#Title

OPINION
Shelves of deceit
A reader takes himself and the world to trial
When the lockdown was enforced and we were all confined to our homes, I began organising my bookshelf and no longer had stray paperbacks all over the house. I could finally spread my legs while taking a nap. This was received with great enthusiasm and approval of my mother, and confused glares of my cat.
This exercise, however, allowed me to reflect over a few things that I would not have acknowledged otherwise. Most of the books I own were penned by popular and well regarded writers, peddled by literary circles, anointed by the Booker or the Nobel prize to enjoy commercial success. As much as I have felt good and have had faith in my taste in literature all these years, it now seems not much of it was under my control. I have conformed unknowingly to a role marketed to me.
This culture has turned mortal humans into automatons with very little scope for individuality in terms of reading habits. Once we get assimilated, we are barely capable of hearing what our heart desires enjoy, what our faculties process. No wonder the writers we read are mostly straight males from big cities who belong to the majority ethnic or religious group. Is resistance to this system futile?
If we surrender our literary senses to the system, we inevitably become complicit in the silencing and extinction of voices that the privileged class have deemed unworthy or intentionally want to suppress. We are much more likely to pick up a book these days because we see them everywhere: our social media feeds, sources that are not always attentive to which voices they are helping to disseminate.
Goodreads, labelled as the ‘Facebook with books’, has been acquired or rather, devoured by the disreputable giant Amazon. To be at the mercy of the Goodreads algorithm seems like a horrifying prospect; the unsuspecting reader becomes a pawn in the battle to dominate the market, while our inquisitiveness undergoes a silent death.
BookTube too—the part of YouTube dedicated to discussing books—relies heavily on following trends in the publishing world and keeping abreast of literary awards. The relatively bigger channels cater mostly to commercial genres produced with a target demographic in mind.
Despite being so susceptible to the parables of the market, however, there are many channels that promote engaging conversation on books and attempt to reflect on their reading habits. The Reading Women challenge for instance is a great initiative. But in some ways it is still falling short since the conversation only tends to include a few selected women writers.
Bookstagram has its niche community for books too, although the dimensions for hosting conversations and intelligent engagement can feel a bit restrained here.
Instagram is flooded with images that employ books as only a visual prop. It also tends to showcase a lifestyle that is more about “refinement of taste” centred on books. This curation of an “aesthetic” persona may seem grand at first, but it simply showcases some common and popular books with very little indication to what they contain and mean to the “influencers”. One wonders how rejuvenating such discourse can be when the books in question are picked primarily for maintaining social graces.
It is not unreasonable to be distrustful of a culture that treats literature this way. I have very little to say to many around me for whom the act of reading is merely a medium of entertainment. But what about the rest of us, who hold literature as dearly as our own lives?
One name that comes to my mind is that of Michael Orthofer, who single-handedly runs the literary website complete-review.com which, in addition to being an excellent source for literature from across the world, is also a testament to Michael’s efforts as a reader to find great literary works overlooked by the Anglophone world.
Now that I am in my mid-twenties, how a book reaches me is quite different from how I would get in touch with one a decade ago. During those teen years, I would stumble upon a book as though by accident. It would fill me with astonishing delights and joys of surprise. Those days are behind me. I have moved from a suburban town to the capital city and have experienced the advent or rather intrusion of the internet in every aspect of our lives. I have been exposed to other people who read and the cultural landscape around me. All these have exponentially increased the ways in which I come in contact with a book. But the innocent joy of finding something new and unexplored is lost for good. By borrowing from the tongue of this mechanical age, the sensor for detecting wonder has gone offline. I have become numb.
Can we not do any better?
Mursalin Mosaddeque grew up in the suburban town of Rangpur in Northern Bengal.
Instagram: @bluets001
ILLUSTRATION: Tanima Uddin
Mursalin Mosaddeque