Year Ender 2023 | Book lists are so last century

It's time we acknowledged that this zeitgeist supports focused reading, and from sources other than books. (Photo by Oleksandr S via Pexels)

Apart from all those broken resolutions, the end of the year is also a time when I am shamed by how little I have read. For the umpteenth time, the 8 to 10 books I managed to go through in the preceding 12 months pale into insignificance when set against the dozens read by the more literate. Economist and bestselling author Tyler Cowen, for instance, reads 100+ books a year. Even those who put in the N.R. Narayana Murthy-recommended 70 hours at work seem to have turned the last pages of dozens of tomes.

Some readers are direct, giving detailed, and excruciating, accounts of their passage through the year: “Understood the meaning of a part of life after reading 179 pages of XYZ”. Others use visual clues to the same effect. Thus, entire bookshelves, captured in vividly detailed photographs and occasional videos, are liberally shared on social media. One friend signs off each email with the signature line “What we are reading right now.” It’s like a periodic affront particularly when you get such mails on 2-3 successive days. I take 2-3 days merely to unwrap a book delivered by Amazon after cutting through the thick packaging.

If the numbers aren’t bad enough, it’s also the kinds of books I have been reading. If How to make money as a novice in the stock markets is your hot favorite of the year, are you even qualified to be counted as educated?

Sadly, the gap between what I should read and what I can handle is too vast.

I scrolled through the list put out by esteemed publications like the Economist and The New York Times. In the Times list is The Bee Sting, by Paul Murray, which the paper says is a “tragicomic tale about an Irish family grappling with crises”. There's also Chain-Gang All-Stars, by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, a “dystopian satire in which death-row inmates duel on TV for a chance at freedom”. Now why doesn’t that set my nerves racing with excitement? I turn to Eastbound, by Maylis de Kerangal which “follows a young Russian conscript named Aliocha on a trans-Siberian train packed with other soldiers.” I like that name but beyond that the journey seems difficult.

So, I turned to non-fiction, perhaps a better choice for someone with my sensibilities. Here I am confronted with The Best Minds, by Jonathan Rosen which is “an inch-by-inch, pin-you-to-the-sofa reconstruction of the author’s long friendship with Michael Laudor, who made headlines first as a Yale Law School graduate destigmatizing schizophrenia; then for stabbing his pregnant girlfriend to death with a kitchen knife”. Sleep is difficult enough without adding such nightmares.

The Economist’s list was a bit more promising with Flowers of Fire by Hawon Jung, a “brilliant examination of South Korean feminists’ struggle for gender equality” that has global resonance and How Big Things Get Done by Bent Flyvbjerg and Dan Gardner about how megaprojects often turn into megasnafus. But even in this list there’s The Kingdom, the Power and the Glory by Tim Alberta, a “chronicle of the modern evangelical movement in America”, which leaves me kind of cold.

It is interesting that most such lists have very few books in common. Clearly even the best editors and critics can't agree on their choice of the best. Often, they can't seem to agree on the reasons for the same choice either.

Let's face it, reading is a pretty much recent activity, going back only about 5,000 years. Nutritionists of a kind insist that for most of human existence we survived on meat alone. And now suddenly we need books too!

Increasingly, this annual orgy of confessional about books read has enshrined itself in our minds and socio-cultural spaces as the intellectual ornament to be flashed to show supremacy. The book list is worn as a festoon around the neck much like the Ferrari in the garage as an object of coveting, with the covers whipped off at year end and paraded.

High time the snob value around these lists is buried in return for the acknowledgment that this zeitgeist supports focused reading and from sources other than books.

As for that booklist, let it be an artefact of the last century!