tsundoku. The joys of binge-reading

A recent article in The New York Times urges people to start binge-reading again. The author writes that finding himself in the middle of a power cut, he picked up a Ruth Rendell book, lit a candle and was transported into bliss. “I’d gotten into the habit of consuming novels so fitfully that I was all but sealed off from their pleasures,” he says. At this point, I look away from the screen and think to myself, “I do that too!” I read a lot — as I have done, every day, since I learned to read — and I spend most afternoons reading, when I can no longer bear to look at my screen or think about all the things one thinks about. And still, at some points, I hit reading slumps when I just want to re-read old favourites ( A Suitable Boy , for instance, every two years) or it feels like I’m looking at books as though I am outside the book, not sunk into it. This month, I rediscovered the joys of books that pull you in and spin you around, books that are intense and immersive, and, yes, books you can totally “binge-read”.

Water cooler

To be honest, I would not have picked up Michelle Obama’s Becoming if it hadn’t been a pick for my book club that month. (Sidebar: do you have a book club? It doesn’t have to be anything very formal, just four or five friends reading one book and discussing it every month, and it does force you to read out of your comfort zone.)

Becoming; Michelle Obama; Viking; Memoir; ₹999

I would have been one of the few people on the planet who hadn’t read it, though. Slight exaggeration, but since former First Lady Obama’s book is on track to becoming the bestselling memoir of all time, you can bet it is pretty popular all across the globe. The writing is so good, I had to google to see which ghostwriter she used, and was impressed and delighted to find she wrote it all herself. The book is not all Barack-Barack-Barack, as you’d expect, instead it’s an inspiring story about a young black girl who prized education, and went to great lengths to get it, her supportive family, and eventually, yes, her time as First Lady of the US. But even writing about her political life, the focus is on what it feels like to be a public figure, to be criticised for your clothes, how she had to give up her career in order to support her husband’s. It even goes into detail about the rough patches in their marriage, through which they emerged stronger, and you, the reader, are rooting for them to make it in the end. Join the party and read it too, I guarantee it will speak to you as it did to everyone else.

Watchlist

I am perhaps a little biased on the subject of mythological novels (myth lit!) because I wrote two of my own, but I do love reading a good “this is what was happening in the background while the epic stormed on”.

Sitayana; Amit Majumdar; Penguin; Fiction; ₹399

An excellent example of this is Amit Majumdar’s Sitayana , which came out quietly a few months ago, and which retells the Ramayana from the point of view of...well, everyone, I suppose. There’s even a chapter about the little squirrel that helped build the bridge — actually, there are a lot of animal chapters, not just the monkey soldiers, but also the vultures and the bears. It’s also great fun to see how Majumdar takes the old story and mixes it up with modern-day language, so it doesn’t take itself too seriously, no long-wrought passages, so the epic moves along at a nice clip. Which means, in turn, that you’re reading this ancient story and it’s suddenly as exciting as if you’ve never read it before, all these different points of view, all these different stories. Great fun, even if you haven’t heard of the Ramayana since you were two years old.

Way back

I resisted reading Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons, because it was always described to me as a parody of rural melodramas, and as Lynne Truss says in her introduction, “I took the view that one couldn’t enjoy a parody if the targeted genre was deader than a doornail.”

Cold Comfort Farm; Stella Gibbons; Penguin Classics; Fiction; ₹399

And like Truss, I too changed my mind about two sentences in. When we meet the delightful Flora Poste, her parents have just died (she’s not sad because they barely spent any time together) and she’s fresh from an expensive education which leaves her with zero life skills. So, she throws herself at the mercy of her relatives, the Starkadders living in Cold Comfort Farm, and even if you’ve never read a book about a sad, doomed family, you’ll enjoy the descriptions of the Starkadders — the father preaches about how everyone’s going to hell, the mother repents of her wickedness, Son One is all about the farm, Son Two is full of lust, and the daughter is almost a hippy, running about in nature and writing poetry. It’s really too melodramatic, and into all this comes sensible Flora, who fixes everyone’s lives. The best part, of course, is when the author makes up a string of nonsense for the rural folk to say, much like a more serious author would inject dialect. My favourite is old Adam, the farmhand, talking of “cowdling [thee] as a mommet”. It’s so delightful, and it makes no sense at all. Use it liberally.

Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan is the author of seven books, the latest being The One Who Had Two Lives; Twitter: @reddymadhavan

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