Jeffery Archer, with others like John Grisham and Dan Brown, brought back young people into reading English fiction. In order to understand the changing habits of youngsters with respect to popular culture, I usually do a survey among my students at the S P Jain Institute of Management and Research: What they read (fiction/ non-fiction); what they watch; what they listen to etc. What surprises me is the range of fiction books they read. Some of them mention Harry Potter to be the last fiction book they have read.
That aside, I see Dan Brown, Jeffrey Archer, John Grisham, Amitava Ghosh, Amish, Chetan Bhagat. I also see books like The Kite Runner, Kafka on the Shore; even some old classics like Animal Farm and Brothers Karmazov. In a class of 80, I often get at least 50 distinct names mentioned. Very few get multiple mentions.
I wonder — if someone had done a similar survey in the late 1970s or ’80s, would we have got such divergent choice of books? Remember the question is very specific: Which is the last fiction book you have read?
We keep hearing that the book reading habit is dying. Bookshops are shutting down. Physical books are on their way out. A lot of that is true. There is just a lot more content out there. In the form of social media posts and Insta reels. The fight for consumer attention has never been more fierce. It is only getting more intense with AI Slop ruling the waves.
The signs are everywhere. As a school student, in the 1970s, growing up in Chennai, I was a regular at all the local libraries — the Central Library, the British Council Library, etc. But my favourite was the Easwari Lending Library. It started as an old paper mart but became a library that kids and elders used to throng.
A few years ago I had the opportunity to spend some time at the very same library. It is now being run by the founder Palani’s son. They still have a great collection. And have multiple branches across Chennai including dedicated libraries in gated communities. But I was told that except for the weekends, they don’t have the kind of crowds they used to have a few decades ago. While they have several thousand members, most of them don’t visit too often. Even when they come, they don’t borrow too many books. One other interesting trivia that he shared was that with kids, there is often a reading wave. Some authors will trend for a few years. Only to fade away. Unlike the B School students we saw, school students seem to be reading fiction books in groups. So if you did the same survey among 80 school students in say Class 9 you may get only 10 titles as the last fiction book read.
Why does reading fiction matter? Even for a business school student?
I remember a business leader, the CEO of a large company, a voracious reader no less, who introduced me to the book On War by Carl von Clausewitz, telling me proudly that he never read fiction. I did not want to tell him why he should start reading fiction but I got an answer in a talk that author Amitav Ghosh gave a few years ago at one of his book launches. He said that when Leo Tolstoy was writing his magnum opus War and Peace he thought he was writing history. It turned out to be, what we call, historical fiction. In a similar vein, Amitav Ghosh explained, his series of books, The Ibis Trilogy, are deeply researched to the extent they are historically accurate, but are fiction all the same.
Books by Arthur Hailey, for instance, used to be so well researched that each of them gave a young reader a window to a new world. The world of hospitals, or airports for instance.
Reading books by Jeffrey Archer gave us a window to the world of British politics, banking, nobility and more. John Grisham gave us a window to the world of law. Then there are those books that are sheer reading pleasure and nostalgia. You can put R K Narayan at the top of that list.
How to find the time to dive into fiction in our busy busy world? Some friends of mine have gone fully audio. They use their morning walk to listen to a book. Some others have opted for the digital version of books, sampling them on their ride home.
I am sure if you see value you will find the time. In my mind it is a misnomer to classify all works of fiction as just time-pass. Let me share an interesting incident about books. Fiction.
I was on a flight back from Kochi to Mumbai. I had the latest Tom Clancy book for company and was immersed in it. Next to me was a smart young person who was observing me keenly. After a bit, he asked me: Do you read these heavy Tom Clancy books? I told him I do and I find them unputdownable. And greatly educative. To that he said he was with the Indian Navy and with the Southern Naval Command based in Kochi. It is a major operational and training hub. He told me that Tom Clancy’s books were recommended reading for every trainee.
We then got into an interesting discussion about how much research must have gone into even fiction books. By the time I landed in Mumbai my belief in reading fiction was further strengthened.
The writer is a best-selling author of books on brands, consumers and advertising. He is also an independent brand coach
