Books That Were A Challenge To Read: Endurance Training For My Mind

Room truly was a brutal experience to read. Fiction sanitised (to some extent) the actual case on which Room was based. The voice of the entrapped child keeps the book from becoming too graphic. I had some semblance of safety but it was far from an easy read. So why did I read it?

At the time, I was not able to explain why. A few months earlier, I had experienced an unethical therapist. Her advice to avoid everything triggering sounded unsustainable for me living and working in a world of media and stories. When I asked her how to navigate these, she shamed me and told me to ‘get over it because how long will you keep complaining’. This also coincided with the rise of keyboard warriors eager to gain their activist credentials by weaponising cancel culture. It made me mistrustful of popular (and generic, West-focussed) mental health discourse.

I don’t think avoiding triggers was ever the right advice for me. It is like telling someone who has been chained to never go near anything that reminds them of it. Necklaces? Walls? Closed windows? It’s ridiculous advice. I need to believe that healing is a possibility and that I take active part in it. In the absence of sensitive, personalised guidance on navigating with safety, I must build my own.

All these years later, I can understand this better. We deal with life’s most brutal happenings by trying to understand them. There aren’t any real answers but we do find comfort in narratives that help us cope. And who is to say what is the right sort of narrative for someone’s unique trauma?

I’m constantly seeking to redeem that which has decimated me. This is not because I feel some kind of spiritual obligation to absolve those who have hurt me. It’s because I don’t want to live in a world of monsters to fear. When I can see the weakness that is foundation to those who abuse, lie, cheat, violate and harm, then I can transcend fear and work towards protecting myself while still staying me.

Lolita was a way for me to do that. When I saw my abuser years later, all I felt was pity. And another book gave me context for why this was a healthy reaction.

I pushed myself through See What You Made Me Do: Power, Control and Domestic Violence by Jess Hill in 2020 while we braved the first lockdown.

Trying, trying hard to understand why men like to hurt women. Trying to make sense of the violence and microaggressions that were daily features of my life. Trying to make it all have some meaning before possibly this life was gone away forever.

I did not find answers…exactly. But that book has been endurance training for my mind. It helped me face the thought that human beings are easily capable of senseless violence & selfishness, that many choose hatred over the effort to be kind, loving or humane. Once I could hold that idea without flinching, it helped to navigate the world where this is reality.

As for books always having answers for me, they do. Because as The Hitch-hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy satirically notes, 42 is the answer to Life, The Universe and Everything. You need to understand your question first and sometimes that is the hard part.

Here’s a delightful idea floating around the Guide fanbase. In ASCII, the original language of computers, 42 is * (asterisk). The asterisk is a wildcard that stands for ‘anything that you want it to be’.

So the answer to all things is anything that you want it to be.  Human beings are rarely so gentle & fun. 😄

One day before the discussion, I bought the book. And I sat down in the bookshop itself and read and read. I finished the book around 10 hours before the discussion. This is not my favorite way to read a book, with no time for reflection. But exercising the conscious self is about doing new things.

Never Let Me Go is primarily a story of three friends with the attendant flimsiness that most human relationships entail. The pettiness of motivations, the ambiguity of affections, the prosaic nature of things that we want to amplify into great poetry.

Kazuo Ishiguro makes a bold choice of not giving us a single likeable character. What he does is present an idea for us to champion. Maybe that’s too amorphous for the human mind to sustain through the length of a book without anyone to peg our loyalties on.

This characters are decidedly difficult to attach to. A victim who doesn’t perform victimhood in a way that eases the reader’s saviour complex. A villain who is victim of their circumstances. Empathising with her means aligning with the idea presented as villainy. And a narrator who is weak-willed, smarmy and narcissistic in equal measure.

First person accounts are invariably like these. We see ourselves with far greater nuance than we see other people. We know how close our decision calls are and how much of life choices are sheer randomness. Simultaneously we see others from the outside, performing stories that make it easy for us to project tidy labels onto. Strength. Love. Kindness. Courage.

The discussion was unsettling. This is an unsettling book. Perhaps if I had read the book earlier, I would have had time to let these realisations simmer and felt more stable entering that discussion. Instead I found myself overrun by the violence of other people’s emotions. That incident in turn set off a chain of hostile reactions from various people in the group as well as renewed instances of aggression.

I’m rolling my eyes harder because of the notion that Gen Z invented feminist thought. Or that women in STEM fields are new and revolutionary. The first English science fiction author was a woman (Mary Shelley). The first computer programmer was a woman (Ada Lovelace). The World Wars were won in great part due to the code-breaking team of mathematicians who were, again, all women. Am I expecting too much for someone who claims to read, to have this perspective?

But to back up my opinion, let me bring up a comparable book to Lessons in Chemistry(modern, female author, hotly discussed in book clubs, algorithm darling).

Butter by Asako Yuzuki made my feminism jumpy like it was on hot bricks. It offered no easy answers. It raised uncomfortable questions of the self-confessed feminist protagonist asking herself where she was falling short. It was absolutely delicious because that’s what my ravening mind has been looking for.

C’est la vie. People read for different reasons.

I would not have picked up an Ocean Vuong book for so many reasons. I’ve learnt to give award-winning books a wide berth. They never live up to the hype that is needed to win said award. And then there comes the pressure to enjoy it in exactly the same way the powers-that-be have decreed it.

I read The Emperor of Gladness under duress. Coming on the heels of a hard month of familial illness and still reeling from the earlier bullying incident, I chose differently from my usual.

Was it a bad choice wrong? Not really.

This is an excruciating read, a kind of Chandni Bar of books where everything that can cause misery occurs one after another without a paragraph of respite. Mental illness, suicide attempts, dementia, poverty, racism, discrimination.

“But these things happen to people!”

I am told when I express this view on endless suffering sagas. No, that is not what life is like, I say. Humanity is about finding moments of respite and breathing from pain, even if they have to be eked out or imagined. Relentless self-flagellation feels manipulative. It feels like I am not allowed to say no without being called cold, delusional, overprivileged or shallow.

Ocean Vuong talks about the fear of sincerity in young people. And in that, there is a touching sincerity. It also makes me see James as being vindictive in tone, rather than sincere. I must respect sincerity even if it shows up as unbearable (to me) pathos. So yes, making a choice to explore sometimes means facing painful disappointment, the way this book did for me.

I have been thinking and writing a lot about boundaries of late. I don’t want my boundaries to become fortresses. So I’m going to think of this book as the cost of pushing my boundaries.

This Instagram post came up on my feed with happy serendipity. It doesn’t offer a solution but it does tell me that something is wrong, rather than I am wrong. I don’t know if I want to attribute this behaviour to a particular generation or blame it on social media.

The disappointment was an incisive teacher, making me examine my assumptions and needs. Nobody stood up for me in the bullying situations. Strangers approached me in secret to say that they agreed with me and then stayed quiet as the harassment continued. Friends were dismissive, indifferent or told me to edit myself. Excruciating.

I am coming to believe that human nature has always been this way. There will always be the ones that choose comfort over courage or mob violence over solitary hardship. They will always be the greater numbers.

It is also possible that we all play different roles through our lives in each of these choices that keep coming at us. But I function on the premise that people don’t really change that much and it just gets harder to do so the older they get.