What I will be reading, or atleast attempting to read

A few readalongs, a couple of book clubs -

So in 2025, I have decided to join a few readalongs. Hopefully these pillars of the year will prop up my reading schedule, while I also look to write and engage my critical muscles with the texts that I come across. These are the books I am going to be reading this year as part of a few different initiatives:

Joyce supporting the others, which makes sense in a way.

Upamanyu Chatterjee’s Lorenzo Searches for the Meaning of Life is the most recent JCB winner. Having read and enjoyed the humour of English, August, which was both a coming-of age story and a slacker novel, I had been remiss in not reading any of his other books since. As part of a book club in a Pune bookstore, I had picked this and am looking forward to reacquainting myself with Chatterjee’s trademark humour and sardonic nature.

Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights is a book picked by me for another book club that I am hosting. We have worked our way slowly through maybe a fifth of the book and all the readers have found the plot absent, the prose mesmerizing and damningly for a book club, the book in itself particularly hard to summarize or discuss in any conventional way. On it goes.

V.S. Naipaul’s A Turn in the South and The Enigma of Arrival was picked by a friend of mine who has suggested we embark on a slow read of two Naipaul books at a time (one fiction, one non-fiction) and then meet up for a video podcast or something along those lines. Enigma is one of my favourite Naipaul works, truly novel and almost unclassifiable in some ways; I have lost count of the number of copies I have gifted to people (or forced upon people); A Turn In the South is a travelogue, Naipaul’s only such book set in the United States. Having recently read Imani Perry’s comments on this book, comparing Naipaul’s views on the Caribbean folks and the Black folk in the United States had me curious.

James Joyce’s Ulysses, a book which has probably been written about more than read, is intimidating, to say the least. The great critics were divided - Virginia Woolf found it a ‘bore’, and hated that it distracted her from reading Proust, while Eliot and Nabakov were strong admirers (Eliot: the most important expression which the present age has found. Nabakov: a divine work of art and the greatest masterpiece of 20th century prose. The book attracted bans and were it not for a few hardy supporters, Sylvia Beach foremost among them, the book may never have found enough legs to get around the world. The readalong is going to take this behemoth one section at a time, and it promises to be illuminating, frustrating and an experience somewhat like life itself.