On avid readers and voracious reading

Who is a reader?

The Cambridge dictionary defines a "reader" as someone who reads for pleasure, as someone who reads voraciously. I agree with this definition. In my mind, a reader is someone who reads whatever happens to cross her eyes, it may even be an advertisement or a junk article in a scrap of newspaper in which a parcel or some salted moongphali came wrapped in. A reader seeks out something to read; he begs, borrows, downloads, buys, steals books and other reading material. For him, reading is compulsive behaviour. On being asked if there are books that qualify as "comfort read" for him, the Pulitzer-winning Dominican-American author Junot Díaz replied that he is an incorrigible reader, that reading itself "is the comfort". Perfect!

What makes a reader?

It is my partner S's hypothesis that teenage years are the deadline for a person becoming a reader. If a person is not a reader (in the sense defined above) by the time she is stepping out of her teenage years, then she will never turn into a reader; S contends. The person may become an expert in some domain and read everything there as part of her work, but she won't be a reader.

 I am not as confident as S, even though all avid readers I know started reading for pleasure in their teens or earlier. I am certain that an overwhelming majority of voracious readers start finding comfort in reading as children or as teenagers. But I have a sneaking suspicion that exceptions exist, even if I haven't come across them in my own life.

 It is easy to work out why almost all readers are "made" in childhood. Language itself is an unusual if not unique attribute of the human species; writing involves representing a human language in abstract notations called alphabets (and numbers); so reading involves translating the sequences of alphabets on the page to language to their meanings to their visual and auditory and other sensory imaginations. In contrast to reading, listening to music or seeing paintings or watching movies does not involve the step of translating alphabets to languages; in that sense, reading is perhaps the most abstract leisure activity. Looking only at abstract written symbols for a guide, a reader's imagination must create an entire world. As an adult, it is not easy to empathize with the difficult steps a child has to go through to learn to read. The child has to learn to correlate the symbols (letters) with sounds (or in case of pictographic scripts such as Chinese, correlate the symbols and numerous classifiers on top of it to the sounds and pictures they denote), then learn to understand and recognize the words, then sentences, and eventually, large collections of sentences. At some point along the journey to becoming a fluent reader, the child learns to recognize the whole word as a single element and to connect it to its meaning. Only when all these steps become second nature does the visual and auditory and other sensory imaginations triggered by what one has read become addictively enjoyable. Only then a word encompasses the world, only then the world becomes a canvass for words.

 I myself have no memory of learning to read. I have always been reading as far back as I can remember. I am not sure, but I think I learned to get a pictorial feel for printed words and their sounds and their meaning before I formally learned to decompose those words into the letters of Devanagari or Latin, the two scripts I was taught in school. Decomposing words into letters was easy, but I vaguely remember finding it harder to consciously combine separate letters into words. These memories would obviously vary from one individual to the next.

 I think that for many children, correlating written letters and words with their meaning does not become an instantaneous and instinctive activity. It remains a tedious chore, leaving no scope for the mind to soar in response to the written word. The reasons could be many: poor educational facilities, lack of nutrition as a result of poverty, something as basic as undiagnosed problems with sight or with hearing! Or it may just be one of those chance happenings—some kids never grow up into voracious readers despite being well-nourished and despite being taught by the best teachers in the finest schools.

 I never had any guidance on what to read. My father is unlettered, with no interest whatsoever in reading or in literature of any kind. My mother didn't have much education, but she was an autodidact who read whatever she could lay hands on. She had a rough homespun ideology that broadly amounted to wanting justice for all and an egalitarian society. We were very poor and life was hard. I know (though don't remember) that she read to me as a baby, but once I could read, she didn't have the mental bandwidth to supervise my reading. So I read everything and anything I could find, there was neither rhyme nor reason to my reading. Ironically, I never came across picture books or any other books that would qualify as children's literature. Marathi newspapers such as Navshakti, Loksatta, Sakaal; and English newspapers such as Times of India, Indian Express, Free Press journal—I read them end-to-end if and when I found them at some reading room or at my maternal grandparents' home or at any neighbour's place. I read magazines such as Lokprabha (Marathi), Manohar Kahaniyan (Hindi), Sportstar (English). I have vivid memories of some lurid adult stories I read in Manohar Kahaniyan! Simultaneously, I found and read several Marathi books by some chap called A. L. Bhagwat on spirituality and astrology and on various techniques to acquire powers to hypnotize people and make them follow one's wishes, and other stuff along those lines. To be fair, the author repeatedly emphasized that those were cheap low-key pursuits that one should not indulge in, and the real purpose was to be one with the supreme being, and that all spiritual activities should be directed towards that attainment. Maybe the author's warnings had the desired effect, for I never acquired any mind-controlling powers despite practicing some of those techniques for a while! I felt nostalgic while writing this, so I looked up and found that the author has long been dead, but those books are still very much in circulation, with covers far more garish than what I remember. 

 During my pre-teens and early teens, I gradually got into what is called literature. I borrowed two huge English books—one on Russian history and another on Dutch history—from a school senior staying in the same building. I remember narrating translations to my mother as I read those books. At some point, I landed on classics such as Catch-22 (English), Ranangan (Marathi), and David Copperfield (English), though most of my reading continued to be a serendipitous diet of pulp novels, short stories, poems, and essays of wildly fluctuating quality. Only in my early youth I started buying books of my own, and some discernment refined over all those years of reading guided my purchases.

 Details vary, but the few voracious readers I know went through analogous reading trajectories as children and as young adults. 

 Let's get back to the question we have been pondering. Can a grownup turn into a voracious reader? I don't think an adult leading what we call a normal life—earning a livelihood, raising a family—can suddenly develop a love for reading. But extraordinary circumstances may turn some people into readers and writers. I remember recently reading the story of Ehtesham Qutubuddin Siddiqui. Siddiqui spent two decades in jail, nine of them as an undertrial, and the remaining period as a death row convict in the 2006 Mumbai serial train blasts case, before being acquitted by the Bombay High Court on July 21, 2025. Siddiqui was a college dropout, and used to work as a Desktop Publishing operator at the time of his arrest. Awaiting execution in solitary confinement, Siddiqui filed nearly six thousand Right To Information petitions to gather evidence against the investigating agency and to challenge his conviction, and to access books published by the government press. He earned over twenty degrees, including several Master's, Bachelor's and Diplomas. Last year, he published a book, "Horror Saga", which details his prison life and the botched up trial. He has a manuscript ready for his next book. He also translated several books while being incarcerated.

 Would Siddiqui qualify as a reader? I think so. Prison life shaped and sculpted Siddiqui into a reader, writer, and thinker. He had to fight hard to access all the books and other reading material, reading and writing provided him both hope and solace during the darkest phase of his life, and I am certain he will remain a lifelong reader as well as a writer, thinker, and activist. The circumstances differ, but Siddiqui belongs to an illustrious lineage that includes underclass revolutionaries like Bhagat Singh and George Jackson.

 I also wonder: what about folks who learn to read and write only in adulthood? Does any of them become a voracious reader? None of the people I know personally fit these criteria. But I do know that Manoranjan Byapari—the Bengali writer, sociopolitical activist and politician—taught himself to read and write at the age of 24 while in prison. I do not know if he is a voracious reader, but given that he is a multiple award-winning author of twelve novels and over a hundred short stories and non-fiction essays, I believe he must be an avid reader. I can dig up more examples like Byapari's, but I am certain that the number will be statistically insignificant. This is more a commentary on the state of human society than on the ability of unlettered grownups to learn to enjoy reading and writing. For the overwhelming majority, our socioeconomic systems leave no scope for the body to rest, no space for the mind to wander. Can't expect them to soar in shackles.

 (Brief aside: in contrast to most readers being "made" in childhood, I have observed that a significant number of people turn into film buffs or into connoisseurs of music or paintings as adults. Exposure to these arts as a child may play an important role, but it does not seem to be critical. I feel this again has to do with how much of an abstract activity reading is, as compared to appreciating these art forms.)

 How is modern technology affecting reading habits? For example, what role are audio books playing? I don't really know. On the one hand, they feel like a piecemeal reincarnation of the olden days when only the handful of people who could read and write, would read and sometimes perform stories from mythology and history, for the rest of the masses. On the other hand, listening to audio books is a simpler activity as compared to reading; so it is possible that avid listeners of audio books may significantly outnumber avid readers. Even voracious readers may turn into avid listeners of audio books as their sights weaken with age and reading becomes stressful.

How many readers in a bunch of strangers? 

How are readers distributed in a population? In several decades of my life, I can count on my fingers the friends and acquaintances who would qualify as avid readers. For whatever reasons, readers are very rare. However, my experience is limited to India, and I wonder how it is in societies that are very different from India's.

 I wager that across the world, there is a higher proportion of readers among prisoners, especially among political prisoners, as compared to their proportion in the general population. It is no coincidence that the examples I could think of, of adults turning into readers and writers, involved prison life. Reading is a potent discipline for understanding how and why exploitative social structures endure. No wonder then that some of the exploited and incarcerated folks turn to reading. Granted, they do not start reading for comfort, but at some point, it provides them succour as well as pleasure.

 Conversely, an average reader has heightened awareness of her milieu as compared to the book-averse populace. She is more likely to perceive injustices and to fight them. There is a dialectic here—reading and political activism feed into each other. It should come as no surprise then that the more exploitative the system, the larger the list of books it chooses to ban. Such a system literally cannot afford readers.

 In contrast, a society moving towards egalitarianism would provide affordable universal good quality education. It seems obvious that this should significantly increase the proportion of readers in the population. Easy access to books would also have the same effect. 

 As compared to today's scenario, would a far larger proportion of humanity be readers if libraries were common across the world and access to books in those libraries free or very cheap? Do pockets of the world, the USA for example, with wide spread of good libraries and with cheap access to them for all people in their neighbourhoods have higher proportions of readers as compared to places like India which do not have a good spread of libraries? 

 It is said that the Scandinavian countries have a more relaxed work culture compared to almost any other country in the world. Do they also have higher proportions of readers as compared to the rest of the world endowed with good libraries? Apparently, a third of Icelanders read a book every day, so maybe that is indeed the case. Though I do not know if the combination of high literacy, good libraries, and relaxed work culture truly explains this observation—maybe Icelanders curl up with books simply because it is always cold outside, and climate change-induced heatwaves will change their reading culture for the worse? I also do not know how the Icelandic data compares with that for Finland or Sweden or Norway or Denmark. I could look it up, maybe some day I will, but I don't feel like doing it right now.

 When thinking about reading, we must also remember that even the oldest known scripts are barely few thousand years old, so abstract writing systems to represent language and arithmetic are very recent inventions on the timescale of human evolutionary history. And widespread education even in a few pockets of the world is a phenomenon barely a century or two old. Assuming humanity does not wipe itself out in a nuclear holocaust, and assuming that the massive restructuring of human societies necessitated by climate change does not reverse the trend towards universal education, how would the proportions of writers and readers in the human population evolve over the next few centuries? This will very much depend on, and in turn influence, how writing itself evolves, and how written works are preserved and propagated in the future.