Nothing but Russian Playboys

There’s no shortage of data about how people read on electronic devices, but we still need to know much more about than we do about the different ways people read printed books. In short bursts or long stints? On the bus, or in bed? In silence, or in the ambient thrum of a crowded coffee bar, or with the sound of somebody else’s television coming through the wall from the next apartment, or with some voice compounded of our own voice and the author’s pronouncing in our inner ear?

Pankaj Mishra spent much of his twenties reading for up to ten hours a day in a village in northern India – much the way Nathaniel Hawthorne spent much of his twenties reading for many hours a day in the northern United States. All that solitude left him – surprisingly, but not that surprisingly – unable to get “the knack of reading in public, among strangers.”

So while on holiday, he explains, he takes “a vacation from reading,” the better to spy on other people’s reading habits.

The practice calls forth his inner aphorist:

… the tyranny of the Booker shortlist is to be feared wherever middle-aged travelers from Britain congregate.

One Cuban beach, rimmed with resorts, was utterly book-free, a wasteland of Russian editions of Playboy and Cosmopolitan.

Certainly, we need a moratorium on Asian and African translations of Ayn Rand.

Lately, Mishra’s best reading has come from rereading the books he amassed at that house in the Himalayas, where he found that

… in their familiar arrangements of words, on pages rust-browned and corrugated by the damp of many monsoons, I could remember the excitement I felt on those first readings, and I could still make out odds and ends of myself as I was then.

• 13 December 2013