Never Judge A Book by its Genre!

I never thought this book will be the first book on #My100BooksLibrary.

I am a book lover for as long as I remember. But I started reading well, like a reader, only during my college years. I made reader friends. We discussed books, authors and characters. We hung out in the public library. We made friends with the library staff. We discussed with them the cons and pros of having a library membership and the ways to extend it even after college.

Oh, those years of pure joy.

The joy of evening library visits with your bookish friends.

The comfort of books and bondings over books.

It’s one of the few things that I am indebted to in my college years.

When I started reading books, I started with the self-help genre. The name is still a puzzle for me though. It’s not self-help, really. It’s the people seeking help from books. Seeking counsel from the authors of the book. More than ‘self’-help, the writer is benevolently rescuing the reader in life’s dilemmas with his words.

After a lot of reading in this space, I have moved on from certain kinds of self-help books. The ‘preachy’ ones. The ‘positive’ ones. And it’s not because I don’t like them. I have outgrown them. Like we outgrow our clothes with time.

So, when I took this book, The Comfort Book by Matt Haig, to read, I always felt, it was one of ‘those’ books.

The book had short reflections from the author about living.

I know what he has to say. To be positive. To accept life as it is. Struggles are part of life. Good days will come. I have read it in a million ways before.

Why did I buy it even?

So, one day, on one of those days, when I was feeling like absolute crap and hopeless, I picked up this book. I was alone and sad and needed someone to vent out but there was nothing even to vent out. I couldn’t figure out why I felt so miserable and empty at that moment. I picked this book only to distract myself.

I started reading.

I read page after page.

I started crying while reading.

I cried like I would cry before a friend beside me. The book felt like a real person who was with me consoling and reassuring me with her kind words.

Matt Haig did exactly what he told in the introduction of the book.

‘’These are the thoughts that have kept me afloat. I hope some of them might carry you to dry land too.’’

It did.

The comfort book lived up to its name.

It comforted me in one of my darkest moments.

The self-help/personal growth genre has stuck with me for a long time. I occasionally read fiction and even with fiction, I tend to choose, fiction with a lesson. Whatever that lesson means. For me, a book was more of a guide than a friend. Reading was a productive hobby rather than a leisure activity.

I had this illusion of ‘good books’ and ‘mere books’. Good books come with power-packed wisdom and action points while mere books are for enjoyment or time pass. I adored them both. But I had always thought the former had a deeper impact.

But when I found a friend in a short, straightforward, simple book on that lonely afternoon, it changed the way I see books. It taught me why different people fall in love with different books.

Everyone finds their treasures in the books they love.

As the writer Kit de Waal puts it, the only thing a book has to do is whatever the reader wants it to.

Every book is self-help if you want it to be.

Every book comes with wisdom, if you look at the right time, with the right eyes.

You just have to keep reading.

From the book:

“The best thing about rock bottom is the rock part. You discover the solid bit of you. The bit that can’t be broken down further. The thing that you might sentimentally call a soul. At our lowest, we find the solid ground of our foundation. And we can build ourselves anew.”

“In order to get over a problem it helps to look at it. You can’t climb a mountain that you pretend isn’t there.”

“If we stand in a hurricane, it doesn’t matter how violent or terrifying the hurricane is, we always know that the hurricane is not us. The weather outside and inside us is never permanent. People talk about dark clouds over them. But we are never the clouds; we are the sky. We just contain them. The clouds are just the present view. The sky stays the sky.”