The Reading List - Sara Nisha Adams - ★.½

AUTHOR: Sara Nisha Adams

GENRE: Contemporary Fiction.

RATING: 1.5 stars.

In a Nutshell: Didn’t expect much, didn’t get much. Should have loved the ode to books, reading, and libraries, but the paper-thin character detailing and the lack of overall structure and sense in the plot didn’t work in favour of my reading experience. Plus, there were errors in the references it makes to the classics – so disappointing.

Plot Preview:

Seventeen-year-old Aleisha lives a frustrating life taking care of her mentally ill mother Leilah and working part-time in the local library while her elder brother works all hours to take care of the family. Aleisha dislikes books, but when she comes upon a reading list, she decides to alleviate her boredom and check out the first book on the list.

Widower Mukesh Patel has been living alone after the death of his beloved wife Naina. His three daughters check in on him from time to time, but there is no one to understand him and speak to him the way Naina did. As she was an avid reader, Mukesh decides to read a novel, just to see why Naina was so fascinated by reading.

The above two characters thus begin a new journey through books, and when they stumble into each other, also develop a new friendship that connects over books despite the age gap.

The story comes to us in the third person perspective of various characters, though the prime narrative viewpoint is that of Mukesh and Aleisha.

Bookish Yays:

😍 The fondness this novel generates for reading and local libraries. It brings out how people can bond and heal over a shared love for books, and also how different readers experience the same book differently.

😍 Great Indian rep. Or perhaps I should say, great Gujarati rep. India is so diverse that each of our regional subcultures has a distinct vibe. This novel represents well the food, culture, and beliefs of the Gujarati people from Western India. (There are teeny stereotypes, but on the whole, this is among the least stereotypical novels I have read by an author from the Indian diaspora, so I’ll ignore those clichés so as to add a Yay.)

Bookish Mixed Bags:

😐 For a debut novel, the writing is remarkable restrained in the themes it covers. Rather than going overboard with a list of issues, the author sticks to the power of books in healing and bringing people together. However, this also turns out to be a shortcoming too. The whole book feels repetitive as we explore barely anything outside of mental health themes such as depression, loneliness, frustration, teen angst, and so on.

😐 The core plot idea is good, but the writing style is heavily melodramatic, especially in the dialogues. The first half is almost like a soap opera, with the way all characters overreact at the tiniest of things.

Bookish Nays:

😤 The ‘reading list’ discovered by the characters in this novel contains eight names, most of which deserve to be in a must-read list. For a couple of these books (‘The Kite Runner’, and ‘Little Women’), the novel does justice. However, I was really disappointed with how it misrepresents a novel (repeatedly calling ‘Rebecca’ as a horror story with an actual ghost - It is not!), gets the age of a fictional character wrong (Boo Radley was just 33 in ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’, not at all an old man as this novel calls him multiple times), and gets character detailing entirely wrong (Mr. Bennet was far from stern in ‘Pride and Prejudice’, and Lydia was clearly the worst behaved daughter, not Kitty. Don’t even get me started on her interpretation of Elizabeth and Darcy’s behaviour!) I began to question if the author has even read the original works, or maybe she read them ages ago and decided to rely on her memory instead of revisiting them.

(On an aside, it would be better if you have already read the eight novels. I haven’t read ‘A Suitable Boy’ and ‘Beloved’, so my experiences in the chapters connected to these two novels were least remarkable. The eighth book is ‘Life of Pi’, for which you could even watch the movie. Oh, and just in case you dislike spoilers, know that there are major spoilers about these eight books in this novel.)

😤 On a related note, how does that reading list magically spring up here, there and everywhere in London without ever going ignored or discarded as rubbish? And at the end, even make its way to the right intended recipient? And never does it reach a person who simply rolls their eyes at the thought of reading and puts the list back in place? So farfetched!

😤 Flat character development, with no exceptions. We see only Mukesh’s life in detail, right down to his Indianisms. But even this extensive look doesn’t make Mukesh a relatable character. His behaviour is a study of contradictions in thoughts as well as actions. (That said, a conservative Indian grandpa would know the meaning of the word ’smut’ when he isn’t even a reader and doesn’t even have family members who read smut? Highly unlikely! Even I didn’t know what ‘smut’ meant until a few years ago!) Aleisha’s family dysfunction is written at just a superficial level, with no explanation of what her mother suffers from or why her brother Aidan seems so lost in his work. What do we even know about Aidan by the end of the book though he is such a key character? The remaining characters come on page only to the extent they are needed and barely get any development.

😤 The pacing – slow in the first half and dragged in the second half. This is the kind of novel where you keep on reading and reading and reading, only to see the percentage indicator on your Kindle move up by 1-3% after a marathon session.

😤 There are interspersed flashbacks from the perspectives of characters who aren’t a part of the main plot but whose lives are affected by that mysterious reading list. This adds only confusion as those characters have no bearing on the main proceedings, and the brief glimpse into their lives is nothing but a distraction. We do get to see why they are mentioned, but this is only near the end, and all that build-up is just a waste of page space.

😤 The ending is preposterous and forcefully contrived to create a HEA, which generates more questions than provides answers. I can see why many readers will love the joyous finale, but if the ending doesn’t spring logically from the events of the book, it is not a happy ending but an unrealistic OTT ending. For such a story, things can’t be tied so neatly with a ribbon on top!

😤 Why mention ‘Save Our Libraries’ at random points throughout the book, and use it only in one event at the end? An event that is so basic that I can’t believe none of the library staff thought of it! Most of the book has hardly anything about the struggles libraries face today, and the “saving” event was just idiotic, sorry.

As a few of my friends had already warned me not to expect much, this book ended up on the average level. I might have been even more disappointed otherwise. I loved the ode to books, but I wish the content had been more memorable in its execution. For a debut work, this book functions decently, but by leaving many things unsaid, it doesn’t fulfil the potential it showed. This is a case of ’great idea, poor execution.’

As the other reviews will tell you, I am very much the outlier in my rating. I still appreciate the way it advocates books in a world with increasing non-book distractions, so even if you dislike the book, you might enjoy its message about reading and about libraries. Other than this, the book was a big fat dud for me. I would have DNFed this had it not been the BOTM in my book group. (And our very last BOTM too – what a sad way for our journey to end!)

I must mention that all my friends who heard this on audio loved it, while those of us who read it were disappointed. So it is quite possible that the multi-cast audiobook enhances the story, but to the best of my abilities, I can’t see how it can turn a below-par experience into a winner.

I have read this author’s second novel, ‘The Twilight Garden’, which was a much better experience, though still not a perfect one. But as it was a vast improvement over this book, I can hope that she hones her writing even more by the time the third novel is ready.

‘The Reading List’, however, is not gonna be recommended by me.