tales of Suchita

So any bookish post must begin with me showing off how many books I have finished reading and I’m happy to report I’m sitting at a comfortable 36 – that is 6 books more than my target and it makes me so damn proud that I’m reading again, like I used to a few years back.

One of my favourite comments on my books read has been: you read very different genres and it’s true! As long as a book blurb or a cover entice me, I will read the book. I can’t even say that number of pages is a deterrent because I can read 700+ page books too. A necessary superpower since fantasy is my favourite genre and most fantasy books are 400+ pages.

But if there’s one genre I find difficult to get into it would be nonfiction. And though I’m saying this, I have read two nonfiction books this year and I’m currently reading a third titled: Super Powers on the Shore by Sejal Mehta.

If I dive deeper into why these three specific nonfiction books took my fancy, it’s because two of them were first person accounts of their life stories and the third is about the sea, sea creatures and Bombay.

Which brings me, I think, to why reading nonfiction makes me restless. There is not much room for imagination I have found. Reading a nonfiction book is not like a movie running in my head. It is not really escapism – the one thing that fiction gives me. Though I don’t like to read more than one book at a time, I have found I have to read a fiction book side by side with a nonfiction book as a remedy to that restlessness.

Another thing which makes reading nonfiction difficult for me is there is no plot or a character to latch onto – again two things that fiction gives me.

Maybe I need to change the expectations I have with nonfiction books. After all, there is a reason they have their own category and are not put under fiction with a different sub-genre. Maybe it’s because fiction, even while portraying real things is still fiction. I can distance myself from painful realities. But I cannot do that with nonfiction.

Maybe.

How about you? Is there a genre you don’t usually read?

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