Reading 90+ books doesn’t really mean one has a lot of free time. Or rather—more accurately, since nobody has free time anymore—it means having a longer attention span. And that, I think, is the biggest roadblock to old-style reading habits in the modern world. For me, what worked was switching to audio—essentially solving a digital-era […]
Two books about death—Death and the Gardener by Georgi Gospodinov and Things in Nature Merely Grow by Yiyun Li—were the highlights of my reading over the past few weeks. Gospodinov looks at his father’s death with a quiet serenity, understanding it as a natural process, yet still searching for ways to live with the pain. The
Reading Proust has been the biggest personal project I set out to complete this year — and I finally managed to finish it on the very last day of October. Effort was never really the concern with a project like this; it was more about how to engage with such an immense text — especially one that often unfolds
Arundhati Roy’s clarity is impossible to deny. I have disagreed — and at times still disagree — with some of her ideas, especially her positions on Kerala politics. My sense has been that some of those views were shaped under the influence of certain Islamic fundamentalist groups here. Another disagreement, years ago, came from my
In the earlier post, I mentioned that Browne wrote out of his experience of living in Norfolk. Sebald lived in Norwich, and Naipaul in Wiltshire. Sebald’s narrator writes by blending memory with the experience of walking through Suffolk. Naipaul’s narrator does essentially the same thing, though he stays rooted in one place. Later, when I
Although I had written this before, there was a time in my reading life when I avoided Rushdie and Naipaul after seeing them dismissed by Krishnan Nair (he was not really a critic but a literary journalist — which, to be fair, suits many so-called “critics” now as well). Later, however, I read two of
A serious reader does not choose a book in isolation; it is always the sum of the people, times, and experiences they have passed through. That is what some online readers fail to grasp. The offline lives of people we see online—their ripenings, the choices they make, the things they embrace or abandon—cannot be known
The prompts: 1. How many books have you read so far this year? Do you have a yearly reading goal? If so, how are you doing with it? I’ve read 63 books so far this year. I don’t set yearly goals — I never really have. This year started strong, and I just kept the
Today again, I bought a few more books. I’ve finished reading 49 books this year. Almost all of my reading is through audio (yes, there are people online who question whether that even counts as “reading”). It has long been my desire to become one of Kerala’s foremost readers. I grew up in a home
Edmund White was one of the greatest readers ever. I’ve read a few of his books, and for the past two months I’ve been (slowly) working through The Loves of My Life—a rather graphic gay memoir. His Boy trilogy was wonderful and among my first reads in this category. Of course, being American, he’s largely