Yves here. I was sad when I had to divest myself of many books when I left New York City and then more when I left the US, although I still transported quite a few. However, in a contrary approach, my mother, who read a book a day most days, treated them as disposables. Admittedly her tastes ran to murder mysteries and the occasional history/historical novel. The fact that she reported was that her happiest memories from childhood were of reading in her room, eating the (according to her, far better than anything you could procure in the 21st Century) roquefort and crackers says escapism was the big allure for her. And you?
By Satyajit Das, a former banker and author of numerous technical works on derivatives and several general titles: Traders, Guns & Money: Knowns and Unknowns in the Dazzling World of Derivatives (2006 and 2010), Extreme Money: The Masters of the Universe and the Cult of Risk (2011) and A Banquet of Consequence – Reloaded (2021). ). His latest book is on ecotourism – Wild Quests: Journeys into Ecotourism and the Future for Animals (2024). Jointly published with New Indian Express Online
In the early 2000s, my partner and I were looking for an apartment. Our requirement for ‘lots of walls’ befuddled real estate brokers. We found ourselves repeatedly clarifying our need for solid brick walls not fashionable glass or flimsy partitions to support sturdy bookshelves required for our 4,000 plus volumes.
I do not come from a family of readers. Growing up in India, outside of school texts, my reading options were limited. That changed when we emigrated to Australia where I found myself the only non-white amongst 750 high school students. Making connections was difficult as most of fellow students already knew each other from primary school and few lived near me. I developed other interests. The school had a library. An even better stocked public one was within walking distance. I began a lifetime of reading unaware of Petrarch’s warning: “Books have led some to learning and others to madness, when they swallow more than they can digest.”
I began working part-time before the legally permissible age of fifteen for money which bought precious independence. It allowed me for the first time to buy rather than borrow books. That became a habit and over time I slowly built my collection. Some of the volumes on the shelves date back to the early 1970s.
Books are linked to identity and ego. For some, a library is for display rather than the reading. There are hardbacks and leather-bound editions. A bookbinder told me that the fancy leather-bound antiquarian items he restores at exorbitant prices are investments for the monied and rarely opened far less read. There are arty bookshelves and bookends costing hundreds and thousands of dollars; stone ones with satin white speckle glaze, black-and-white marble cut at a 45-degree angle, optical glass polished to create distorted reflections depending on viewing angle, cast-iron named after Kyuzo, the swordsman in Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai.
My books are cheap paperbacks. Some are second hand often discarded library copies as these institutions ‘revitalise,’ reducing holdings transforming into community centres or internet hubs for office-less digital piece workers. The shelves are utilitarian white melamine covered medium density fibreboard. The bookends are standard library powder coated metal fare. My interest is solely the content.
The habit of reading and books remains integral to my life. It has never been about entertainment or passing time but about knowledge. As an emigrant who has left a life behind, I know the only thing you have is what you know and can transport within the confines of your brain. Everything else is transient.
Books are time stamps. They speak to when you read them and what they signified then and, upon rereading which I frequently do, now. There is an unavoidable link to the period and its historical and personal events. It shapes your relations to others. The weightiest decision that my partner of four decades and I had to confront was whether we would merge our separate holdings. To this day, each title is stamped identifying it as hers or mine. As Argentine writer Carlos María Domínguez observed: “To build up a library is to create a life. It’s never just a random collection of books.”
It is possible to deconstruct books. What to read? Whether to purchase physical volumes or digital editions? How does the knowledge affect your relationship with others? Do you lend your books?
Assuming you read two books a week from the age of ten, you would get through around 7,000 books in a lifetime. Given there may be 160 million unique works, selectivity is essential.
At the beginning, I had little idea of what to read or what was worth reading. Not moving amongst readers, I lacked literary markers. Book reviews were something I knew nothing about. I read without discrimination feeding my curiosity, which might be the greatest asset for a reader. One book led to another as I followed an author, subject or a work referred to in the book that I was reading.
Some teachers provided guidance, encouraging reading beyond the curriculum. It led to translated Russians and Europeans and now extends to works from around the world. I overheard someone say that art critic Robert Hughes, then enjoying popularity with his Shock of the New, was repeating what Clement Greenberg had written. I read Greenberg’s essays. Spending days in bookshops widened my interests. I have spent days rummaging through shelves and sometimes reading entire books, occasionally drawing attention from staff concerned that I was homeless, a shoplifter or worse.
My tastes remain eclectic spanning fiction, history, philosophy, current affairs, politics, science, travel, biography, culture, art, and nature writing. Some suspect I would read the telephone directory if there was nothing else handy.
Lacking access to the theatre, I read scripts. Even though now I can watch live performances, my preference remains the written work. It avoids the disappointment of modern auteur director’s novel stagings, gender bending, tedious multi-media trickery and lack of adherence to the text. ‘Adapted from [insert name of drama]’ now passes for theatre.
While seeing a painting or sculpture is preferable, art books are sometimes the only option. Standing in line rushing past a painting propelled by a surging crowd means that you rarely get to linger and study the work. New ‘blockbuster’ exhibitions do not always live up to their billing consisting of a few notable works and other lesser items, sketches or ‘works of followers.’ Major retrospectives are frequently thousands of miles away. Artbooks with decent quality reproductions frequently allow closer study and a more comprehensive perspective on an artist.
Genre, I have come to understand, is irrelevant. You can learn more about Russia from Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Turgenev and Solzhenitsyn than from standard histories. Ryszard Kapuściński’s travel books tell you more about world politics than learned analytical works.
It is important to be true to Socrates’s dictate: “An unexamined life is not worth living.” I have tried to know everything about something and something about everything.
Perhaps because of my age, I continue to prefer bound volumes never having embraced eBooks. The tactile quality of real books remains magical.
Our books are organised by subject matter or genre, then alphabetically within each category. It creates unexpected juxtapositions: Dostoevsky and Conan Doyle; Baldwin and Bellow sandwiched between Babel and Borges; Kafka and Kawabata; Musil following Murakami; Zweig’s The World of Yesterday ends fiction. In biographies, King precedes Kissinger while Mao and Mapplethorpe find themselves next to each other. Locational accidents allow new discoveries.
The books record the effluxion of time as the fragility of some titles shows. As the collection outstrips the capacity of the shelves, disorder creeps in. Individual items sit horizontally over the vertical rows. Double rows appear creating problems of invisibility and access. It mirrors the growing confusion and chaos of the world.
For me, reading is a solitary pursuit. Machiavelli donned fine court robes discarding his working clothes before secluding himself to read. Although I keep meticulous notes on points of interest, I have never found it necessary to discuss texts with others.
Book clubs or their equivalents are about people’s need for social connections rather than the works. Some communal approaches embrace travel and adventure such as reading Herman Melville’s Moby Dick onboard a ship in a Scottish gale, Homer’s Odyssey on a Greek island, Virginia Woolf’s The Waves in St Ives and Marcel Proust in Paris. The field trips are meant to contextualise books by studying them in their original setting. In company, the works are peripheral to self-exploration by people who want to be writers.
Semiotician Roland Barthes proposed a theory of reading. In his essays Pleasure of the Text and S/Z, he distinguishes between ‘readerly’ and ‘writerly’ texts (sometimes translated as ‘readable’ and ‘writable’). The first does not challenge the reader who receives information passively. The second confronts the reader forcing them to engage actively even re-enacting the arguments of the writer. My preference has always been to argue metaphorically with the writer allowing the text to remain alive and be reinvented constantly.
There is the vexed issue of whether you lend your titles. I rarely do as it is unclear whether others will treat the items with the care expected. Erasmus and Petrarch fetishized books like holy relics believing their library to be paradise.
Recently, we contemplated downsizing in recognition of the approaching end of our lives. It would mean disposing of the bulk of our books following William Morris’ command: “Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.” It forced me to consider a life without books. I could still read, of course, but that has become intimately connected with my collection. I enjoy walking down the shelves to find something that I am thinking of and reread it. Placing a new title in its place gives pleasure. There is the visual appeal of row upon row of titles.
Increasingly, I think about the meaning of reading and books. Walter Benjamin wrote about unpacking his library. The German only came alive through his books, not the other way around. His books were building stones defining a room into which he could disappear. I have come to agree with American journalist Christopher Morley: “When you sell a man a book, you don’t sell him 12 ounces of paper and ink and glue – you sell him a whole new life.”
© 2025 Satyajit Das All Rights Reserved
