5 Things I Learnt from Reading 21 Books in 2022

By 7 January 2022, I had decided I want to get back into reading. I had opened a Goodreads account in late 2021. I watched everyone set their reading challenges for the year and add books to their tracker as they finished them. I opted into it with a why the hell not attitude but then got really invested, far more than I thought I would.

I don’t really believe in putting pressure on myself in the beginning of the year only to burn out by the end of the week. So, this wasn’t a New Year’s resolution. Yes, I set a goal to be accomplished by the end of the year, and yes, I made sure everyone knew how this is going to be my year in reading. I even put pressure on myself and burnt out in the end. So maybe it was a New Year’s resolution. Fine. Fine!

I completed this goal — 20 books by December 2022 — a full week before the end of the year. This was the first goal of this intensity that I had ever set that I managed to accomplish.

I don’t want to let this achievement slip through my fingers the way I let other achievements slide. I need to review, perhaps give myself a pat on the shoulder and a treat of French fries for accomplishing something, however small it may seem to the capitalist machinery we live in.

Okay, so let’s review.

The Books I Read in 2022

When I say books, I actually mean stories. There is something about the short story format that goes straight for my heart. There is so much to say, and so little time. Words are at a premium: Each word has to be chosen carefully, nit-picked for that sentence alone. So, here is the list of the 21 stories I read this year, in the order in which I read them, linked to the reviews I wrote for each.

1. The Three Fat Women of Antibes (A short story by William Somerset Maugham)
2. The Jane Austen Book Club (A literary fiction novel by Karen Joy Fowler)
3. The Night Train at Deoli and Other Stories (A short story collection by Ruskin Bond)
4. Bartleby The Scrivener (A short story by Herman Melville)
5. The Girl with the Lower Back Tattoo (A memoir by Amy Schumer)
6. The Library of Babel (A postmodern short story by Jorge Luis Borges)
7. The Client (A legal thriller by John Grisham)
8. The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions (A vignette-novel about Queer identity and Queer living by Larry Mitchell)
9. The Hand (A horror short story by Guy de Maupassant)
10. My Evil Mother (A short story retelling witch lore by Margaret Atwood)
11. How the Poor Die (An anecdotal essay about capitalism and hospitals by George Orwell)
12. Uncle Vanya (A play by Anton Chekhov)
13. Close to the Bone (A memoir by Lisa Ray)
14. The Little Prince (A children’s short story by Antoine de Saint Exupéry)
15. The Death of Vishnu (A literary fiction novel by Manil Suri)
16. Dead Man’s Folly (A murder mystery by Agatha Christie)
17. Flush (A fictional biography of Elizabeth Browning’s dog by Virginia Woolf)
18. The Cask of Amontillado (A horror short story by Edgar Allan Poe)
19. A Thousand Splendid Suns (A novel by Khalid Hosseini)
20. The Tell Tale Heart (A horror short story by Edgar Allan Poe)
21. Requiem in Raga Janki (A literary fiction, part-fictional biography of Janki Bai Ilahabadi by Neelum Saran Gour)

The 5 Things I Learnt About Myself

1) I read a lot of classics.

I am not afraid to admit that I was, and still am, intimidated by the classics. Yet, I read 9 classic stories in 2022. Do I like reading them? No. All the classics I read this year were tedious — just mind-bogglingly tiring — because their sentence structure is way too convoluted. The only classics that were easier to read were Uncle Vanya and How the Poor Die.

But do I like the stories? I actually do. I think they have something to offer once we spend time with them. I used to be intimidated because I thought I might not understand classics, given their time period and context, but, story-wise, they turned out to be pretty easy to understand. Some, like Bartleby the Scrivener and The Three Fat Women of Antibes, may even surprise you with their awareness and sensitivity.

Is the mammoth effort that I put into reading them worth it? Maybe. There has to be an easier way, though. I “read” Bartleby the Scrivener while simultaneously listening to its audiobook version and that kind of helped. Maybe I can do that more often with classics.

2) Horror isn’t fun to read.

I love horror movies, but I find horror books not fun. Granted, all the horror stories I have read this year are classic short stories, and for what it’s worth, they were very well-written and impactful. However, rather than feeling that shrill excitement that accompanies a horror movie, I felt these books made me sick to the stomach (The Hand), claustrophobic (The Cask of Amontillado), and anxious (The Tell-Tale Heart).

The only other horror story I have read is The Tommyknockers by Stephen King and that was, well, underwhelming. I suppose I haven’t yet worked out how to separate myself from the images created by a written story, or in other works, how to conjure the images to feel that excitement. Perhaps I should read modern horror in 2023 and see how I feel about them.

3) I love “celebrity” memoirs.

When it comes down to it, I have found that celebrities are not celebrities. I am not saying this to be cutesy. We can talk a book and a half about the pretenses of the people living in the spotlight. I just don’t want to go down that route, that’s all.

No matter how one-dimensional they may seem from across a screen, I want to leave space to acknowledge their depth and purpose; I want to believe that they feel and love and want like the rest of us. I want to take them as they come, to see who they are beyond being actors or sportspeople or singers — in the same way I’d do for a friend.

The world needs that kindness. Especially in this era where it’s easy to push someone down because they are just a picture on your Instagram wall.

I love “celebrity” memoirs because I get to see why they made the choices they made. What is it like to be them? What is it like to be watched all the time? That kind of life must have done some serious damage to their mental wellbeing. How do (or don’t) they handle that? What have they lost in their life? Whom have they lost? Do they love being a celebrity? Do they love being human?

4) I also love reading literary fiction.

I had it lodged in my head that literary fiction is not cool. I would never admit it before today. It is, after all, always attributed to the nerds, the academics, the boring literature-types who can’t stop talking about postmodernism, oh please stop talking about postmodernism, stop! (All of these I am, by the way.)

But literary fiction always followed me around the kitchen, tugged at my pant leg, looked up at me with a tiny, smiling face. On random evening walks, I’d remember my neighbor and her house-help once fought with the whole building watching, much like Mrs. Pathak and Mrs. Asrani do in The Death of Vishnu. I remember that there was just one boy in our English class in twelfth grade, like it was in the book club in The Jane Austen Book Club.

This is why I became a writer. To capture the tiny moments that we have decided are unimportant but nobody can stop thinking about — it consumes our heart, consumes our life, and often shapes how we appear to others and ourselves.

5) Words are important, but not more important than the story.

This is what I said about A Thousand Splendid Suns in my review on Goodreads

I do want to give this book a full 5 stars, but something stands in my way. I suppose the violence was really nightmare-inducing for me. This book does not have to change itself because I am incapable of digesting the violence that other people have very much lived through.

The book follows two women living in a war-torn and Taliban-occupied Afghanistan. And it is a cruel book. To be honest, I didn’t think it a very well-written book either. Entire sections become monotonous and words fall flat, lying dry and unimpactful on the ground. I kept wondering why I was putting myself through this, until the very end.

Yes, good vocabulary, description, and character development is what takes a book from good to great. You can sit through writing classes and learn a thousand techniques on plotting, sentence structure, punctuation, and how to draw readers in. You can hire an editor and ask them to help you make things crisper. But none of this will ever be more important than the story itself.

What Hosseini wanted to say about Afghanistan, the pain of its people, the history of its women, is always going to be more important than how he told this story.

So, what’s next?

In 2023, I have decided to reduce the goal to 15 books. I enjoyed the 20 books challenge, but I want to be more mindful about what I read and read only what I truly want to. I’ll never be happy unless I read what I want to read when I want to read it. I hope to read some books in my actual TBR list this year, rather than adding new ones.

Okay, now, time for some French fries. Cheers to reading!

All pictures in this essay are taken by me or are screenshots of my Goodreads page.

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