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The answer is yes, to an extent. Because before everything else, I am a reader. I have been since the age of four. For more than a decade now, I have kept a reading journal. Not the usual journal where I document what I read and when.
I like tracing a book’s journey. Finding its siblings, its cousins. Sometimes, when I fall in love, I create their family tree.
In my journal, I note down the lines, the scenes, the people, the places that stay with me. Like how a partition story by Urvashi Butalia made me see leaving home in a different light. Or how The Lowland answered a question I had buried somewhere inside me, one that gnawed on lonely nights.
No, I don’t remember everything. But writing things down helps me hold on to the essence of the books. Which is why, when I work with authors as a beta reader or mentor, I often find myself saying, “There is a book you might want to look at for this.” My feedback is never only about what is not working. It is also about what can be done to make it work.
And then there are obsessions. I still remember spending months looking for a book with a Kolkata yellow taxi on the cover. This was before Instagram, when finding a book meant asking friends, haunting secondhand shops, and waiting for luck. I carried that search like a secret. When a friend finally found it for me, it felt like holding the city in my hands. Some habits, some loves, never quite leave you.
There was also the time I hunted down a slim volume of poems simply because of one line I had once copied into my notebook and could not forget. I didn’t know the poet’s name, only the way the line had made me stop, mid-breath. It took years before the book found me, tucked away in a dusty corner of a library sale. The joy of recognition was like meeting an old friend whose face you had been trying to sketch from memory.
So, to answer that question again. Maybe I have not read every single book, cover to cover. But I know what they are about. Sometimes through a review. Sometimes through a podcast. Sometimes through a passing mention in an interview. Enough to hear their whispers. Books for me have always been more than books. They are journeys. They are hauntings. They are conversations that stay long after the last page is turned.