As is customary at this time of the year, people tend to look back over the past 12 months and take stock of accomplishments, failures, surprises and life in general. Here’s a mini personal retrospective in numbers: 10 – New Year’s Eve marks a decade since I moved back to Mauritius from Ireland, involving a whole ten years of rollercoasting through re-adaptation, carving a place for myself, raising kids within a pandemic, coming to a number of realisations about myself and how I see life. 5 (approximately)– the number of articles I managed to write this year, not by lack of want, but more so driven by bouts of despair and resignation that despite the best of sayings, the pen does not seem mightier than the sword these days, instead words uttered or written are more of Damocles’ sword in today’s local climate. However, all is not gloom, at least in my perspective of the year gone by according to the last number on my list: 9 ½: the number of books I managed to read this year.
I have always been an avid reader, a habit cultivated from a young age by my parents, and which sometimes reached irritation point for them. During my teens, I would have averaged at least 50 books a year (my daughter boasts 58 for this year), devoured dozens during holidays, which makes 9 ½ look paltry in comparison. This number looks even more meagre compared to the number of articles making the rounds around this time of the year evoking the number of books read (for some more than a hundred) in a year. With reading challenges and social media seeping through the reading world, as other aspects of life, it becomes easy to get sucked in this world of establishing reading goals and feeling bad when not being able to achieve same, especially compared to others’ success. Setting reading goals is not a bad thing really, but it does not necessarily work for everyone, at least it didn’t work for me. Last year, I unrealistically set a goal of about 30 books on my Goodreads account, I managed less than half. This year, I decided to do it differently, I resolved not pressure myself into attaining a goal. Instead, I planned on taking it a book at a time and see where I reach. I started charting this on my Instagram page and that’s how I was able to keep track of what I was reading and how much reading I completed. In this journey I made a couple of observations.
First, I may have reached 9 ½ books but there are a number of books that I have picked up in between and didn’t get into. I either left them after a couple of pages because of lack of interest (The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett) or because I was not in the frame of mind to get into that kind of story (A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara) at the time I picked the book, to name but a couple. I re-read some books (A Dangerous Fortune by Ken Follett) because a nostalgic part of me wanted to remind myself of how much I had liked that book when I first read it, remembering the person I was then, kind of finding comfort in a familiar and easy read, akin to how sometimes music makes one feel.
Secondly, a major distraction in my reading process has been smartphone usage. A common scenario would go like this: I would be sitting with my book and a call or text message would come in. After attending any of these, I would then scroll social media telling myself that it would only be a few minutes and then when I look at the time, almost half an hour or more is gone. This, I find, was a major impediment for me, though on my worst days, I would convince myself that I have also been reading on social media platforms, but who am I kidding… On some days, my mental energy would be so drained that I would not have the capacity to focus on the string of words in their proper order in a book, so I would watch a film instead, telling myself that instead of reading a story, I am watching one…
A couple of authors shared that they reached impressive numbers in reading by also reading e-books and listening to audio books. I have to say that up to now, I have not been able to join this trend. I have been gifted a Kindle for my birthday, which I was very excited about, but couldn’t quite get into it, maybe I am yet to take the time to make optimum use of it, which is my intention for the coming year. I do admit that I have not given audiobooks a try but judging by my attention when listening to podcasts, it may not be the best way for me to finish a book. Maybe I am simply too old-fashioned, a part of me refusing to be on par with modern reading ways.
Reading is so much more than the story for me. To date, holding a book, smelling its pages and turning them are still very much part of the pleasure that I derive from reading. Browsing through physical books makes me reminisce for I have had the habit of inscribing the date and place along with my name when I buy a book. For instance, holding Bloodline by Sidney Sheldon, transports me back to India on an unforgettable trip with my Dad and sister when I was 18 (also getting yelled at, at the time of packing for the number of books I had bought). A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth the first ever book I bought in Ireland, takes me back to The Crescent Bookshop, Limerick, and evokes my first interaction with an Irish person on my own. I still remember stammering a bit at the till, worried that I would not understand the cashier’s accent or her mine. Holding The Namesake (one of my all-time favourite books) by Jhumpa Lahiri makes me visualize myself sitting on a plastic chair on a timidly sunny day in May 2006 in our backyard in Limerick, finishing the book and feeling as if I has been parted from part of my own story, such was I able to relate to the immigrant experience of Ashima, one of the main protagonists. Similar to those, a large number of books that I own contain more than their own stories; my stories are also intertwined: the person I was, the place I was at, the stage where I was in life… all which contribute to today taking stock of not only a year, but of life in general.
As I am reading Our Missing Hearts by Celeste Ng (half of which I am yet to complete), which is based on a not so dystopian future, I am also acutely conscious of the world we live in. I strongly believe that if we are to make sense of life, of the wider world, reading, no matter the medium, is more than essential. It is imperative. As I sit and write this, reflecting on the 9 ½ books that I have read so far, I tell myself that it is an achievement in itself, especially when I look at The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson sitting on my bookshelf. Ten years ago, that particular book sat on my bedside table for a year, without me being able to make sense of whatever I was reading in its pages, suffering from postpartum depression. That was the year when I hadn’t read a single book, contributing more to my depressed state for I could not understand how something so intrinsic to my being was so out of my reach. Today, ten years later, as I sit among my books, collected, gifted since childhood up to now, what I feel is gratitude: to be able to own books, to have been graced with the love of reading, to be able to write after months of inability to do so, to be able to read again, to still be marveled by stories. There are many more stories on my bookshelves, “discreetly, silently, patiently” waiting to be read, despite being there for some years. And when I will delve into them, I will then understand why then was not the time for me to read them, and why I had to be where I will be to be able to grasp them to the fullest.
