Book Review: A Book About Reading by Theresa Gauthier

 The Reading List by Sara Nisha Adams

    Books are one of the few things about which people habitually seek outside advice. People who won’t ask a close friend or family member anything else will ask for book recommendations. Most of us will also find it a natural enough thing to ask a stranger the same thing. Booksellers, reviewers, bloggers, TikTokers—all offer advice on what books are worth our time.

The Reading List by Sara Nisha Adams is a book that uses that exact idiosyncrasy as a way to explore how books impact the people who read them. I admit that upon picking up this particular tome, I imagined a far more light-hearted foray into the book world, but instead I got a book overflowing with emotions, relationships, and difficult topics—all pulled together by books.

The premise of the story follows several characters who each get a copy of the same reading list. The books (and the readers) are varied and dissimilar, but each one speaks to the readers in a different way and helps them through their own difficult times. 

One man, Mukesh, grieving the loss of his wife a year earlier, goes to the library his wife loved and—neither outgoing nor a reader—goes merely because he realized he still has a library book his wife never returned. First he reads it, then he decides he has to return it, but he’s so infatuated with the story that he wants to read more. He can’t recall any books his wife read. She only got them from the library and never bought any. He decides to ask the librarian.

His initial meeting with Aleisha, the young librarian—a girl who doesn’t care much for reading even though she does intend to go to law school—doesn’t go well. She’d rather not be there. She’s bored. She took the job because her brother said she should, but she doesn’t enjoy what she’s doing. 

Then, going through returned books—a task that yields lists, coupons, and other detritus—she finds a list of books. Feeling bad about how she treated the customer, she decides to read the books and recommend them if she likes them. A love of reading is awakened in her just as it has been in Mukesh. These two people who wouldn’t have met otherwise begin to look forward to seeing each, to discussing the books, and soon they’re friends.

Mukesh and Aleisha each do a lot of growing in these pages. 

Mukesh bonds with his granddaughter over his concern that she’s too solitary and his realization that without her grandmother there her books seem to be all she has. 

Aleisha discovers her own strength, her own intelligence, and her compassion as she deals with seemingly insurmountable problems in her life, and, with Mukesh’s help, finds a connection she might have missed otherwise.

Others in the community have gotten copies of the list. Copies of it appear in the most unusual places, and always help whoever they find. In the end, we do learn how that happens, but by then, the reader is wrapped up in this community, cheering, crying, hoping with all of them.

There’s a lot here to love, but I do think my favorite element is the way these reading lists travel through the community and elevate every life they touch. Also, the gradual awakening of the love of books and reading, and the idea that books can be by our sides as we move through life give me hope that even people who claim to hate reading might one day find the books that change their minds just as some of these characters did.