Covers that
catch your fancy or titles that grip your brain,
It’s a pursuit in which there’s nothing to lose and everything to gain.
It’s a list that never comes to an end,
Whether I buy them, borrow or lend.
The authors of classics, the legends of yore,
The writers of today, new on the fore.
Paperback, hardcover or on virtual device,
Read them as you like, in any crevice.
With a cup of hot brew, or cold if you wish,
Or if you’d much rather, enjoy with a dish.
My friend Mehak has written
eloquently about the merits of an e-book reader, in particular, the Kindle
Paperwhite. So I’m hoping that it will suffice for me to say that it is one of
the most convenient products ever made and instead write about my reading list
for this year.
The following are the books I’ve
been fortunate to be able to read this year:
1. The Perks of Being a Wallflower, by Stephen
Chbosky: a worthwhile read to remind
yourself what it is to feel young and vulnerable, yet infinite.
So I guess we are who we are for a lot of
reasons. And maybe we’ll never know most of them. But even if we don’t have the
power to choose where we come from, we can still choose where we go from there.
We can still do things. And we can try to feel okay about them.
I think that if I ever have kids, and they are upset, I won’t tell them that
people are starving in China or anything like that because it wouldn’t change
the fact that they were upset. And even if somebody else has it much worse,
that doesn’t change the fact that you have what you have. Good and bad. It’s
just different. Maybe it’s good to put things into perspective, but sometimes,
I think that the only perspective is to really be there. Because it’s okay to
feel things. And be who you are about them.
2.
The Bell Jar, by Sylvia Plath: What I learnt from this book is that it is
not delusional to be unhappy and feel dissatisfied with your lot in life, even
if you don’t know why.
After nineteen years of running after good marks and prizes and grants of one
sort and another, I was letting up, slowing down, dropping clean out of the
race. The trouble was, I had been inadequate all along. I simply hadn’t thought
about it. The one thing I was good at was winning scholarships, and that era
was coming to an end.
I felt like a racehorse in a world without racetracks or a champion college
footballer suddenly confronted by Wall Street and a business suit, his days of
glory shrunk to a little gold cup on his mantel with a date engraved on it like
the date on a tombstone.
I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig in the story. I saw
myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because
I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and
every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat
there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by
one, they plopped to the ground by my feet.
3. The Book
Thief, by Marcus Zusak: anybody who
has ever enjoyed reading must read this book.
When she came to write her story, she
would wonder exactly when the books and the words started to mean not just
something, but everything. Was it when she first set eyes on the room with
shelves and shelves of them?
Certainly, her brother practically died in
her arms. Her mother abandoned her. But anything was better than being a Jew.
4. The Fault in
our Stars, by John Green: because even though love is without hope, we
can all be hopeless romantics sometimes.
The oblivion fear is something else, fear
that I won’t be able to give anything in exchange for my life. If you don’t
live a life in service of a greater good, you’ve gotta at least die a death in
service of a greater good, you know? And I fear that I won’t get either a life
or a death that means anything.
I would probably never again see the ocean
from thirty thousand feet above, so far up that you can’t make out the waves or
any boats, so that the ocean is a great and endless monolith. I could imagine
it. I could remember it. But I couldn’t see it again, and it occurred to me
that the voracious ambition of humans is never sated by dreams coming true,
because there is always the thought that something might be done better and
again.
5.
The Outsiders, by John Clements: because it's never too late to read a coming of age book.
Rat race is
a perfect name for it, she said. We’re always going and going and going, and
never asking where. Did you ever hear of having more than you wanted? So that
you couldn’t want anything else and then started looking for something else to
want? It seems like we’re always searching for something to satisfy us, and
never finding it. Maybe if we could lose our cool, we could.
6. Looking for
Alaska, by John Green: you like one title, so you have to read others, simple.
‘I go to seek a Great Perhaps.’ That’s why I’m going. So I don’t have to
wait until I die to start seeking a Great Perhaps.
Jesus, I’m not going to be one of those people who sits around talking about
what they’re gonna do. I’m just going to do it. Imagining the future is a kind
of nostalgia.
You spend your whole life stuck in a labyrinth, thinking about how you’ll
escape it one day, and how awesome it will be, and imagining that future keeps
you going, but you never do it. You just use the future to escape the present.
And what is an “instant” death anyway? How
long is an instant? Is it one second? Ten? The pain of those seconds must have
been awful as her heart burst and her lungs collapsed and there was no air and
no blood to her brain and only raw panic. What the hell is instant? Nothing is
instant. Instant rice takes five minutes, instant pudding an hour. I doubt that
an instant of blinding pain feels particularly instantaneous.
7. Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy: it was a worthwhile and moving read, despite the length and mundane parts.
It’s the truth I’m telling you. I do value my idea and my work awfully; but in
reality only consider this: all this world of ours is nothing but a speck of
mildew, which has grown up on a tiny planet. And for us to suppose we can have
something great – ideas, work – it’s all dust and ashes.
In his father’s opinion, he did not want to
learn what he was taught. In reality, he could not learn that. He could not,
because the claims of his own soul were more binding on him than those claims
his father and his teacher made upon him. Those claims were in opposition, and
he was in direct conflict with his education. He was nine years old; he was a
child; but he knew his own soul, it was precious to him, he guarded it as the
eyelid guards the eye, and without the key of love he let no one into his soul.
His teachers complained that he would not learn, while his soul was brimming
over with thirst for knowledge.
8. Norwegian
Wood, by Haruki Murakami: Glad to be
finally reading his work.
Memory is a funny thing. When I was in
the scene I hardly paid it any attention. I never stopped to think of it as
something that would make a lasting impression, certainly never imagined that
18 years later I would recall it in such detail. I was thinking about myself. I
was thinking about the beautiful girl walking next to me. I was thinking about
the two of us together, and then about myself again. I was at that age, that
time of life when every sight, every feeling, every thought came back, like a
boomerang, to me. And worse, I was in love. Love with complications. Scenery was
the last thing on my mind.
Even so, my memory has grown increasingly dim, and I have already forgotten any
number of things. Writing from memory like this, I often feel a pang of dread. What
if I’ve forgotten the most important thing? What if somewhere inside me there
is a dark limbo where all the truly important memories are heaped and slowly
turning into mud?
I tried hard to forget, but there remained inside me a vague knot of air. And as
time went by, the knot began to take on a clear and simple form, a form that I
am able to put into words, like this: Death exists, not as the opposite of but
as a part of life. It’s a cliché translated into words, but at the time I felt
it not as words but as that knot of air inside me. Death exists – in a
paperweight, in four red and white balls on a pool table – and we go on living
and breathing it into our lungs like fine dust. Until that time, I had
understood death as something entirely separate from and independent of life. The
hand of death is bound to take us, I had felt, but until the day it reaches out
for us, it leaves us alone. This had seemed to me the simple, logical truth. Life
is here, death is over there. I am here, not over there.
Becoming serious was not the same thing as approaching the truth, I sensed,
however vaguely. But death was a fact, a serious fact, no matter how you looked
at it. Stuck inside this suffocating contradiction, I went on endlessly
spinning in circles. Those were strange days, now that I look back at them. In the
midst of life, everything revolved around death.
“Of course life frightens me sometimes. I don’t happen to take that as the
premise for everything else, though. I’m going to give it 100 per cent and go
as far as I can. I’ll take what I want and leave what I don’t want. That’s how
I intend to live my life, and if things go bad, I’ll stop and reconsider at
that point. If you think about it, an unfair society is a society that makes it
possible for you to exploit your abilities to the limit.” “Sounds like a pretty
self-centred way to live,” I said. “Perhaps, but I’m not just looking up at the
sky and waiting for the fruit to drop. In my own way, I’m working hard. I’m
working ten times harder than you are.
May we always have a friend in need,
And if not, a book to read.
Until next time.
