This year, I am unwilling to put myself under pressure to read. Hence, I haven’t set any reading goals. I want to pick up books that I feel like reading at that moment and enjoy them. I am already on a weekly deadline for my weekend short stories and have a manuscript in progress. I have enough goals to last my restless brain for a while.
My first read of the year helped me tremendously while planning my next novel. Steering the Craft by Ursula Le Guin is an excellent exercise book for writers. I intend to spend some time with this book before starting with any manuscript in the future.
The exercises help you brainstorm, open your mind to story possibilities, envision characters, voices, narrative styles, and most importantly, the POVs or the points of view.
My subsequent two reads of the year belong to a genre that I haven’t explored much. A lop-sided approach to history in my early school years made me lose interest in the subject until I read Manu Pillai’s The Ivory Throne. I found the book at the right time when looking inward into my sense of belonging and identity. The Ivory Throne is a historical book, but the narrative style was close to fiction, and I found a liking for a new genre that I had not explored until then – historical fiction. Since then, I have unintentionally picked a few from this genre every year.
I read two books from the genre this quarter, The Covenant of Water and The Citadel. Both are, coincidentally, medical fiction.
The Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese is a bestseller recommended by Oprah Winfrey in her book club. But that’s not what led me to it.
The story is based in Kerala, and that’s the only reason I picked it up, to be frank. I have read Robin Cook’s racy medical thrillers as a teen but otherwise, not keen on the genre. I was looking forward to seeing how much medicine would be covered in this historical fiction. It was quite detailed because the author is also a doctor. However, the writing is lucid enough for a layman like me to understand the complexities of surgery and the prevalent diseases of the time.
And what beautiful writing! The author transported me back to the 1900s Kerala and left me enchanted with a saga of three generations. The descriptions were so vivid that I wondered if it was really fiction. But then, as Dr. Abraham says in his book, “Fiction is the great lie that tells the truth about how the world lives!”
The Citadel, by A J Cronin, apparently threw such a sombre and unflattering light on the prevalent medical practices and ethics in the United Kingdom when it was published in 1937 that it hastened the establishment of the National Health Services (NHS). Imagine the power of writing and fiction to stir a nation towards infrastructure development in public health.
But do not be misled by the book’s far-reaching consequences; it is a classic entertainer about doctors falling in love with their profession and life, wanting fame and money, and then finding their true purpose—a hero’s arc that never becomes outdated. The book, written by AJ Cronin, a Scottish physician who served in a Welsh mining village, has a classical and straightforward narrative style.
After finishing The Citadel, there was a lull in my reading. This always happens after I read a classic because you rarely get another book that compares with it.
However, I fell into reading luck when I found The Winners by Fredrik Backman in the library. I had been waiting to get hold of it. Fredrik Backman has never disappointed with his empathetic, entertaining, and endearing writing style.
The Winners is the fourth in his Beartown series and once again takes us back to the two quaint, neighbouring Swedish villages beside the mysterious forest and surrounding the frozen lakes, villages passionate about and consumed with ice hockey, harbouring dark secrets of love, ambition, and betrayal. In the book, I came across one of the saddest lines I have ever read, ‘No one can hurt you when you’re alone.’ And one more, ‘Mothers have no more armor to get them through life because they give every last bit to their children, by the end of their teenage years there isn’t even any skin left, so every feeling of loss cuts right into her flesh now.’
The following two were intentional picks from the library. I wanted to explore a few books from Australian literature, and travel memoirs would be an excellent opportunity to understand the country a bit before I move on to reading fiction.
So, I picked up Tracks by Robyn Davidson from the library. To me, the book can be summed up with one word: crazy! That’s the word I mumbled hundreds of times as I read it. In the late 1970s, a woman in her late twenties decides to cross 1700 miles in the Australian outback with four camels and a dog for company. Tracks is the memoir of that journey written in the same crazy, nonchalant, adventurous style that defines the author’s plans.
My second Australian book was The Yield by Tara June Winch.
It is a story about a land and its people. Written from the perspective of the Wiradjuri people of Australia, it is a historical narrative through the eyes of a young woman who returned from London to find that her ancestral land was coveted by a mining company.
The narrative progresses along three separate threads and POVs that converge at some point. Until they do, it might be hard to follow what’s happening. It took me a while to feel confident about finishing the book. I was about to abandon it when one of the threads gathered pace and rekindled my interest. However, the story is relatable for anyone who knows what it is to be deprived of one’s ancient legacy, the land, and all that belongs to it.
I ended the quarter with a light read – Nothing Ventured by Jeffrey Archer, the first in the Detective Warwick series, and I was thoroughly entertained. I have picked up the second in the series for this month.
But there is an absolutely beautiful book that I am currently meditating on (not reading). I pick up a random page and enjoy the words written by an expressive and empathetic naturalist, Yuvan Aves. The book is titled Intertidal, and I slightly envy the writer. I am not knowledgeable enough to write a book like this; otherwise, I would have definitely attempted it.
I am looking forward to a few other books this year. I’ll share more about them in future posts. I hope you find something interesting from my reading lists. As a reader, recently, I had the pleasure of knowing that my book recommendation worked for another reader. I had suggested Trevor Noah’s memoir Born a Crime to someone on X.
So, if you read any of the books I mention and like them, do share in the comments. Also, I would love to know if there’s some book you enjoyed and would like me to pick up next.
Happy Reading!
(Follow me on Instagram @theplausiblemind and on X @NairSudeepa to get more instantaneous reading and writing updates with quotes, book recommendations and more. You can sample my fiction on scubestorybasket.substack.com where I post weekend short stories, and access my longer works available on Amazon.)
The Plausible Mind 