The Commitment

Why reading a book a week is a practice worth maintaining

- Esha Mahajan

I was the one who hid a novel inside a science textbook before an exam, who chose books as presents after painful teeth extractions, and had them confiscated during random bag checks at school. As if anything I learned in a geography class would compare to what I got from reading. Solace. Belonging. Adventure. Inspired by characters I met early on, in Enid Blytons and the Sweet Valley series, I set up a lemonade stall outside my home in junior school— my first lesson in entrepreneurship. Empowered by young prodigious detectives like The Secret Seven and The Five Find-Outers, I taught myself how to lift fingerprints and pick a lock. Transported by my grandfather’s notes in the margins of a tattered copy of The Godfather, I discovered why films will never compare to the words on a page. And why, no matter how fantastic an actor Al Pacino may be, he was never quite the Michael Corleone I imagined. In books I found my bliss. In long-forgotten cupboards at home as a teenager, my family’s entire reading history was in my hands— my mother’s The Catcher in the Rye, from her time as a student of English literature; Archie comics stacked in my cousin’s room, my dad’s Richie Rich collection in a carton somewhere else. Genres ceased to exist.