Summer reading

As the summer flows in full swing, newspapers and weekend magazines are discussing which new local eateries to dine at, which mangoes are the best this year, and what new recipes to create at home. There are pages dedicated to new fashion trends and on who is wearing what. Curiously, what is missing from our newspapers is what to read over the summer. Summer reading lists, curated by editors and book reviewers, are fairly common in newspapers around the world; and while a newspaper or two in Pakistan may have a review of a book every now and then, there is no dedicated space for regular reviews or books to read over summer. The problem is bad enough in the English dailies but particularly acute in Urdu newspapers where I have never read a serious review of a book of new fiction or non-fiction.

The rapid decline of our reading culture is a topic that continues to bother many of us. Recently, a friend, someone who has a rich engagement with literature and is a well-recognised author himself, compared the literary culture of Europe to that of our society. His comment made me think of my own experience, not just in literary centers such as Europe (or Asia for that matter) but even in smaller countries like Norway or Serbia where publishers produce five times more books than Pakistan, despite having 1/40^th of our population. Here, a reminder that published books in Pakistan include self-help books, reprints, religious books and text books, which is the largest category of published books in the country.

From the supply side, many valid reasons are discussed such as the high price of paper which needs to be imported to trade with India. But it would be wrong to pin the entire blame on the supply side of the equation. The demand side is just as problematic. As I discussed the summer homework for children with friends and relatives, there was little in the way of reading. Nearly all of it was repetitive academic work. There was no expectation that the students would read broadly outside their curriculum. While I am fully aware of the challenges of access with few libraries and high cost of books, the argument about access fails to materialise for children in private schools who pay hefty tuition fees. Schools with deep pockets can, and should, purchase books for students and make them available for reading. The demand side also suffers from lack of demand creation. There is rarely any discussion of a new book in the newspapers, and I cannot remember the last time an author was invited to talk about his or her book on a television program. The demand side also suffers from lack of diversity in available books, particularly in Urdu. While fiction remains, and should always be, a major thrust of the reading culture, the genre of creative non-fiction is almost absent in Urdu, with the exception of travelogues. There are few, if any, non-fiction books that use creative non-fiction or storytelling techniques with a focus on history, science, nature, environment or important social issues of our time.

Finally, the engagement of students in colleges and universities with books has also taken a big hit thanks to HEC’s over bureaucratisation of curricula. Our university students read, if at all, not because it is important for the mind or the soul, but because it is in the curriculum designed to get a degree. The reliance is instead on summaries and notes, rather than the actual text. The STEM students, in particular, do not think reading is for them. This results in indoctrination, a decline in understanding the complexity of the world, and a lack of tolerance. The trend is not going to end well. We may not have reached the tipping point, but it may not be far. So, what should be on our summer reading list? Hopefully anything bound with actual paper between the binding and certainly not the WhatsApp texts that have been forwarded many times.

Published in The Express Tribune, July 19^th, 2022.

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