A Coronavirus Diary: Running Out of Books I Love
We have all heard the common adage — you should live your life as if you had only six more months to live. While it is somewhat naïve — what if you live longer, don’t you have to plan so you can continue to have a decent life? — there is some truth to this, as I found out recently. Confronted with the coronavirus pandemic, the possibility of dying suddenly seems more real than theoretical. And while it has not really changed my outlook or thinking — I was already more of a “go with the flow” type of person — one thing that it has definitely changed for me is my reading.
Given the lockdown and the directive to stay at home, this seemed like a great time to catch up on reading. Of course, the libraries are all closed, and I don’t enjoy reading books electronically — so ebooks are not an option — but I have plenty of books at home that I have not yet read. Since I couldn’t go anywhere, I could just curl up on the sofa and catch up on those. Or so I thought.
However, it didn’t really work that way. I found that I couldn’t really “get into” the books I had not read. And when I stopped to think about it, the reason, really, was simple — if they had been books that I loved, I would have read them by now. The very fact that I had not yet read them was because they hadn’t “called” out to me as such. Whereas previously, I would persist with a book even if it didn’t grip me, I found that I could no longer force myself to do so. I kept asking myself — if I knew I was going to die tomorrow, perhaps because of the coronavirus, would I still be reading this? The answer was a resounding no.
But given that I have loved to read since I was a kid, reading was an activity I now craved to comfort me and keep me grounded. But what to read? In desperation, I turned to my prized collection of books that I love. I started out with one of my all-time favorites, The Painted Veil by Somerset Maugham. I found that not only could I read it with as much enjoyment as the first time I had read it, I was still as moved by its haunting quality as before, even though the story is imprinted on my brain.
After I finished The Painted Veil, there was the question of what to read next. I could, of course, continue to re-read more of the books in my “I absolutely love these” collection — which includes A Meeting by the River by Christopher Isherwood, Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë, the first four of the Harry Potter books, the first ten or so books in the №1 Ladies Detective Agency Series by Alexander McCall Smith, Career of Evil by Robert Galbraith (aka J.K. Rowling), A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara, The Memory Keeper’s Daughter by Kim Edwards, The Host by Stephanie Meyer, Sister of my Heart by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Me Before You by Jojo Moyes, North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell, and The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro. All of these are books that I have re-read several times over the years, and each time, they provide me with the same thrill and enjoyment as they did before.
But the problem is that this list is finite. In fact, the most recent book in this list, A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara, was published in 2015, almost five years ago. (By the way, that book actually inspired me to start a community site called bookswehaveread.com for people to share thoughts about the books they’d read.) I haven’t been able to find any book to add to my list since then, despite having read so many.
Given there is a limit to the number of books that I love, and therefore, to how often I can turn to them when I desperately need to read something I love — such as now in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic — I am scared of running out. It is similar to being marooned on an island with a finite supply of food — it has to last you a while, so you have to stretch it out, not knowing if you can get any more.
I find myself in the same situation with regard to the books I love — I have no idea when my “stock” will be replenished, so I need to make what I have last. I need to ration them out, as I am afraid that reading them too often will take away their ability to enthrall me.
It is a rare conundrum — should I keep reading them, or should I save them for a future “rainy day?”
