Last weekend I was in Dallas attending a literature festival, where I also had a short session titled “What Should Be the Next Book to Read?”

The crux of my talk was simple: people who read regularly rarely ask this question because the next book usually finds them.

Most often, this question comes from people who don’t have a reading habit yet. And I always tell them, “If you don’t read anything, then any book is a good start.” Reading demands effort, far more than watching or listening.

Evolutionarily speaking, the act of reading is relatively new compared to seeing or hearing, so it does not come naturally to us. We need to cultivate it deliberately.

Let me share how some books found me.
I hadn’t read Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment when I was younger.

Three years ago, a friend told me, “You should read it, it will change you as a human being.” And it did. I think so. The person who begins “Crime and Punishment” is not the same person who finishes it.

Another example is One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Marquez. It’s one of the most loved foreign novels in my home state of Kerala in India, yet I hadn’t read it until 2017. It also took me two and a half years to finish. I would stop, lose touch, and then the book would find me again.

Later, I realized two things: the Malayalam translation I started with didn’t resonate as much as the English version I finished, and that I’m not naturally drawn to magic realism. Yet, that book stayed with me and it continued to grow inside me long after I turned the last page.

Ocean Vuong’s books found me through podcasts. Podcasts are wonderful gateways to new authors where you discover them, forget them, and then one day the book remembers you. You cannot escape a book that has set its eyes on you.

Recently, I read Pedro Paramo by Juan Rulfo, considered one of the masterpieces of Latin American literature and an inspiration for Marquez himself. In the foreword to the edition I read, Marquez recounts how he first encountered the book. His friend and writer Alvaro Mutis handed it to him, saying, “Read this shit and learn.” Marquez said he couldn’t sleep until he had read it twice that night.

It changed how he saw storytelling. He realized prose could be as poetic as poetry. Pedro Paramo found Marquez and not the other way.

Books have a way of finding us when we are ready. They come to those who read, not by chance, but by habit.

Happy Reading to you All !!!