On the Writer’s Shelf with Janice Pariat

BH: Do you have a particular place in the house where you like to read, or are you the sort of person who will read anywhere?

JP: I'm very much a read-anywhere person. Bed, sofa, dining table, airport, train, a café, waiting for someone to arrive. I can read almost anywhere. But there is something particularly lovely about reading in my writing shed in Shillong. It is surrounded by trees and feels slightly removed from the rest of the house. The light changes through the day, and sometimes you can hear rain, 'slap praw praw as we call it in Khasi, beginning on the roof before it reaches anywhere else.

BH: And what does a perfect reading afternoon at home look like for you?

JP: Rain helps. A large pot of tea, nowhere I need to be, a book I am completely absorbed in, and ideally several hours in which I don't look at my phone. Perhaps a kitty nearby, though mine is usually more interested in deciding whether I'm occupying one of his favourite spots. The perfect reading afternoon is really an afternoon in which time becomes slightly unimportant.

BH: What does Vincent make of all these books? Is he, as cats tend to be, a shelf-dweller, or a book destroyer?

JP: Vincent would very much like to climb all the bookshelves, especially because they reach almost to the ceiling. From up there he can survey the entire room—and, presumably, the world—with the serene superiority only a cat can possess.

BH: What’s the most beautiful thing about having books around you at home that has nothing to do with reading them?

JP: Their presence. I like the fact that books make a room feel inhabited by other minds, other lives. You don't have to be reading them for them to be part of your life. They contain the possibility of another world, another way of thinking, another person's attention. And I like the traces they acquire. Bent corners, inscriptions, old tickets tucked between pages, the particular wear of a book that has been loved. A library is partly a collection of books and partly a record of a life.

BH: I’m curious about the books you keep but don’t particularly like or have outgrown.

JP: I don't really keep books no longer like. There's too little shelf space for that luxury. Although I do have one dilemma: I own all seven of the original-edition Harry Potter books, and while I have complicated feelings about the author, I'm rather attached to the books themselves and the particular time in my life they belong to. So, they remain. For now.

I've come to realise that "home" for me is often about recognition—the sudden feeling that someone else has noticed something you thought only you had seen.

BH: If this shelf had one embarrassing secret about you, what might it give away?

JP: That I have a terrible weakness for buying books faster than I can read them.

Also, that my reading life is far less orderly than my shelves might suggest. There are books on there that I bought because of one beautiful sentence on the back cover, books I haven't yet opened, books I've outgrown but can't quite bring myself to give away, and books I keep because they belonged to a particular version of myself, a particular point in my life. Perhaps the embarrassing secret is that I still believe I will eventually get around to all of them.

All images by Janice Pariat