I grew up surrounded by books partly because my entire family is made up of voracious readers. We used to read while we eat at the dinner table and almost always had one book with us on the go. Waiting for our orders at the restaurant, for example, posed a chance for us to get lost in the worlds within our books. My mom was the biggest reader among us but I had the most varied and largest book collection. Together, we hoarded tons of books from the past and customized a floor-to-ceiling bookcase on the second floor at mom’s place to fit all of them.
The entire library now holds literary classics. Some foreign materials from Colette, Kundera, Camus and Nin. Some contemporary ones like The Memory Keeper’s Daughter, The Time Traveler’s Wife and even the complete writings of Malcolm Gladwell. My sister’s stash of books, ranging from the Adrien Mole series to anything by Nick Hornby, also sits as part of the collection. And not forgetting the erotic thrillers from Jackie Collins as well as those of the Mills and Boon variety, all courtesy of my mom. To top that off, we also have cookbooks, Reader’s Digest hardcovers, the Brittanica, atlases, old children’s books, travel guides and multiple copies of the Koran. All of them make up this one giant reading tomb.
During my years in high school, I’d enjoyed plenty of novels particularly of the Gothic variety. My favorites were those from Poe and M.R. James but the less archaic, more controversial V.C. Andrews novels were the ones that kept me glued to reading. My interest in horror waned once I entered college. I picked up contemporary Japanese lit instead simply because Haruki Murakami was all the rage among my peers at the time. This was the period when I discovered the translated works of Banana Yashimoto and Junichiro Tanizaki; I was a creative writing minor at the time so their writings held weight on the way I wrote my fiction.
I read a lot of confessional poetry on the side too, and people like Anne Sexton, Dorothy Parker and Sylvia Plath taught me more than a few things about loneliness and becoming a woman. Over the years, my collection grew with the inclusion of Raymond Carver, Aimee Bender, Amy Hempel and many more. Sadly, by the time I got to graduate school, I’d somehow lost the time to read for pleasure. I ended up sitting in the library until late hours just going through the writings of Freud, Barthes and Susan Sontag only to prove a singular point in my thesis. Ah, such is the life of an introvert!
Once school ended and my teaching career took place, I began to stop reading books altogether. I wanted a break from them. One look at them made me tired simply because they remind me of the grueling times I had in graduate school. I didn’t have the energy to pick up even the simplest paperback. Eventually, I gave up the books. I went from novels to trivial magazines to blogs written by stylish moms and design enthusiasts. I could spend an hour just soaking up the simple narratives of these strangers’ lives but I couldn’t bring myself to finish up A Gate at the Stairs by the ever-brilliant Lorrie Moore. It was a cultural divorce.
Slowly though, I began to pick up the pieces and went to bookstores more regularly than ever. I knew I was missing something substantial by shying away from books. Thinking about how I read less than three books annually in the last few years ashamed me. I wanted no more than to go back to my comforting habit. So last year, I took a vow…to myself and to my current bookshelf. I vowed to set aside at least half-an-hour per day to read a book, no matter how monumentally busy I get. I also vowed to go shop for books more often and finish reading whatever I bought. N would share his book vouchers with me once in a while and we’d happily hunt for books together.
I managed to finish less close to ten books last year on top of my wedding preparation and all. Now that the coast is clearer, I thought I’d switch up the gears and read at least two books a month. That’s a new vow I’m talking about— made on World Book Day this week— and I hope to make this small change in my life to foster my inner literati.
Cheers to the books and this marvelous thing called reading.
PS These were the books we checked out from a nearby bookstore this week. Check out N’s stuff: business, business and more business. I’m more flexible with my book preference these days. I’ll read anything under the sun.
