Tag Archives: Nila Bhowmick

How I Pick What to Read Next

23 Tuesday Jun 2026

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In a world of algorithms and Goodreads, how does a person pick what to read next? Since creating my own website in 2011 to write things I’ve also used it to track what books I’ve read. But the following describes what tends to guide me in what to read next.

I’ve had two editors named “T” who got me onto excellent books. The first, Tathagata Bhattacharya, is a novelist himself who comes from a distinguished line of writers. His father is the great Bengali radical novelist Nabarun Bhattacharya, and his grandmother is Mahasweta Devi, a legendary writer and activist famous across India and beyond. T got me onto Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate and also Yeshar Kemal’s novels, The Wind from the Plain, Memed, My Hawk, and They Burn the Thistles. It’s easy to read T’s novel, General Firebrand and His Red Atlas, and feel his love for both Vasily Grossman and his father’s works.

T’s wife is also a dear friend of mine, Nila Bhowmick, and her non-fiction books–How Not To Be a Superwoman and Lies Our Mother Told Us: The Indian Woman’s Burden–are brilliant. I’m excited to read her upcoming novel.

My second editor T, Tyler, got me into Roberto Bolaño’s novel 2666. I’ll forever be indebted to him for this. Today we have a book club featuring just that book, ie we talk about 2666 whenever we hang out. He also loves Martin Amis’ Times Arrow, which absolutely floored me, and Hemingway. Maybe because of him I read The Sun Also Rises. Some Morley Callaghan stories, too. He got me into Point Omega by DeLillo.

Another friend and ex colleague, André Forget, an excellent novelist in his own right too, also guided me to me several excellent novelists. JK Huysmans, Goncharov, and Gaddis. His love for Orhan Pamuk pushed me to read The Black Book, an excellent novel. Against Nature, Oblomov, and The Recognitions are all masterpieces. I had read Pamuk earlier, The Snow, and quite liked it.

I have a recollection of Tathagata praising Kemal far above Pamuk, but I spoke to him more recently and he quite loves them both. I associate my two friends with each of these legendary Turkish authors.

Andre’s novel In The City of Pigs was truly excellent. It floored me! Not just because it was set in Toronto and felt familiar in theme and content. He’s friends with some outstanding contemporary novelists I doubt I would have otherwise found: Noor Naga, If An Egyptian Cannot Speak English, Fawn Parker’s Hi, It’s Me and What We Both Know, and Naben Ruthnum’s A Hero Of Our Time, and his body-horror novella, Helpmeet. Naga, Parker, and Forget were all longlisted for the Giller, while Ruthnum was outrageously snubbed.

I’ve often thought, “surely there must be outstanding contemporary novelists, I wonder who they are!” and I’m obliged to Andre for helping to answer this. I’m very confident in recommending any of these writers to anybody. Andre also edited After Realism, a great, gutsy collection of contemporary literature.

My darling Amanda directed me to The Shadow of the Wind, A Night To Remember, and many other cool non-fiction books. Friends in India put me onto Ambedkar and essayists like Khushwant Singh. Doug Miller at Miller Books got me reading Lethem and Auster, two very cool, impressive writers.

Sometimes I consult my favourite dead novelists by reading what they love. My love for Bolaño has got me to read more Bolaño than 2666 or Savage Detectives, but also his favourite works, like Don Quixote and Hopscotch by Julio Cortázar. Next I plan to read another dear love of his, Nicanor Parra.  

I’ve also read some Pablo Neruda because Bolaño doesn’t like him and I wanted to see why, for my own curiousity and to better understand By Night in Chile. The truth is, the Neruda I read I really loved. Sorry, Roberto! I’m sure I’ll learn more about your distaste for Neruda’s poetry and politics and come to see your point of view, but meantime, I found the language sadly very dazzling and beautiful. I wanted to dislike him, but it turns out the poet many said was the 20th century’s best is in my opinion very good.

Years ago I met a contemporary writer, Daniel Perry, through a mutual friend, and his work is excellent. I loved his short story collections, Hamburger and Nobody Looks That Young Here, and his recent novella Modern Folklore is outstanding. Along the same lines, Sofi Papamarko’s short stories Radium Girl was great.

Sometimes friends who aren’t novelists or my editor recommend books to me and I’ve been led to excellent works that way. That’s how I found Cloud Atlas and A Brief History of Seven Killings.  

Of course, there’s always Vladimir Nabokov as guide. His literary lectures on Russian and European authors is an incredible way to find great novels and have an absolute genius by your side as a literary companion. I read Dickens’ Bleak House, Proust, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Kafka, and of course my dearly beloved Nikolai Gogol this way. Reading literary criticism about a difficult text can be a wonderful motivator to read it. For years I’ve had Nabokov’s lectures on Don Quixote on my shelf, and finally got to read that because of Bolaño .

My dad really loved JM Coetzee, Disgrace, and so did I. He loves Maugham and maybe I’ll read that soon. I told myself I would.

So long as you love what you read, there’s probably no bad way to get recommended books. I’ll just say that sometimes you don’t know what you need next, and trusting an algorithm to reverse-engineer a list for you based on what you’ve read already may be looking backwards instead of forwards. It may very well direct you to books you enjoy, but there’s a type of book it won’t put in your hands, and that’s the kind of book I’ve been chasing. Sometimes I wonder if satisfaction comes in higher tiers we don’t know about yet, and can’t dream up until we do. Then again, YouTube directed me years ago to Alice Coltrane.

Sometimes, knowing a book has delighted someone I know and trust helps me read it, in the way a joke is genuinely funnier when you hear a friend laugh at it. Friends and writers I admire have no commercial ulterior motive and I know they’re suggeseting a book because it means something to them, even if I don’t end up loving it. In a way, reading a friend’s favourite is like holding a three-way conversation. I wonder if American literature has an outsized impression on me, but even so, maybe I’ll read Gass, Vollman and John Williams soon. Maybe Clarice Lispector. I mostly use Twitter now to connect with like-minded readers and music fans, and these writers are popular there. Technology can be a useful tool if used correctly. It all comes down to people in the end.

Reading Cultures vs Reading Class, From India to Toronto

09 Monday Mar 2026

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I recently read a wonderful Nilanjana Bhowmick essay defending reading culture in India, and while local issues about reading there are very different than in Toronto, much of it resonated. Nila was replying to a Guardian article, which claimed, “India hasn’t made the transition to a literate, book-reading class.” What a cheap shot. She had two main counterpoints.

The first was that India has over 120 languages and thousands of dialects, and reading works very differently there than in countries like the UK or Canada. Indians may read poetry in their mother tongue, policy in another language.

Canada has two official languages, even if there are 72 Indigenous languages and residents and immigrants here speak 400+. Still, French and especially English predominate.

But what I found very interesting was her distinction between a “reading culture” and a “reading class.” She cites US sociologist Wendy Griswold in saying a reading culture is one where people read to be “culturally competent and economically successful.” Basically, people read for practical reasons, to get cultural and professional information.

In contrast, a “reading class” is about a small group of people with the free time and education to read a lot for non-utilitarian reasons, for pleasure. Nila isn’t criticizing either mode, just making the distinction; Nila is a friend of mine, married to another friend, whose father and grandmother are iconic, revered novelists who each have enormous, passionate readerships.

Neither she nor I doubt reading is good, but I want to use her article as a jumping off point to discuss related things.

My cherished copies of some of Nila’s in-law’s books: Two Nabarun novels and short stories by, among other Bengalis, Mahasweta Devi.

Is Reading Privileged?

If reading is “privileged,” it’s because reading consumes a lot of free time. Reading a tome nobody’s talking about takes hours and mental energy people don’t have or don’t want to devote in our hurried, expensive world. In people’s small window of time, it’s understandable they want a break, maybe watch a popular movie or whatever’s streaming—something they can talk about with other people. All fair enough.

However let me take the opposite position, which I believe in.

Books are deeply affordable. A brand new book costs $20-45 dollars. You can buy used books for much less, $5-20, or even get them for free from the library. Copyrights expire after 95 years, so you can download old classic novels to an e-reader for free. In a world of $20 sandwiches, how can such a rich pleasure that’s almost free like reading be “privileged”?

The idea that reading Canon literature requires education can be true, but not necessarily. People who read highbrow stuff in university may be more likely to get into other heady stuff later, but it’s still just sitting on the shelf for everybody. That old classics cost virtually nothing is probably why they’re not advertised to people en masse! If you can have a beautiful, formative experience without spending money, why spend money on anything else?

And before radio, TV and the internet, people across classes commonly read what today would be considered rarified stuff, like Milton’s Paradise Lost or the Romantic poets. Digital technology probably shapes reading habits more than “education.” How can people not have enough free time to read in a world where, between work and recreation, the average Canadian spends 5.5 hours every day looking at a screen?

How Do You Measure Reading?

Kids naturally spend way less time on screens (they don’t have jobs), and I’m sure unpacking the data surrounding screen times would paint different pictures for different demographics, but the thrust remains: people spend a lot of free time on screens that could be spent in other ways. If books were as addictive and omnipresent as social media, I’m sure people wound find more time for reading them.

Nila makes the point that it’s difficult to measure how a society reads. How do you gauge it, exactly? What metric do you use? English books sales? Book fair attendance?

Reading is such a personal, esoteric thing that defies easy quantification. Measuring sales isn’t the same as measuring reading. If a person buys a book they never open, that will register in economic data about book sales, but if a person borrows a book that changes their life, that won’t show up in any stats. Two of my favourite books I paid $1 each for, one from a book sale at my local bank (Barney’s Version), the other at an antiquarian book store’s closing sale (Divided Soul: The Life of Gogol).

All I know is that reading is rightfully and universally considered one of the most beautiful, important things a person can do. Whatever the book. “Critical thinking” is supposedly universally valued too, so it’s funny to have to defend the very idea of reading, or a certain type of reading.

Everybody knows reading to children is crucial to their development and can only be a great thing to do. I get why reading is “privileged” as you get older and responsibilities grow, but reading doesn’t stop being wonderful. If it’s a privilege, it’s certainly not a hollow or bad one. May we all enjoy such privilege in life!

It’s hard not to think that if Big Business profited from people reading voraciously, reading would be talked about and marketed in a way it currently isn’t. Today, luxury consists of comfortable travel to posh places, exclusive gourmet dining, couture or designer clothes, luxury cars. People are supposed to aspire to these things, and be seen consuming them, if not in real life then on social media.

There are even lesser tiers of expensive things marketed as less hollow “lifestyle” products that people “deserve” because they’re “worth it.” Skin creams, spa treatments, branded accessories, premium home goods. You know.

My cherished copies of Nila’s wonderful books and her husband T’s debut fiction.

Everybody deserves to read, too, but that’s seldom on these lists! Read widely, not just the latest best sellers, which sometimes are promoted. Reading is pushed as something you do on a beach vacation—you get the free time to read, but only after paying for flights and hotels. In a money hungry world, the only real currency there is or ever will be is time.

“Performative Reading”

I don’t know how saturated in online discourse you need to be to have encountered the term “performative reading,” but apparently that’s when a person goes to a bar, coffee shop, public transit or any public place and reads a book they want to be seen reading, supposedly to signal what kind of person they are or aspire to be.

I hate this notion for several reasons.

First, on a basic level, fuck off. That argument alone is enough for me. People can do what they want without concealing themselves at home. It’s absurd to think otherwise. I don’t want to live in a world that automaticaly attaches that kind of hollow consumer subtext to every human behaviour and activity.

But even to play that game, isn’t signalling who you are by your consumption patterns supposedly the entire basis of our society? People work for years to afford a certain kind home, a certain kind of car, certain kinds of clothes, and that’s fine, but…reading a book in public somehow crosses a line?

Again, it’s hard not to notice that we accept or even praise consumption patterns that benefit industry, and mock what don’t. Hopefully I’m having a one-sided argument aloud with myself here (I do that sometimes), and we all agree the idea of “performative reading” is not real or that it’s dumb. That’d be lovely.

Nila concludes that Indians read in ways that suit them, given the economic conditions they live under. I’m sure she’d agree that if reading is a privilege, it’s one we should all enjoy and be given space to enjoy. Those of the reading class shouldn’t judge reading cultures for being dumb unsophisticated philistines because maybe they haven’t read the Canon, just like those in reading cultures shouldn’t judge those in the reading class for being snobs or dorks with too much spare time on their hands.

All reading is good and we all need to chill out, judge less and read more.