Why we need Popular Fiction?
Let me begin with a disclaimer. I am no saint and I have done enough trash talk about popular fiction writers (Yes, Remember CBag?). Since I was forced to introspect more these days, I came out with this rather unpopular opinion about popular fiction, which is entirely based on my experience. Also, I am limiting my monologue to popular fiction in English.
Imagine you come from an uneducated family with limited resources. What are the chances that you will turn into a voracious reader? Not much, I believe. My case was similar. But I was fortunate to have members in my family who loved regional literature. As an introvert, who was averse to any sort of physical activity, I found my happy place amidst the limited number of books we had at our home. I read whatever I could lay my hands on - including the papers in which groceries were wrapped up, academic books, porn which I didn't quite understand at that time, tickling romance novellas in the weekly magazines and the most celebrated novels in my mother tongue. I was quite egalitarian in that way. I believe that is how a reader is born -a desire to stay away from others, love for stories, no pre-conceived notion about what is good and bad and the constant search for the next favourite book.
My paternal uncle, seeing my love for books got me enrolled in the nearest library, which again had limited resources. I was able to finish off the books in no time. The School library was also not much of use. I read, re-read the stories in my school books, which were stripped out of some famous novels and which in turn had lost context and meaning. Sometimes I was able to convince my parents to buy me books by telling them that my teachers asked us to read the complete novels. This was all in my mother tongue. In my mind, English literature was not meant for someone like me. Coming to think of it, I would have picked up books in English if they were lying around me like the other books. But that was not the case and nobody at home was educated enough to read in English. So other than a couple of picture books of Alice in Wonderland and Tom Sawyer I found in the neighbourhood library, I remained oblivious to the charms of English Literature until my late teens.
It is not a pleasant experience to look back at my seventeen-year-old self. Other than the depression induced sleeping, the only vivid memory of those initial years in living away from home is curling up with a book in my hostel bed. By then I was comfortable enough with English as a medium of instruction in academics. But I never thought I would read English like the way I adore my mother tongue. None of my peers had any interest in my mother tongue and so I was left without a choice. I picked up whatever was available with my hostel mates. Most of the time it meant trashy books. I don't remember the first book I read during that period, but I read a lot of books by Dan Brown and Robin Cook. If it was not for Dan Brown, I would have been shy of picking up English books for many more years thinking that they are way out of my league.
The Da Vinci Code, Digital Fortress, Angels and Demons - They pushed me to a new world and I was ready to start exploring. Slowly and steadily I moved on to the more refined books. It started with Little Women and then there was this whole bunch of Harry Potter fans at the hostel who got me hooked to that series. Since everybody was fighting for the Harry Potter books, I also started with a marathon of Paulo Coelho books and it was the most accessible literature then. Then around the final year of college, there was a couple of Chetan Bhagat books. It was cheap, easily available and one could finish that off in one day. That was all a broke college student could afford in those days.
Life was depressing in the final year of college. I didn't see any prospects for me after college. I didn't get any job offers and higher education was never even a choice. I tried to bury myself in books because the worlds that they opened up for me felt much more comforting than my real life. One time when all of us were visiting a friend's home, I found this worn copy of A Letter From Peking By Pearl.S.Buck. I spent the entire time during that trip reading so that I don't have to leave it midway. It was my first encounter with a book where I felt seen, heard and understood. Even though I didn't realize it at that time, the quest for the next favourite book has always been for finding places where I belong. And the quest continues.
The point of this long rant is that my seventeen-year-old self would never have had the self-confidence to pick up a book by authors I adore now. I wouldn't have understood their stories if not for the popular books that got me hooked into reading in the first place. It had to be started in a small and comfortable space and that is what these popular books offer to the likes of me. I am forever grateful for finding such books at the right time.
