Before I graduated college, I loved reading fiction. I recall one Sunday when I drank up The Kite Runner and didn’t eat for 8 hours straight. The last book I took out of the Stanford library system was a tattered copy of The Unbearable Lightness of Being; knowing that it was my last time borrowing from Green Library, I couldn’t bring myself to return it. It sits on my bookshelf and brings a smile to my face each time. But the library often ran out of newer, more popular fiction. For that I went to the bookstore.
To a Pakistani girl new in California, $29.99 seemed an absurdly high price for a book. As an aspiring author, it looks pretty low. Despite my father’s generosity, he was earning in rupees and I was spending in dollars, so I thought it ridiculous to buy each book I wanted to read at full price. I wouldn’t even have space to store them in my dorm room. Instead, I made the Stanford bookstore my makeshift library; I’d buy books, read them and exchange for a new book within 30 days. Nobody called me out for it.
America, the land of the free, where I could return anything I bought! I was delighted with myself; I could not have pulled that off in Pakistan. Then again, books in Pakistan don’t cost as much.
Once I graduated and started working in Silicon Valley, I became very… well, Silicon Valley. I still read a lot, but switched entirely to nonfiction. Novels got replaced with MIT Technology Review and The Economist. Malcolm Gladwell was more welcome on my bookshelf than Gillian Flynn, who got me through grueling quarters in college. TV shows were slashed almost entirely; sometimes, just sometimes, I’d allow myself to watch a documentary. David Attenborough’s soothing voice became my lullaby, coupled with the ever-occasional delivery from Eaze.
I was learning that the real world is often more fascinating than fiction, and for that I’m grateful. But this rejection of fiction was also largely driven by an obsession with productivity; I was convinced that reading nonfiction, even if equally fascinating, was a better use of my time. The founder-types, and I aspired to be one, only spoke about mind-enhancing nonfiction from the real world. I was not only reading for pleasure, I was building interesting conversation fodder for the next bunker party.
This focus on productivity did pay off. I couldn’t relate on most things people my age struggled with. My finances and health were in great shape; Barry’s Bootcamp was obviously a huge productivity boost, and thus, completely justified. When other graduates discussed the terrible economy and how difficult jobs were to come by, I’d stay silent; this was not the case for my friends and I in tech. We did not believe San Francisco and New York were absurdly expensive cities to live in, as was often the story. We worked hard to afford to live there, and fiction was a reasonable price to pay.
If I give the impression that I didn’t play in those years as a Software Engineer, I apologize. We played; scuba, skiing, Burning Man, Coachella, work. But fiction was a form of play I didn’t let myself get back to until last night. 4 months after I left my lucrative job for no concise reason other than that I wanted to, I walked over to the Fiction section of a bookstore in Karachi and picked up Americanah. I’ve seen this book everywhere, in airports and smart people’s homes, and I love the author’s TED talk. Last night I started reading my first novel in 5 years. So far, I am loving it; significantly more than Thinking Fast and Slow, which I was trying to read, and failing to read, out of pure boredom.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a novel to get back to.
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