I never used to be an avid reader. I read when my mom told me, “You can either study math, or read a book.” But outside of my hatred for long division, I never voluntarily picked a book well into 8th standard. That is, of course, until I discovered Harry Potter. I had this one bad habit, though. I could never tolerate the suspense hidden between the lines and pages, and I always read the end before the beginning. For example, I always knew Augustus Waters was going to die. That way, I could prepare for the sadness ahead of time. Though, let’s be honest, nothing prepares you for when Sirius Black dies. (I bawled my eyes out.)
If you have read voraciously, then at some point, you must have thought to yourself: hey, what if I write a New York Times bestseller and become an author. I definitely went through that phase. I wrote 3 chapters of a book. It was about a girl who visits a town after her parents die and she meets a guy and falls in love. The plot twist? The town was a cursed place where all the people were dead and the curse was what killed her parents. I wrote another story about the afterworld, and another one, a tale of romance in an asylum. It was cliche, and whatever I wrote depended heavily on what I was reading at the time. I think of these times and it feels so distant, that the dream has becomes almost a speck, hidden by the large stack of calculus and Freud textbooks. Well, maybe someday I will write a bestseller. Consider this a pre-sale article.Â
And now, since this is a book-recommendation article, as someone who has read a lot of brain rot romance, the one of the few romance novels that left me feeling that there was some good left in the romance world after the whole Colleen Hoover era (It Ends With Us was okay but Ugly Love was written by a 13-year-old, I swear to God. An emotionally stunted one.), was Turtles All The Way Down (John Green). It’s a John Green novel so there was a certain tone to it that grasps you in from the very first line. What kept me, though, was not the heart-wrenching romance or the poetic musings. It was the way the book represented anxiety. Soul-crushing anxiety. Enough to make you bleed tears. She drinks sanitizer to keep the germs out. She digs her nail deep into her skin, and you feel the words and the actions enveloping you. Every moment, every thought plagues the brain till there is an infinite spiral of your thoughts, till it’s Turtles All the Way Down. It does get a little monotonous in the middle, but somehow, even that encapsulated the essence of it all. When Aza’s anxiety takes over everything and you start thinking, “Ugh, where is the romance I signed up for?” That’s when you understand what the book is truly about. That’s when you understand what she must have been going through. You feel like you are there, in her head, her thoughts surrounding you, eating at you; and by the end, you are left drained and tired and thinking: Was this the best book I have ever read or the worst?Â
Once I abandoned romance, I slipped into mystery. And before I recommend my favorite novel from this genre, I just want to say: for the record, you can never go wrong with Agatha Christie. However, there are too many books in Christie’s collection to choose from. (Murder On The Orient Express, maybe? And Then There Were None?) However, the book I am dying to recommend is not exactly a classic. It will be. It just needs to collect dust on shelves for longerto become a classic. The Silent Patient. The book I talked about in my Ashoka essay. The Silent Patient is an amalgamation of everything that is good in the World. Too much? Okay, maybe I should take it down a notch. The book is perfect because Alex Michaelides builds up the suspense to a level that you cannot imagine what plot twist could justify the build-up and you are almost waiting to be disappointed, you are waiting for the suspense to unravel and to think “oh, that was it?” but it never happens because, God, does he deliver the most mind-boggling suspense. You never really hear the word mind-boggling much anymore, do you?
The book is about a woman who shot her husband 5 times in the face and then never spoke a word again. It’s about the therapist obsessed with her. It’s about the grey hues in people, that we often miss because our palette is not diverse enough to capture the complexities of humans. If you are looking for a book that keeps you on the edge of your seat (hell, you might even fall off) then this is the one.
Okay, I am really testing the word limit, now. (And my editor’s patience? Do I make editor jokes a lot?) But I simply cannot end this article without recommending this last book to you. I don’t even know why I find this book to be as profound as I do. Maybe, it’s the way Murakami writes. Or, maybe it’s the note scribbled on the front page, “I hope this book changes your life as much as it changed mine.” It set a precedent for the novel. Can a book really change someone’s life? Can a book be so profound that by the time you flip the last page you are a different person? I am not too sure. Norwegian Wood. There is a song by The Beatles of the same name.Â
I once had a girl,
Or should I say she once had me.
Norwegian Wood is a sad novel. It is a romance novel, in a way. But I would not really put it under that category. If I were an emotionless person who wasn’t that interested in complex novels, I would describe it like this: A lot of people have sex and kill themselves. Maybe, in more nuanced terms, I could say the book is about the aftermath of grief and trauma but even that doesn’t capture its essence. Murakami, you see, seems to have existed on a different plane of existence where emotions are encoded differently. I wonder how many words got lost in translation. The characters, the emotions, the conversations: it’s all described in a way that I have never read before. Even the goddamn sex scenes seem profound the way he wrote them. It seems like nothing and everything matters. It seems like you are in a grass field, turning the tear stained pages of the novel, and the years of your life keep slipping away. It’s the kind of novel that doesn’t even make you cry,because tears seem like too small of a response. What I like about it is: Murakami doesn’t talk about the character in some meta ways. He doesn’t try to figure out what his characters are feeling, or supposed to feel. He gives them a life of their own. He is not a puppeteer, and they are not his puppets. It almost feels like you are meeting new people.
And well, that’s it. There are so many more books I could recommend but Chandler is about to propose to Monica and I really don’t want to miss that. Maybe when I want to make people cry again, I will suggest some more of these books.
Fin.