A Fragmented Reading Year

Yesterday was International Reading Day.

I thought about it for a while and realized that I had a problem. I have never had a reading year that felt so fragmented.

When the year began, I was reading philosophy. Considering it was my birth month, that was perhaps an unusually gloomy way to celebrate being alive. Yet it made sense. Over the last few years, my reading has increasingly shifted toward philosophy, politics and history. Somewhere along the way, those three areas quietly began occupying more of my reading life than literature itself.

That is an odd thing to admit for someone who teaches literature for a living.

The truth is that I still read literature. The difference is that much of it has become re-reading. Certain books have become annual pilgrimages rather than discoveries. The Literature I Revisited

Book	Why I Returned
The Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkien	Because every return convinces me that modern fantasy is still negotiating with Tolkien's imagination.
Maus by Art Spiegelman	Chosen for next year's students, but rereading reminded me why it remains one of the most powerful Holocaust narratives ever created.
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy	An annual ritual. Re-reading Tolstoy is my way of checking whether I still know what great fiction looks like.
Kayar by Thakazhi Sivasankara Pillai	Partly admiration, partly ammunition against the argument that pre-1970 Malayalam literature was somehow dull.
The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger	A conversation exposed a forgotten detail, and I dislike being defeated by memory.
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck	Because economic hardship, migration and inequality remain stubbornly contemporary subjects.
All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren	Political corruption ages remarkably well as a literary theme.
Cancer Ward by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn	Because few writers combine moral seriousness and narrative force as effectively.
The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu	To remind myself that many "modern" novels are standing on foundations built a thousand years ago.

If literature was my annual return journey, philosophy, history and politics became the roads I spent most of my time exploring.

1. A History of Western Philosophy (Bertrand Russell)

A philosopher explaining other philosophers while quietly reminding you that most of them were wrong.

2. Why Buddhism Is True (Robert Wright)

Picked it up to understand meditation; stayed because evolutionary psychology makes a surprisingly convincing accomplice.

3. The Consolations of Philosophy (Alain de Botton)

Philosophy for ordinary anxieties, written for people who do not have the patience to wrestle with Kant directly.

4. The Story of Philosophy (Will Durant)

The fastest way to meet centuries of dead geniuses without enrolling in a university.

5. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (Dee Brown)

A useful antidote to every heroic Western movie ever made.

6. SPQR (Mary Beard)

Rome stripped of marble statues, patriotic myths and schoolbook simplifications.

7. The Sixth Extinction (Elizabeth Kolbert)

A cheerful reminder that humanity may be the most successful ecological disaster in history.

8. At Home (Bill Bryson)

A history of civilization disguised as a walk through someone's house.

9. Pathogenesis (Jonathan Kennedy)

Proof that microbes have influenced history more often than kings, generals and politicians.

10. The Omnivore's Dilemma (Michael Pollan)

Started as a book about food and ended up being a book about everything wrong with modern life.

11. Cooked (Michael Pollan)

A book that made me think harder about bread, fire and stew than most books make me think about politics.

12. Manufacturing Consent (Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman)

Read it to understand media; finished it wondering how many opinions I actually formed myself.

13. The Origins of Political Order (Francis Fukuyama)

A massive explanation of how societies became states and why some still struggle to do so.

14. Better Than Sex (Hunter S. Thompson)

Politics viewed through a lens of caffeine, paranoia and gleeful irresponsibility.

15. Political Fictions (Joan Didion)

A quiet demonstration that political language often exists to conceal rather than reveal.

16. Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics (Stephen Greenblatt)

An argument that Shakespeare understood authoritarianism centuries before political scientists invented terminology for it. 25 books in 6 months are actually pathetic reading. Besides all the work-related stuff, I got very little time since January. This coming part of the year should be a little different, organised and hopefully, more positive. Perhaps that is why I do not worry about literature apparently falling behind. Literature never truly leaves. It simply waits patiently in the background, appearing in unexpected places.

Meanwhile, I continue editing my own poems.

Though "editing" is not really the correct word. Most days I feel less like an editor and more like a demolition contractor. Entire poems are being dismantled and rebuilt. Lines survive only as fragments. Some poems are becoming unrecognizable from their earlier versions. Whether this is progress or madness remains difficult to determine.

Perhaps reading works the same way.

We begin the year with plans. We end it somewhere entirely different. And sometimes that journey is far more interesting than the destination. #ReadingLife #BookReflection #Literature #Philosophy #History #Politics #ReReading #ThinkingThroughBooks #WritersLife #GreatBooks #InternationalReadingDay