Reading Habit

Thursday March 10 2022

reading habit

Editor’s note

Samanth Subramanian is a writer and journalist. His latest book, ‘A Dominant Character: The Radical Science and Restless Politics of JBS Haldane,’ was one of the New York Times’ Top 100 Books of 2020. Samanth also has a monthly newsletter called multi-storied which makes for varied and fascinating reading. It goes without saying that we’re delighted to have him answer our Book Addict’s Quiz!

What is your most powerful and/or a cherished childhood memory of a book?

One of my first “serious” books—a book not written for children, that is—was Nevil Shute’s ‘On the Beach.’ And I remember the slow sense of discovery as Shute unfolded his apocalypse, and the unfamiliar shock (spoiler!) of encountering an ending that was not happy for the protagonists at all. Children’s books are predicated on cheer and happy resolution. This was the opposite—and it was riveting. Shute isn’t high literature, some people would say. Nevertheless, this book was my first introduction to what a proper novel could do—the power it had to move you.

What line of literature or poetry can you quote ad nauseam? Brownie points if you can tell us when and where you quoted it most recently.

Invariably, Wodehouse comes to mind. Once, riding a bus in Poland, I turned to my wife in delight and said: “If this is Upper Silesia, what must Lower Silesia look like?” It’s an immortal quote—not from a work of literature, exactly, but from one of Wodehouse’s broadcasts during the war, made when he was interned in that part of Poland. (I use it often in variation: “If this is Greater Noida, what must Lesser Noida look like?”) Recently, after a mediocre meal at a restaurant, I told a friend that I was, “if not disgruntled, far from being gruntled,” a coinage of pure genius in ‘The Code of the Woosters.’ I also often think these days of Virginia Woolf’s opening sentence from ‘On Being Ill’. It is, of course, too long to quote in conversations, or even to oneself, but fragments of it play through my mind. Here it is, in full:

“Considering how common illness is, how tremendous the spiritual change that it brings, how astonishing, when the lights of health go down, the undiscovered countries that are then disclosed, what wastes and deserts of the soul a slight attack of influenza brings to view, what precipices and lawns sprinkled with bright flowers a little rise of temperature reveals, what ancient and obdurate oaks are uprooted in us by the act of sickness, how we go down into the pit of death and feel the waters of annihilation close above our heads and wake thinking to find ourselves in the presence of the angels and the harpers when we have a tooth out and come to the surface in the dentist's arm-chair and confuse his “Rinse the mouth—rinse the mouth” with the greeting of the Deity stooping from the floor of Heaven to welcome us—when we think of this, as we are so frequently forced to think of it, it becomes strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love and battle and jealousy among the prime themes of literature.”

An author you adored as a child but haven’t thought about in years?

Victor Dragunsky, whom I only know for one book: ‘The Adventures of Dennis.’ It was the first book I ever chose and bought for myself: Rs 50 at a Russian book fair stall at my school in Delhi, when I was 7 or 8. I read that book again and again, because it's stories were moving, funny, bizarre, or even mundane—and above all for how they captured a boy’s view of the world.

<Ah, a book fair! Truly a lost love in itself.>

Which book would you gift to your new best friend, and which to your worst enemy?

When you make a new best friend, you wish, above all, for a confirmation of your unanimity on everything. Maybe I’d gift them ‘The Catcher in the Rye,’ to be sure they’re as bored by it as I was, or Carsten Jensen’s ‘We, The Drowned,’ to see if they’re as enthralled by and immersed in it as I was. To my worst enemy, I bequeath the experience of reading Hanya Yanagihara’s ‘A Little Life.’ Not that it is a bad book, necessarily, but it is certainly a book guaranteed to make you miserable, and there are 700-odd pages of misery to plough through.

I would love to see a movie/series adaptation of ___________ starring ____ as _____

This question gave me so much trouble; I should never become a casting director. But I’d watch the hell out of an Indian adaptation of ‘King Lear,’ with Naseeruddin Shah in the title role.

A book review that was better than the book?

Mihir Sharma’s excoriation of Suhel Seth’s ‘Get to the Top,’ in Caravan.

<Sadly, the review is behind a paywall, but here’s a taste: “An age—let us call it the Age of Seth—when a closed, Brahminical notion of public discourse appears to have died, but has actually only disguised itself as a culture that prizes mediocrity, insulated from challenge by the same walls of privilege that have protected it all along.”>

Which book do you pretend to have read?

‘The Satanic Verses.’ Not that I pretend to have read it, exactly, but the discourse around the book has, in itself, been so rich and detailed that I’ve come to feel (wrongly, I’m sure) that I don’t need to read the book to talk about it.

What is the first “forbidden” book you read in secret?

Either a Sidney Sheldon book—extremely forgettable, clearly, because I don’t recall the title—or Wilbur Smith’s ‘Wild Justice.’ My father thought we shouldn’t read “trash” in our formative years—that there was always plenty of time for that in adulthood. So my foremost act of childhood rebellion was to defy him and read trash in secret.

What’s one of the funniest books you’ve ever read? Something apart from Wodehouse, Adams, Durrell et al would be even better.

It is difficult to think past Wodehouse, whom I truly adore, or past Jerome K Jerome’s ‘Three Men in a Boat.’ But I remember giggling a lot when I was reading Richmal Crompton’s ‘Just William’ series as a boy, Saki’s short stories and the Adrian Mole books as a teenager, and…almost nothing as an adult. Do adults not get truly funny books written for them anymore? Perhaps ‘The Collected Dorothy Parker,’ a thick collection of her essays, which I read in autorickshaws from my house to my office in Connaught Place and back. Parker was brilliant. Her wit can peel the skin off your arm.