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Salubrious Sunday | A reader, but not necessarily a finisher
I have never been able to get myself to participate in a 100-books-a-year challenge, I’m not a fast reader who devours one book after another at a speed that is celebrated, but I am not a slow reader too as my reading speed is pretty decent
I was recently interviewing a senior professional on Zoom. Seeing a dense book board behind me, he asked, “So what are you reading currently?”
“Three books, actually. Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott. Languages of Truth by Salman Rushdie. And Love, Life, and Elephants by Daphne Sheldrick.”
Pop came the question. “So when will you finish them?”
Silence.
I had no answer.
While the interview progressed, I parked the question for my introspection later.
When would I ‘finish’ reading a book or even the many books I was reading simultaneously? It was a pretty plain question, right? But I could not get myself to give even a vaguely ambiguous answer, such as in a month or so or over the next two weeks. Any attempt to do that put me in extreme discomfort.
And that discomfort got me thinking.
The only certain and honest response I could come up with was “I don’t know.” Why? Because I have never looked at books as objects that needed to be finished. Rather, I have always seen books as a companion.
A companion with my chai. A companion that I meet during my work breaks. A companion that sits on my lap when I settle down on the rug around sunset. A companion that I hold with both hands at my favourite bench in the garden on Sunday. A companion that I spend time with, every night, under the soft glow of my bed lamp. A companion that sits in my backpack. A companion I turn to whenever I need to find my centre.
And while I’m in these periods of companionship, varying between 5 minutes to a few hours, I’m in an alternate world, like many readers, time travelling, dramatising, dreaming. I wonder what the author must think when she or he wrote what they wrote. I imagine the characters saying what they say and occasionally import myself in the story and wonder what I’d say to them in that scene. If my phone rings during that time, I put it away as I am already conversing with my companion. I smell the paper, jump pages, come back to the earlier pages, read the last chapter, and again go back to reading from where I dropped off, read and re-read, following eccentric patterns in a no-rules companionship.
And while I am doing all that, the last thing on my mind is, ‘When will this be over!’ ‘By which date will I reach the final page?’
The timeline is something that is a practical reality. The book will finish at some point in time. For some books it may be a day for others it may be months. And for some, it may be never. But that would be a natural fallout and not a guiding factor when I open the first page.
Probably, that’s the reason I have never been able to get myself to participate in a 100-books-a-year challenge and so on. I’m not a fast reader who devours one book after another at a speed that is celebrated. But I am not a slow reader too as my reading speed is pretty decent.
So, if I had to describe the kind of reader I am, I guess the best-case scenario is, “I’m a reader. A person who reads regularly.” And that’s that. A reader who enjoys the companionship of a book undefined by when it starts and when it ends. A companionship that thrives on reading for the sheer joy of reading. No boundaries, no milestones, no metrics, no race. A companionship that allows one to be a finisher and a non-finisher.
anushasingh3@gmail.com
( The writer is a Mumbai-based corporate communications consultant)
