A reader’s passion and a reading life in 2022.

I took a short sabbatical from writing in the last couple of weeks to focus on reading and rearranging ( or reorganizing) my ever-growing library – a project I had been postponing for quite some time. My library has swelled in 2022, and this year alone, I realized, more than a hundred books have been added to the overburdened and drooping shelves. All available side tables, my work desk, spare speaker holders, the kitchen counter, and the staircase have books on them. In short, they are all over the place. But at some point, I know, I must enforce a method on this collection, if not for anything else, at least, to give each book its due companion, a kindred neighbor with whom they can pair. For instance, I placed Nabokov’s Lolita with Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and paired Gibbon’s Everyman’s edition of the history of Rome with a 1935 print of Herodotus’ histories – both tell stories in their inimitable ways. Since I am organizing my own personal library and not a public one, I am free to choose a system that works for me, and me alone. Only I need to know where a particular book is located. For others, it can remain a maze, a bibliophilic confusion. I am obsessive about my books in a way I am not about any of my other material possessions. I agree with the great French Novelist Balzac when he offered a justification for an obsession in one of his novels “as a pleasure that has attained the status of an idea”. To me, a personal library is a private idea, an imaginative vista of the known and the unknown.

Many have asked me why I bother to buy books at all, and not borrow them from the wonderful public library system available in the US. There is merit to this question. I do use my local library extensively. There is always a separate pile of borrowed books on the desk. But those books are not mine in a way that I can’t write on the margins, annotate them, call them mine and hold on to them for as long as I want to and whenever I want them. There is a sense of strangeness to a library book. I use them as appetizers. If I like a book I have borrowed, I buy it, and only then can I read it the way I wish to, which is to have prolonged and intimate conversations with the book with no time limit, and not having to return it. In the medieval ages, especially during the Renaissance, books were customized for a buyer, for his personal library. No two copies were identical in all respects. Each book reflected the idiosyncrasy and love of the reader.

The great writer and master of semiotics Umberto Eco had one of the largest and the most eclectic private collections of books, a collection that was rumored to be more than thirty thousand volumes. When people walked into his home and saw the wall-to-wall shelves of books that adorned virtually every room and space of his home, the majority would instinctively ask him the stupid question: “ Have you read all these books?” It is only a select class of visitors who would look around, silently admire the erudite and vast collection of books spanning a dizzy variety of subjects, with the silent understanding that a man who collects so many books does so not to feed one’s ego, but to constantly remind himself that there is so much more to know, to understand, and evolve. A huge library is not a sign of an egoistical acquisition to prove a point, but an extensive tool for research, for study, it is a deep and ever-replenished source of ideas. I don’t buy a book because I must read it now, tomorrow, or even months later. I buy it because something within me prompts me that this book, the one that I hold in my hand, will come to my intellectual rescue sometime in the future to answer a question that I haven’t formed yet. And this has happened so many times, that it is no more a fanciful theory. I have books that are still waiting to be opened. They often signal to me as I pass by the shelf, gently making themselves known to me, waiting for the day when their turn arrives.

2022 has been a remarkable year for my reading self. It was a year of synthesis when all the diverse threads of reading began to come together to precipitate intellectual breakthroughs. It was a year when the thinking life and the reading life converged with one acting as fodder for the other, and reading became a distillation of wisdom than mere acquisition of ideas or ticking of titles read. I found some hidden gems in second-hand bookstores and online auctions. There have been many unexplainable moments, when the book I would go hunting for, would serendipitously show itself among the hundreds stacked up in a bookstore. I particularly remember walking into a Goodwill store hoping to find Marilyn Robinson’s first novel “Housekeeping”. The odds of its availability were minimal, but there it was, right on top of a pile of books on the very first aisle I walked by – a copy in mint condition for ninety-nine cents. It completed my collection. Why I thought of that book on that day, and why I drove to this store among so many others is a mystery. But there it was, the book beckoning to me, and me at the right place.

It has been a year of re-reading. I went back to books I had read when I was young. The works of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, especially Anna Karenina and Crime and Punishment, and the stories of Chekov. They revealed layers of understanding that I hadn’t observed before. Now I understand why these novels are timeless. The Russian masters of that golden age of the 18th and 19th centuries managed to capture the fundamental predicament of man in the emerging modern world. I read all of Henry James’ novels – that exquisite sculptor of prose. A few years ago, I bought all six volumes of the Henry James Everyman library edition, beautifully cloth-bound and printed on special quality paper. What a body of work, what characters, and what mastery over language? And I read his brother too – William James, the great pioneer of psychology whose book “The varieties of religious experience”, a collection of lectures still remains one of the finest explorations in the realm of spiritual experience in the English language. I read Douglas Hofstadter’s “Godel, Bach, and Escher” for the seventh time. Each time I read it, the mists clear up a little, and the rigorous logical reasoning of Hofstadter gets more and more cogent. The insight that consciousness can be accounted for within the neural system grows stronger with each iteration. It is not an easy book to read, it is a heavy tome, and tersely written, but even if we happen to make progress one chapter at a time, there is great merit. Reading “ Godel, Bach and Escher” is an exercise in learning how to think with discipline. It is a bonus that the book is fun to read as well.

I have always had a fondness for Aldous Huxley’s prose and fiction. I remember reading “Point and counterpoint” during my college days from a Chatto and Windus hardcover edition of the book borrowed from the British library and hoping one day, I would have the means to own all his works. I do now, and this year, I systematically re-read all his books in the chronological order he wrote them. It is deeply educative and seductively enticing to follow the intellectual maturity of a literary giant. In a personal way, every reader evolves with one’s beloved writer, book after book, and so it has been with Huxley.

The American literary critic and essayist Vivian Gornick published a slim volume in 2018 titled “Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-reader”. Gornick is eight-seven years old and has been one of the finest prose writers of her generation. In this book, she revisits the books she has loved and writes about the process of self-discovery and expansion of one’s worldview with each reading. She speaks about the ripeness of readers when they encounter a book. A book can speak to a person only when the person is emotionally ready to receive the message, until then those words will sound empty, monotonous, and mechanical. If you read “Anna Karenina” when you are eighteen years old, it may seem sentimental, heavy, and unnecessarily verbose book; but try reading the book later in life, when one has emotionally matured, the same book will reveal stunning insights that Tolstoy has packed into each paragraph; Anna and Prince Vronsky will come alive in us as living and breathing personalities. That is the power of great literature and books.

Wishing all my readers a wonderful new year and loads of happiness and good health.