Ranjona Banerji | When Books Were Our Map To A Wild, Hazy World

Clearing out some of my old papers, I found a diary I used to keep in my early teens. It was a thing in those days, before you had to chronicle your whole life on social media. People wrote down what happened to them in the days, their thoughts, ideas, passions and secrets, if you wanted to be part of a murder mystery. They were also called journals and this is before journaling became a 21st century thing, together with “gratitude”.

Some boring minutiae of daily life of a school-going girl in the 1970s aside, I found I had also made a list of my favourite tennis stars and most significantly, books that had made a difference to my life. How would they compare today? Does the mind of that 14-year-old match what I am now, 40 years later?

In a judgmental fashion, I was appalled to find some popular fiction. My mother, as I remember it, was very strict about reading habits and was very clear that I had a whole lifetime to read rubbish, so I didn’t have to start young. And yet I find Colleen McCoullough’s Thorn Birds in my list. Perhaps, and this is my excuse, I was allowed to read it after we had watched the American TV series. Who knows. I do remember being deeply embarrassed by the idea that I had even watched it, some years later. Although Richard Chamberlain was quite dishy.

I was amused to find George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss on the list. I studied that in school a couple of years after the list was made, and quite disliked it. Of the great British Victorian writers, Charles Dickens and George Eliot remain my least favourite. And many of those turgid texts that were gifted to us as birthday presents: beautifully hardbound classics which remained unread on the shelves.

It occurred to me to explore the pretentiousness of a teenager. I was very pretentious as a teenager. Or so I thought. But apart from Thorn Birds, I also found Mario Puzo’s The Godfather. What?? How did I sneak that past my mother? Maybe like I quietly read Stardust when she was sleeping in the afternoon?

Some of the books reflect the talking points of the time. Like Sybil by Flora Schreider, an apparently true story about a young girl with multiple personality disorder. It caught the public imagination, and these were times when mental health and mental wellness were rarely spoken about. Sigmund Freud, from what we could glean from our parents’ conversations and the media, was all about blaming your parents and problems with sex. It was Freud and Carl Jung in those days, as far as I can remember.

And then there’s Jonathan Livingston Seagull. Much as it was discredited later, it was a book of the times. Richard Bach, I think, went out to rewrite the book several times under several names, each time reducing the impact and his own reputation. Does anyone still read it today? There’s Pearl Buck’s Hidden Flower in my list. I cannot even remember what the book is about, but I knew the writer was my grandmother’s favourite. I was shocked to the core when my mother gave me Buck’s Pavillion of Women, where a wife finds a concubine for her husband. The notion was too much to handle for my romantic teenage heart. Buck brought China to life for many; but did the Chinese see her as appropriating their culture? Could one do that today?

Thankfully, there is redemption in some choices, to feed my current ego if you will. Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice of course. William Shakespeare. Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyaya’s Pather Panchali. Rabindranath Tagore’s Gitanjali. George Bernard Shaw. Jean Anouilh’s version of Sophocles’ Antigone. Jean Paul Sartre’s play, No Exit. Albert Camus’ Caligula. Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac.

Shockingly, there’s so much missing. Where is Alice in Wonderland? Where is J.R.R. Tolkien? P.G. Wodehouse? And there is also something intriguing. So many playwrights. Is it because I was still in school? Why do I not read playwrights any more?

This rabbit hole also reminded me how little I read now compared to even a few years ago. I stopped reading fiction over a decade ago, and thus shut the door on so much entertainment for myself. I have gained some, though, especially in popular science. A degree in English literature means that you left the sciences behind somewhere around the time I made this list. But I have returned to it in some way. Natural history, geology, cosmology they test my skills and my brain.

Don’t worry, I take revenge on my pretentious side by reading endless murder mysteries. Although, I say this emphatically, I have not delved into the money-making game of the descendants of crime writers like Agatha Christie, where they get people to write in her name. Yuck! Now don’t try and convince me otherwise!

What I have had to remind myself is that reading is a privilege and it should not be. It should be a pleasure available to everybody. The repository of human imagination is massive and probably insurmountable, but like those tall mountains to be conquered, they are there. We have so much to entertain ourselves with today, as distractions, not least with the fun that people have with AI whatever the consequences.

Funnily, there was no sci-fi on my list. But significantly, there were comics: Peanuts, Iznogoud, Asterix and Denis the Menace. And no Archie comics, although they were read avidly by the whole family. No kiddie fiction, so obviously I was being “grown up” while making my list.

What have I learnt and why have I inflicted this on you? Changing trends, I suppose, and reading at a time when it was not a spectator sport. No literary festivals, no massive publicity drives for any small achievement, very few prizes.

This is for all those warm afternoons during the summer holidays, curled up reading Agatha Christie and Georgette Heyer and Laura Ingalls Wilder and Louisa May Alcott. And tasty bits of Antoine de Saint-Exupery thrown in.

I told you I was pretentious, born like that!