Secret Letter #3: How to find great books to read?

A simple foolproof hack to find great books.

Dearest Reader,

I anticipate you had a tolerable Monday, and direly hope that you’re not reading this letter snarled up in Bengaluru traffic! I’m Harsh, one of the curators of Cubbon Reads. This is the third dispatch from us and I promise you’d soon hear from my cofounder, Shruti, and get to read her elegant prose. Until then, please tolerate me.

In this newsletter, I’m going to let you in on a little secret that has kept me in good stead for twenty years of reading fiction. This letter stemmed from an innocuous question that my 15-year-old cousin asked me not too long ago: ‘How to discover great books to read?’ I believe this the greatest question any reading or writing enthusiast could ever have asked.

And I went on a rant, which fortunately (or unfortunately), I documented later. I wonder if you find it worthy of your time. If not, do write back! Okay, no more wait. Here I go:

See, one of the most common problems plaguing every new reader is the absolutely useless recommendation engine of their friends—the friends who only recommend the most popular books. Check any such avid fiction reader’s library, you’d find bestsellers starting with the quintessential dose of Amish Tripathi or Chetan Bhagat, a spectrum of Paulo Coelho, a couple of splattering of Khalid Hosseini, an unread copy of The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy (if it’s a millennial kid), one novel by Gabriel Garcia Marquez—mostly Love in Time of Cholera. Nobel Prize, bro. Yeah, right. In some cases, you can even find the new good shit i.e. Murakami. Don’t get me wrong! Some of these are great writers. But reading just their popular works isn’t going to make you a great reader. What you would be doing is not reading, but book-hopping. Popular book hopping at that. Please don’t. Stay away from readers with a to-do list for books. That's not how you read. That’s how you shop. Don’t ever shop for a book.

Date a book, instead. Have a crush on a book. Wait for it. Catch its glimpse in nooks and corners, in bookshops and airports, flip a few pages, take it in—its smell, that of the pages and words. Spread it out, like jam on bread, right in the middle. Read a random page and see if the sentences make you want to read the next line. Let the language do its magic, or not, for you to decide what to take home. Read the first chapter during the long stopovers and imagine what happens next. Make yourself crave for it. Treat the book as a person. Learn more about it, its friend, its influences. While you are away from or done with the book, read about its author. Her life story. The books that changed her life. The books that she’s reading now. The books she grew up reading.

Here’s the way to find a book you ought to read. Sniff the author names out of acknowledgments of novels, authors whose advice the author trusted and thanked. Google them, find their books. If you’re reading a non-fiction, check the bibliography. I found a gem called One. Two. Three. Infinity. by the physicist George Gamow in the bibliography of my NCERT Physics textbook twenty years ago. It continued to be the best book on Physics that I read until Feynman’s omnibus happened during college.

Go find the book that the writer you like the most talks about. Read the author’s interview. Paris Review, Google this website if you haven’t yet. They publish the most detailed interviews delving right into the mind of the writer. Watch the BBC documentaries of writing maestros, be it Philip Roth or your Murakami boy. Everything is one YouTube search away. If they are living writers, follow them on social media, find if they write newsletters. See if there are books they recommended. Read the Fiction section of The New Yorker. They feature works by underrated writers every now and then, works that you can vet and that can lead you to their books if you like. Read about the spats between authors. Be obsessed with them. Don’t jump on to the next book until your curiosity is quenched. Here’re a few for your indulgence: Why did Pankaj Mishra call Salman Rushdie’s The Ground Beneath Her Feet anti-literature? Why did Rushdie adopt Conrad’s first name during hiding? Why did Conrad write about Africa? What did David Foster Wallace think of Kafka? Why did Arundhati Roy take more than two decades before writing her second book? While you dig deeper, you will find references to new books. Great books. Not by any of the self-proclaimed bibliophile friends, but by the writers themselves. Writers that are devout readers, whose taste you can trust.

That’s how you will discover an unforgettable narrative nonfiction titled A Free Man by a not-so-famous journalist called Aman Sethi mentioned inside Amitava Kumar’s A Matter of Rats. That’s how you will come across An Obedient Father that marked the arrival of a writer of great finesse whom not many people know of, Akhil Sharma (we shared a snippet of his interview in the 2nd newsletter). That’s how you will be awed to hear that Jeet Thayil grew up translating Charles Baudelaire’s poems from French to English, frequenting his grave in Cimetiere Montparnasse while he was in Paris. That’s how you’ll discover that the greatest Portuguese writer isn’t Paulo Coelho, but an unknown Nobel Laureate named José Saramago. Read his book called Blindness, if you like dystopian fiction. That’s how you will be moved to know that Alice Munro wrote only short-stories not because she feared the form of a novel, but because she only had as much time. All her stories were written in hours stolen while her child slept or was in school.

All the viral listicles with 100 books that you can’t live without reading are filled with bestsellers. Unfortunately the writers of those buzz-fed lists have grown up masticating the very same curd of famous recommendations with friends crooning “Yaar, Jhumpa Lahiri padho yaar. She's brilliant,” and you ask, expectantly, “Did you read (her less famous but best-written) Unaccustomed Earth?” and pat comes the reply, “No, The Lowland, dude. It's just epic.” Yeah, right. Booker shortlist won’t get it wrong, would they? They will. Most great works don’t get noticed immediately. It’s only time (and readers, like you and me, who go out of their comfort zones) that help decide which published work survives for generations. You have to give these books the notice they deserve. Else, the world will be filled with shoppers, never readers.

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That’s all folks! We hope it made sense. Do write back and ask away any of your reading or writing related questions. While we are not experts in the professional sense, we love and live words for our bread and butter, and we’d try our best to answer your questions and take your criticism with passion and insight. If we’re not equipped, we’ll reach out to some of our gifted writer and reader friends and get back to you. Until the next rant, keep reading!

You reading makes us happy,
Cubbon Reads