Yesterday I was at Inorbit Mall at VimanNagar Pune. There's a sprawling, all glass Crossword store there. Inside there were a couple of folks leafing through glossy magazines and coffee table books which were on sale. And, I started thinking about how I select which books to pick up and read.

• Every year I re-read a couple of books. Among these are Pather Pachali, Aparajito and Chaander Pahar. Then there's Padma Nadir Maajhi, Putul Naacher Itikatha, Love in the time of Cholera, Of Love and Other Demons, War and Remembrance, The LoTR. There's the fun of being able to discover more than I understood in the previous year - of layered meanings and sometimes forgotten episodes.
• I've found Goodreads.com to be a good source of reading up on newer books and, their reviews. Interesting book reviews or, even books that have an interesting topic as their core can be picked up.
• Twitter and Facebook are good, but I don't harvest recommendations as much as I can.
• After the purchase of the Kindle and, the subsequent setting up of newsletter notifications, Amazon sends a steady stream of book recommendations by genre. All very nice, linked to reviews and all of that. That forms another source.
• I usually keep a list of books (on the phone) I'd like to read if I see (and, mostly read through) anything that jumps out and says "read me" at the bookstores. In this aspect, Landmark at Pune does better than Crossword. I haven't yet visited CMYK. So, perhaps something would come up from there.
• I get very few book recommendations from acquaintances and friends. The usual complaint that I hear is "I don't even know whether you'd like to read it !" So, I do a sneaky follow of what they are reading and sometimes ask pretty obvious questions - that gives me an idea about what is interesting to read.
• The other thing I've noticed is that I end up doing "breadcrumb reading". That's something I just cooked up as a term. What it means that I might be reading a book and, the reviews of the book or, citations inside would open up a new vista of related books and reading material. So, breadcrumbs ... One thing leads to another and I end up reading through a good chunk of stuff.
• Finally, the newsletters from the publishers (I subscribe to a wide variety of them), help me figure out what should be on the reading list.

I wonder how others make up their reading lists ? Do you make it up at the beginning of the year, or, is it seasonal ?

It started with this. And, yesterday Barkha commented about how 2010 has turned out to be a "good book year" for me. Over the years I've had folks remark about my reading habits and "how fast you read". Till the time Runa pointed out long ago that the book reading was actually a bit odd, I've never considered that I was a "fast reader". That is because I had to look at my Mum and anytime I saw her finish a book and then saw how much time I took to finish it - I was "slow". Anyway, this post is more because I have over the years promised a lot of folks about writing down about my reading habits and so forth.

For a small number of years after my birth I had to live outside the country - the parents were trying their level best to set up a better life for the family and, India wasn't the most promising place to do that. An aspect of living outside was that I grew up within a fairly mixed bag environment. And, somehow, since my mother seems to have always been a bookworm, I was lucky enough to grow up in houses where piling up books wasn't frowned upon. What was not encouraged was not reading them or, reading them but not talking about them. You get the drift - sooner rather than later, reading a book a day was the best way to end it. Which is probably the reason I ended averaging 6-7 books a week (do that math for per month and multiply it by around 6 years and you realize the tragedy of packing and moving). Since most books were borrowed from libraries and I really really wanted to cram as many books I could read (I salute and remain thankful to each and every librarian I encountered who just indulged in my silly game of borrow_today_read_return_tomorrow) I ended up reading books really quickly. And, there are shades of that habit mentioned in this blog entry.

So, once Runa did point out that I was being a bit unusual, I tried to observe what I did. Here's a rough list:

• I can read texts written in English at a fairly rapid pace and keep switching between text types/content types
• I can hold a thread of commentary/notes/review of the text I am reading while going through it
• The above doesn't work for Bengali and Hindi. In fact, for Bengali I've been known to go back and forth over the same paragraph
• I generally read nearly a page at a time. What this means is that children start reading a character at a time, progress to a word at a time and thereafter to a sentence and a paragraph. I seem to be able to read larger chunks fairly easily.
• I cannot seem to do an equally quick job of reading when I am reading off the screen (desktops/laptops)

And that is all there is to it really. The habit of book reading that I caught fairly early seems to be the main reason for all of this. The downside is that it is an obsessive thing though - these days I need to read some new content (preferably book/monograph/article) daily or else feel like a good old grump through the day.

I inwardly wince each time I read or hear someone end their experience of an e-book reader with a statement along the lines of "this is a good device but I love real books". That makes me sad for two reasons - first, it implies that the ones taking to the devices don't really love the "dead-tree" books and second, the conclusion wasn't arrived at after a small period of time when the reading habits were observed in light of the usage of the device.

The convenience that any e-book reader provides could perhaps be simplistically compared with the portable music player devices. Everyone crams up their device with all sorts of music and playlists with the intent that at any point when the urge to listen to music kicks in, one isn't left high-and-dry because the particular piece wasn't present. I kind of learnt it the hard way (or, was it the fun way ?) during my last visit to Kolkata. Earlier, each visit used to have a number of days of the multiplied by 1.5 number of books or, if that was difficult then I'd dip into the local bookstores to get them. This time around not only did I squeeze in some good amount of reading (during Pujas with a cold no less), I could also resist the temptation to visit the bookstores.

The e-book readers have a couple of problems probably peculiar to me though. Things like regional language books being unavailable, not all books being available in an e-book format, quirky prices of e-books (on Amazon, the cute "prices set by the publisher" does little to assuage the anger), not all books being available to a specific region and, more importantly, lack of portability between e-book retailers. However, in spite of all such hindrances, I seem to have managed to do fairly well this year And, more importantly, I haven't felt that I was missing anything given that my e-book reader doesn't render color :)

Unless the reading habits and book purchases are studied, figuring out whether the device would actually be useful isn't going to work out. Meanwhile, I do love my "real books". For example, I couldn't even imagine a Tufte book in an e-book reader format. But then, if, like me, you end up having to shift residences on and off, you wouldn't want to look at the faces of the packers-n-movers folks when they encounter stacks of boxes that are really far too heavy.

By now a whole lot of good folks have written up about the banning of "Such a Long Journey" (this is being one of those) and of course the point of view of the author himself. Having read the book a bit in the past I decided to pick up a copy to read it again. And, of course try and figure what can make it into a ban-worthy object of political acrobatics. Turns out that the actual content is sparse and certainly isn't authored with an intent to actually be a forceful denunciation of the political organization. Guess this is just puerile tamasha that keeps on happening on and off.

Sadly enough it reminded me of Jatin Chakrabarty's famous tirade against the clubs at Park Street and, some of the "Hope" shows terming them as "aposanskriti". And, if one tries to look a bit more deeply from that time to now, the various instances of where political and quasi political/religious organizations have taken it upon themselves to be the "guardians of morality" and, the crusader for public conscience. The annoying part is that while this is a standard form of claiming an ounce of twisted political legitimacy, it does ensure that the books and content don't get read or become part of the discourse. There is a substantial disconnect between the reading habits of the youth of today (averaged across the nation) and, the youth of yesteryears. I used to smirk when I heard my parents lament about it. I guess it is my turn to do the lament.

The other part that is worrisome is the lack of reading habits around the classics. Especially in the local/regional languages. I wonder why it is so. It isn't that the books are not available or, they are outrageously priced. For example, it has always been a standing joke that a Bengali household needed a set of Tagore books (printed by who else but Viswa Bharati) to grace the shelves to give a sense of a household that reads. Add to that the collections from Saratchandra Chatterjee or, BankimChandra and, the mandatory Ramayana and Mahabharata and you'd have a fair idea about the bookshelf. This was when I was young and, it was somewhat tacitly encouraged to read all of these (it is another aspect that my personal reading habits in Bengali literature have been far to skewed and awkward to be part of a sample set). The same cannot be said now. And, this is during the time when the lifting of copyright restrictions on the works of various authors should have encouraged greater availability of their works. And, I don't even desire to wade into the waters of being unaware of the Greek classics.

Availability doesn't necessary equal consumption I guess. In the world of books.