I didn’t know I would fall in love that night.
Had I, I certainly wouldn’t have stumbled into bed in tattered old shorts and a disgruntled demeanor. He was shocking – he caught me off guard and he never stopped charming his way through the two hundred odd pages of P. G Wodehouse’s Psmith in the City. The wittiness of Wodehouse explodes out of every word he utters, and there’s something about the disarming intelligence and defiant charisma he struts around with that caught my attention.
“A very long, thin youth, with a solemn face and immaculate clothes, was leaning against the mantelpiece. As Mike entered, he fumbled in his top left waistcoat pocket, produced an eyeglass attached to a cord, and fixed it in his right eye. With the help of this aid to vision he inspected Mike in silence for a while, then, having flicked an invisible speck of dust from the left sleeve of his coat, he spoke. “Hello,” he said.”
And thereby hangs the tale.
I recently read Mike and Psmith, my last first read of the Psmith series and recognized the bitter-sweetness of having completed the book and having completed the last time I’d pick a Psmith book anew. It struck me strange how close connected I’d become to this character, and how the poster industry has zero resources to placate me here (if there are any good graphic designers reading this, perhaps I could interest you in a great little product for the readers like me!)
Some books give you exactly what you’re looking for – a character to fall in love with, a plot thick as blood, a world you instantly want to move to (Whose doors are open as long as you stay loyal to it), a dystopia you struggle with and later vehemently respect or live in horror of – whatever you are looking for! And the largest challenge we face here is getting your hands on such a book, or worse – picking up a book if you dropped the last one weeks, months or years ago.
Psmith, to me, was a recommendation made by a friend who I suspect had no idea of the colossal effect it would have on me. There are a few books that made me throw aside months, weeks (and on one occasion – even years) of non-reading that I struggled through, and perhaps this might help you jump out of your reading slack and find yourself a great read to kick start your reading again:
Pick up a comic book. Treat yourself this time- BUY one:
- V for Vendetta: Perhaps not the most conventional approach- jumping in with a comic book. I might even have invited a few arguments about the nature of reading I was talking about but if you look closely, read intently and see between the panels, this book is all you need to throw you into an avalanche of spirited reading.
- Watchmen – If you’ve already seen the movie and not read the book – I am sorry for you. The book surpasses the movie in technique, vibrancy of colors and uniqueness in panels- things that the movie makes us forget even exist. If you haven’t read the book, do pick it up. It’s worth the cost and will make for the best smiley face you have in your book shelf.
- Maus: This is on the more serious side, and perhaps I should think again before throwing this into the same mix, but if there’s one book that I can count on would make you read more books, it’s Maus. Designed by Art Spiegelman with the narration of his father and Holocaust survivor, this book devoured everything I knew of comic books and threw open a whole new world of books and graphic novels.
Pick up a thriller:
- Devotion of Suspect X: This one is easy, you’d get through it in a few hours and you’d come out of a fiction stronger and a book ahead of where you were yesterday. Isn’t that the kind of motivation you’re looking for?
Pick up a strange new world of fiction:
- If you’ve read Harry Potter, pick up The Song of Ice and Fire (and maybe the next book will be out before you complete the 6!). If you’ve read both, pick up Foundation Series by Asimov. If you’ve read that as well, give me a few months and I will read a new series of books and revamp this bit for you.
Or maybe the classic everyone else keeps rambling about:
1. Animal Farm: You’re going to love this. It’s less than a hundred pages long and you can flaunt your knowledge of Communism as Orwell saw it for the rest of your life. It’s that simple. And you’d have read a great book whose ideology will stay with you for your lifetime and that’s always a plus.
2. 1984: I know it isn’t conventional to name two books by the same author but they’re both so good! And they’d both as likely stick with you and make you read more books so…
Read something depressing?
I don’t judge, and I love my great share of depressing books and dystopian worlds. Here are some that shook me off my core and made me slag in my walk and hunch my shoulders in an attempt to curl up inwards for days.
1. Bell Jar: Sylvia Plath was always a mad poet who killed herself sticking her head in the oven to me. After this read though, I started to see reason in her stances to the extent that they drove me mental. To date I have the Fig Tree up on my wall, and it’s an immense source of inspiration if you’re looking for someone to tell you you’re not alone- that we’re all mad in our own statistically insignificant ways.
2. When Breath Becomes Air: Of course you’ve heard about it before. A recent release, New York Times Best Seller and an instant worldwide phenomenon in books, this is one you’ve seen on Goodreads and Facebook reading groups dozens of times. Here it is again to perhaps give you that last push for you to go order it on Amazon.
And finally – oh well – here go all my cents:
Pick up Nick Hornby’s Polysyllabic Spree.
Nick Hornby is an obsessive reader with an eccentric number of favorite genres and this book is literally his ‘Stuff I’ve been Reading’, where, quite rationally, he’s dropped all the books he’d never recommend us to read and stuck to the great great recommendations. This book churned me out of my reading slack and gave me a long list of books that went straight to my ‘To Reads’ on Goodreads to guilt me into reading. If you’ve stuck with me and read till this part of my article, you definitely will love that book.
Beware though- it could get you depressed about the number of books you’ve read so far.
If you’ve liked my recommendations so far, and want to discuss some of them or even better- some new books with me, here’s my profile on Goodreads.
– Swathi Chandrasekaran
Perplexed Potatoes 