much anticipated long list. After which there is a splashy shortlist and then finally the winner. The prize committee stagger their longlists and shortlists to heighten the suspense and to give us time to read the list. It’s hard to resist this temptation – but what a lot of reading it is – and all of this to a deadline.
Shortlist for the 2024 Women’s Fiction Prize
Other reading deadlines come from our favourite communities – the book clubs. And there are many of these – the celebrity book clubs, the online book clubs, the offline book groups, reading communities like Gurgaon Reads or Juhu Reads that are mushrooming in every city. These are fabulous – and much needed, they provide bonding over books and the rituals of community that modern life so lacks. Yet each book club demands its own reading.
And then there are the booklists – ‘The Best Books of 2024’, ‘The 100 Must Read Books of 2024’, ‘Authors pick the best books of 2024’ and so on…we love lists but oh my God the pressure they can bring.
And finally the TBR – our very own to-be-read book list. What could be an exciting list of books becomes a dead weight, a burdensome (and burgeoning) list of the books we should have already read.
I wonder whether we are losing the quiet comfort of reading. Are we transforming reading to a competitive sport?
Book club reads
When I was growing up in Jamshedpur we had a limited supply of books -we borrowed from each other or from the library. We were perpetually starved of print, reduced to reading encyclopaedias and old news on paper bags we picked up from the kirana store. In all my years as a reader, the only place I encountered a TBR was in a school syllabus – for the rest, you read whatever was available. And when you had run through everything around you, you re-read. You read A Secret Island by Enid Blyton and Circus Shoes by Noel Streatfeild ten times, and The Thorn Birds and Pride and Prejudice many more times.
I wonder whether we can go back to a slower way of reading, to reading fewer books and being able to absorb and imbibe them better. Can we simply set aside the FOMO of not having read the latest prize winner? And curl up into the cosy comfort of re-reading a favourite book – so stories sink in and marinate in our minds?
With a current book count of 105, I know I am the wrong person to be saying this. But in a way, this also makes me the right person to say it.
So here are my reading resolutions for 2025–
1. I will try not to be too influenced by the hype around recently published books – in fact I will alternate every new book I read with a book published at least 5 years ago.
2. I will re-read – at least one book every month.
3. I will resist the urge to finish every book I pick up – if I am not enjoying it by page 40 I will give it up.
4. I will stop tracking my books on Good Reads and move to a reading journal where I will note the books I read, but I will not number them.
What about you dear Reader? Do you believe in reading targets? Does your TBR feel like a pleasure or is it a pressure? Do write in with suggestions and recommendations.
And until next week, happy reading!
PS: Never by Ken Follett is set in Chad, China and USA. It takes a while to warm up, and doesn’t have the sprawling genius of Ken Follett’s Century trilogy or his Pillars of the Earth. But it redeems itself by weaving geopolitics into a page turner, leaving you with a great sense of what is going on in the world. 3.5 stars on a scale of 5.
Almond by Sohn Won-pyung is a YA novella translated from Korean, about a boy with a brain condition called alexithymia that makes it hard for him to feel emotion. It’s a thought provoking read, simply written, in the tradition of the bestselling Wonder by R. J. Palacio. 3.5 stars on a scale of 5.
Sonya Dutta Choudhury is a Mumbai-based journalist and the founder of Sonya’s Book Box, a bespoke book service. Each week, she brings you specially curated books to give you an immersive understanding of people and places. If you have any reading recommendations or suggestions, write to her at [email protected]. The views expressed are personal.
