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The Hindu
16-07-2025
- General
- The Hindu
Books without Borders
Published : Jul 16, 2025 19:45 IST - 6 MINS READ Dear reader, Mayyil in Kerala's Kannur district is my favourite place for many reasons—and if you're expecting beaches or backwaters, you will be gently disappointed. It's my favourite because this tiny local panchayat has 35 public libraries. It's startling to see a community with around 20 schools and 20 temples have almost double the number of libraries: which is either a testament to Kerala's commitment to literacy or proof that the people have collectively decided that books are more reliable than Gods when it comes to life advice. My first visit in 2019 felt like coming home to a memory I hadn't known I had—a biblio-sojourn in the truest sense, where on every bend of the dusty road there stood a library, not a café, not a mall, not another temple. I wondered how many communities could claim such a density of literary sanctuary, then discovered that Kerala—with about 8,500 public libraries—is second only to Maharashtra in raw numbers, but leads the nation at approximately 23.4 libraries per 1,00,000 people. The unseen hand behind this proliferation is the Kerala State Library Council, which has apparently been more successful at empire-building than most actual empires. I visited Mayyil's Velam Vayanashala (library in Malayalam) a few years later. The library had invited me to speak on an oddly beautiful occasion. Pusthaka-kani, as they called it, is modelled on the traditional Vishukani (an arrangement of auspicious items such as an idol of Krishna, a mirror, golden shower flowers, cucumber, and viewed at dawn on Vishu, the Malayalam New Year, to ensure prosperity.) But in this library, the kani (or view) was that of books, neatly arranged. That's how they welcomed the New Year. Standing that morning in the gentle hush that only libraries can create, I told them of a book I had just read: Susan Orlean's 2018 work The Library Book, which is about the devastating fire that gutted the Los Angeles Public Library in 1986. 'I grew up in libraries, or at least it feels that way…The library might have been the first place I was ever given autonomy,' writes Susan Orlean in the book, which is an elegy doubling as an ode to belonging—the kind of belonging that asks for no passport, no ideology, only the willingness to get lost in another's words. And that sense of belonging is something that, as Velam's library members showed me, goes beyond religion, caste, or class. I don't know if any institution has such powers in our world. Libraries act like wayward trains, delivering travellers to destinations they didn't know they were seeking. The sheer feeling of serendipity is thrilling. In those small village libraries, whether it was the Kuzhikkattussery Grameena Vayanasala or the Aloor Grama Panchayat Library, the two libraries that powered my childhood, I had discovered in them, by accident or divine intervention, books I never imagined existed. I'd come expecting comfort; I found astonishment. The kind that makes you believe in benevolent universe conspiracies—the way a random book falls off a shelf just when you need its particular brand of wisdom, or how you stumble upon exactly the right metaphor for your existential crisis hiding between cookbooks and poetry collections. In those early pages of our library addiction, didn't we all feel we had unearthed old therapy salons? Places where readers arrived seeking only knowledge or a pastime, but found something more therapeutic than actual therapy and at a cheaper rate. We like-minded souls drunk on words and stories sat close, mostly silent, connected by grief or laughter at the trials of Raskolnikov (who really needed better life coaches), Tess (who deserved better than Hardy's relentless doom), Quentin Compson (whose stream-of-consciousness was more coherent than most Reddit feeds), Meursault (the original emotionally unavailable protagonist), and Okonkwo (whose story hits differently when you're navigating your own cultural dislocations). There were times when a turning page carried the weight of collective tears, and we would emerge, replenished, ready to meet the mundane again with something approaching grace. We didn't need a psychologist—just a shelf, a chair, and that unspoken fellowship of readers who understood that sometimes the best conversations happen in complete silence. Eric Klinenberg wrote in Palaces for the People that libraries are a social infrastructure, the connective tissue of resilient democracies. In their soft light, strangers become neighbours not through forced small talk but through the gentle recognition that we are all just trying to figure out the business of being human. Immigrants find voices; the unemployed find career choices; senior citizens grasp at companionship; teenagers meet alter egos who mirror their confusion, and realise they're not uniquely broken. The history of libraries is a saga that stretches from clay tablets in Mesopotamia to dusty scrolls in Alexandria (history's greatest literary tragedy), from fluorescent-lit reading rooms in 20th-century Carnegie libraries to today's digital archives. Andrew Pettegree and Arthur der Weduwen chronicle this in The Library: A Fragile History, asking us to see libraries not as static institutions but living organisms: moulded by power, censorship, and the changing media of their times. Libraries today teeter under pressures we once thought unimaginable. Across the globe, funding for public libraries is waning. In the US, a Trump administration order to eliminate the Institute of Museum and Library Services—responsible for about $300 million in grants for libraries and museums. In India, Maharashtra alone has seen at least 1,000 public libraries shut down in the past three years. Community libraries need a continuous feed of resources, community trust, and institutional goodwill. If the funding fails, the aisles will go dark, the story hours will cease, the teenagers will drift elsewhere, and those shared moments will vanish like clouds, leaving behind only the hollow echo of what democracy sounds like when it's dying. But a current of human determination and gentle rebellion makes you believe that some people will always refuse to let good things die. This example, too, comes from Trump's America. In New York City, when Mayor Eric Adams proposed a $58 million budget cut to the public library in 2024, authors, celebrities, neighbours, and strangers organised campaigns that restored many services. Similar to what civil society participation and the Library Council's support still do for the many libraries in Mayyil. If ever you find yourself there—or in any other town or village you visit—pay attention to the hush. Follow it like a curious cat. Turn the corner. There, under a low canopy of books, you may discover what I found: home. And with it, an entire world waiting for you, page by page, question by question, revelation by revelation, in the most democratic spaces that humanity has ever created. I was reminded of Mayyil and those many other libraries I have visited when I read this lovely photo essay by Nabeel Ahmad about how three community libraries are making a difference in Delhi, a city where I worked for nearly a decade but missed the libraries of my Kerala childhood. Delhi's libraries were all elite, access dictated by privilege and metal detectors, and I hated them, yearning for the little open spaces of the community library. Which is why I felt so happy and at home when I saw this photo essay. Do read the piece, and if you are in Delhi, pay a visit. If you are not in Delhi, check out your local libraries and tell us about them. Wishing you a lovely week ahead, Jinoy Jose P. Digital Editor, Frontline We hope you've been enjoying our newsletters featuring a selection of articles that we believe will be of interest to a cross-section of our readers. Tell us if you like what you read. And also, what you don't like! Mail us at frontline@
Straits Times
05-07-2025
- General
- Straits Times
TBR (To Be Read): Books about bookshops seem to have lost their bite
Sign up now: Get ST's newsletters delivered to your inbox (From left) Days At The Morisaki Bookshop by Satoshi Yagisawa, The Library Book by Susan Orlean and Umberto Eco's 1980 debut, The Name Of The Rose. SINGAPORE – Book-lined spaces are the closest analogues to temples in a secular context. Especially when one is a bookworm. Throughout my reading life, there have been favourite book-lined spaces, beginning with the old red-brick National Library building in Stamford Road and the similarly red-hued MPH Bookstores across from it, to the floral-scented hush of London's Hatchards bookshop and the bad gym stink of the old Forbidden Planet bookstore in Tottenham Court Road.
New York Times
15-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Ed Helms Read ‘Moby-Dick' on His Phone. On the New York Subway.
In an email interview, the actor ('The Office') explained why working in comedy drew him to exploring big mistakes, in a podcast that led to the book. SCOTT HELLER What books are on your night stand? 'The History of Sound,' by Ben Shattuck, and 'The Library Book,' by Susan Orlean. How do you organize your books? I don't. Books migrate between dignified shelves, unruly coffee tables and chaotic piles that sprout around my office like mushrooms. Describe your ideal reading experience (when, where, what, how). This might sound strange, but one of my favorite reading experiences was standing on the New York City subway, clinging to a pole with one hand and reading 'Moby-Dick' on my phone with the other. Sometimes I was so engrossed I'd get off the train and just plop down on a bench to finish a chapter. But honestly, nothing beats reading aloud to my kids in our little reading nook at home. What's the last great book you read? I've read a lot of good books, but the last truly great book I read was 'The Overstory,' by Richard Powers. What books are you embarrassed not to have read yet? 'Anna Karenina,' by Tolstoy. In my defense, someone gave me a Russian-language edition and I literally can't read it. Disappointing, overrated, just not good: What book did you feel as if you were supposed to like, and didn't? 'A Walk in the Woods,' by Bill Bryson. I signed up for soulful reflections on a grueling 2,000-mile trek along the Appalachian Trail. What I got were some chipper musings about a leisurely stroll to a diner. Bryson is hilarious, but I still felt betrayed. Who is your favorite fictional hero or heroine? The Lorax. Were you a 'Captain Underpants' fan before playing the title role in the movie version? I was only dimly aware of the series before I signed on, but I immediately fell in love with its anarchic spirit. There's a wonderful undercurrent of pure childhood mischief in those books. What's your favorite book no one else has heard of? 'Longitude,' by Dava Sobel. It's a gripping, soulful history of the race to determine one's longitude at sea, which, I promise, is way more exciting than it sounds. In 'Snafu,' you ask readers to think of you as their 'unofficial history teacher.' Is there one who made a difference to you? My brother is a middle school history teacher, and one of the smartest, funniest people I know. He's my go-to for fact-checking and/or spirited debates. What is it about your personality that makes you fascinated by foul-ups? I think because comedy is rooted in pain and suffering, I've spent my whole life instinctively tuning in to moments when things go wrong. At this point, it's not so much a fascination as it is a reflex. Who's the most foolish figure unearthed in the research for the book, and why? One strong contender is the U.S. military engineer who, during the Cold War, proposed nuking the moon just to show the Soviets how tough we were. Not land on it. Not colonize it. Just … detonate it. The most heroic? Jimmy Carter. In 1952, long before he became president, he helped lead a dangerous cleanup of a partial nuclear meltdown at Canada's Chalk River reactor. He and his men risked their lives to contain the disaster, a quiet act of heroism that almost no one talks about today. Is there a recent event that seems likely to make it into a sequel to this book? DOGE. Have you ever gotten in trouble for reading a book? In fifth grade, I got caught carting around 'The Joy of Sex' at school. It made me wildly popular with my friends and significantly less popular with my teachers and parents. What's the last book you recommended to a member of your family? A.D.H.D. has touched my life in a lot of ways, so I've recommended 'Scattered Minds,' by Gabor Maté, to friends and family who've been curious about it. It's a moving, compassionate window into what living with A.D.H.D. actually feels like. What's the most interesting thing you learned from a book recently? In David Byrne's 'How Music Works,' I learned how profoundly music is shaped by the spaces it's performed in. Cathedrals, dive bars, stadiums: They don't just host music, they transform how we experience it. As a musician, this was a thrilling revelation, something I'd always felt on some level but had never consciously reflected on before. 'Humanity has demonstrated an uncanny ability to bounce back' from snafus, you write. Still feeling that way? Yes. But to your point, we also have a nasty habit of bouncing backward just as quickly. Sadly, human progress is not a straight line. It's more like a cosmic game of Chutes and Ladders. You're organizing a literary dinner party. Which three writers, dead or alive, do you invite? Oscar Wilde, Marcus Aurelius and Anne Lamott. That should make for a good mix of profound insight and hard laughs.
