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Help! I'm drowning in words
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What happens to a reader in the book boom era, asks BAGESHREE. S
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TOO MUCH TO HANDLE! There's too much to choose from that leaves the reader confused
Been reading more book reviews than books lately? Don't jump with a guilty start as you say a meek "Yes". That's exactly what every second "reader" the world over is doing these days.
Hard to blame the poor, well-meaning bloke though. Even before he got halfway through Shalimar the Clown, everybody started talking about On Beauty. And before he could even get hold of a copy of the book, people began to ask in disdain: "You mean you haven't read Maximum City yet?!" Memories Of My Melancholy Whores may have been panned by critics, but how can he not read it considering you-know-who wrote it? And it doesn't help that the most suitable boy of Indian writing refuses to say anything in less than 1,000-odd pages.
Cast the bloke in a slightly more eclectic mould and see what happens. He is trilingual and therefore doesn't want to miss out on Poornachadra Tejaswi's latest Kannada novel or that Marathi dalit autobiography. It isn't Booker material, but he wants to read Da Vinci Code because critics have convinced him that all literary pecking order is to be turned on its head and pop fiction deserves as much attention as War and Peace. And... he is a management professional and so has to keep up with all the books every CEO is churning out by the dozen.
Now, doesn't our bloke sound like someone eminently qualified for an intensive de-stressing therapy? More so because he works from eight to eight in a slave-driving firm that pays him an obscene amount.
The big contradiction
If there was ever a countdown on the greatest contradictions of the time, this one would sure figure among the top 10: that even as we never tire of bemoaning the death of reading habit, we have more books written and published today than ever before and people seem to be buying them by the cartload. But this glut of books sure is leaving an average reader confused.
"I feel it's no longer possible to be `knowledgeable' about anything because there is so much knowledge available on every conceivable thing! You feel confused, fragmented, as if you know nothing about anything!" says one bewildered reader. Says another: "The flood of books intimidates as well as makes me feel inadequate. So I end up with a huge pile of `To be Read' books and end up not reading most of them."
To-be-read list
But there are also some resilient spirits who have evolved their own formula. Says writer and voracious reader Shashi Deshpande: "Too many choices is never a problem. I have reached a point in my life when I know exactly what I want. I can walk into a shop full of books and decide in exactly one minute if it has anything worth reading."
Jnanpith Award winning writer U.R. Ananthamurthy would argue that a reader should learn to resist getting "blackmailed" by the publishing industry. "The books I like are those that slow me down; those which question my assumptions."
In spirit, Brazilian writer Gabriel Zaid seems to share Ananthamurthy's views. He says in So Many Books, Reading and Publishing in an Age of Abundance: "Maybe the measure of our reading should be not the number of books we've read, but the state in which they leave us... "
Surely, words good enough to calm and de-stress our bloke who is breathlessly trying to keep pace with the book boom. Unless, of course, he is right now anxiously looking for a pen to add So Many Books to his long "To-Be-Read" list.
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