2024 was an interesting year for me in terms of reading, an activity that has taken a backseat in my past few years. This was the year when I made a conscious effort to change this and get back into reading more. One contributor to my reading slump, apart from life, was my antiquated reading habits. I might have described these in the past: I read only one book at a time, I try very hard to not abandon books midway, and I am rarely critical enough of any book to consider it a waste of time. These quirks make it easy for me to get stuck with a book that I find hard to read, feel guilty about giving up, and too possessive to share reading time with another book.
I also rarely read things online anymore, and realizing this made me very sad. I remember being at my creative best when I read widely. I tried looking at ways to increase my online reading - subscriptions, feeds, apps – nothing worked. If you haven’t noticed, the internet has been a quagmire lately. Our plan to confuse LLMs by dumping the internet with low-quality content and making useful things hard to find is going swimmingly well. I eventually had a eureka moment, and decided to go to a public library to borrow physical copies of magazines. This has been so great that I am ending 2024 on a reading high. I have also been writing about books more frequently, and I hope I can continue doing this. Writing often makes me a more perceptive reader.
I started this year with Amor Towles’s The Lincoln Highway. Towles is known for his more popular A Gentleman in Moscow. The Lincoln Highway, my introduction to Towles, returned mixed results for me. I went in expecting historical fiction. The first few chapters were grim, but the book turned into a fun journey. But then, things shifted tone again. I did not have a consistent emotional reaction to the book. In an interview, the author had compared “history” in his fiction to some detail in the backdrop of a live theatre performance: it’s not the main action, but if you happen to look, you get something to mull about. That’s a fair take. It was just not what I was looking for at that point of time. I am reluctant to say too much about this book because I feel I am judging it very harshly, and I do not want to dissuade others from trying this book.
I read Don Norman’s The Design of Everyday Things because I wanted to become better at designing user experiences. Don coined the term “user-centered design” in 1986, and this is a classic book on design principles. Embarking into what was then uncharted territory, Don Norman proposes a theory on how humans act. While very complete and informative, The Design of Everyday Things is also very academic. It also goes into elaborate details of certain engineering processes which should be familiar to modern software engineers. At various points through the book, I found myself wishing I had picked up a more modern and less academic book. This is not a reflection of the book itself. It might just be that this is not a topic that interests me as much, and the last thing I wanted was a series of categorized lists that felt like preparing for a quiz.
The Color of Magic by Terry Pratchett is a short, witty, and satirical book that was so-so. It is part of the Discworld series, which is supposed to get much more engaging as it progresses. I might get back to the series at some point of time, but I am in no hurry to do so. The fact that there are forty-one books in the series scares me.
It’s becoming a personal tradition for me to read one book by Umberto Eco every year. I may not actually read one, but hey, it is the thought that counts. This year, I read The Prague Cemetery. The Prague Cemetery tracks Simone Simonini, a fictional forger. Simone finds himself entangled with historic figures and the political upheavals of 19th-century Europe. He eventually creates The Protocols of the Elders of Zion - a forged document that supposedly exposes a Jewish plot to take over the levers of the world. In not-so-dark corners of the internet, you can find people who refer to this document to this day as if it is accurate. The Prague Cemetery is an excellent book, but like Eco's The Name of the Rose and Foucault Pendulum, it is exceedingly hard to read. Anyone interested in how and why conspiracy theories originate and propagate would benefit immensely from reading Eco. Reading Eco is laborious, but has rich rewards.
Fahrenheit 451 is a terse, action-packed dystopian novel that imagines a future where firemen are tasked with burning books instead of preventing fires. The dystopian world created by Bradbury is more Huxley than Orwell. In other words, people are captive by choice rather than by force. Fahrenheit 451 is still, and unfortunately perpetually, relevant.
As a Tamil speaker, one of my regrets is not being able to read enough Tamil to delve into my native literature. A couple of years ago, I made a resolution to read more translated works from India, and I decided to start with Jeyamohan. Priyamvada translates Jeyamohan’s collection of short stories called Aram very competently into Stories of the True. At various moments, I found myself mentally translating Priyamvada’s words back to Tamil and imagining the dialogues spoken by different characters. I am extremely glad that I read this book. Jeyamohan’s stories are raw and deal with complicated characters. They challenge the reader to participate in unraveling the stories. My favorite from this collection was probably Meal Tally, which is the sweetest and most uplifting tale in this wonderful book.
Continuing my quest to discover my own culture, I planned to read the Indian epic - Mahabharata. After a short research (in the age of internet, I have learnt to keep “research” short), I landed on an edition of The Mahabharata: A Modern Rendering Vol 1 by Ramesh Menon. I, like many Indians, read a version of Mahabharata as a kid. It’s not easy to escape various short fables from this epic if you grow up in India. But Ramesh Menon treats the epic like an erotic fantasy. And to me, this treatment makes complete sense. Instead of glossing over elements that could be seen as implausible by modern society, Menon leans into the fantastical elements. The result is gripping. As an example, the section where Krishna and Arjuna help Agni burn the Khandava forest is dynamic. On the other hand, some elements of an epic that’s believed to have been authored by multiple writers at various points of time become repetitive. That does seem like a fault of the translator. I plan to read the second and final volume in 2025.
I have already written about Margaret Atwood’s Burning Questions, Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, and Frederik Backman’s Anxious People. I enjoyed all three books, but I enjoyed Anxious People the most.
I ended 2024 the way I started it. Like with Lincoln Highway, Delia Owens’s extremely popular Where the Crawdads Sing left me unsure of what to make of it. Structuring her novel like an investigation thriller, Delia Owens describes the marshlands of North Carolina with stunning detail. But the plot itself is simple, and often far-fetched. Characters do not behave the way we would expect them to. I thought long and hard about reviewing this book and not breaking my writing streak. However, I did not have much to add to the discourse on this bestseller, and I found many other reviews which expressed my thoughts more effectively than I could ever hope to.
In 2025, I might want to fit in another book by Umberto Eco, and the second volume of Ramesh Menon’s Mahabharata. But then, I am whimsical with picking my next reads. I look forward to seeing what catches my fancy next year. I begin with an open slate, and I am very excited to read more. Happy reading, and a happy new year!
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