The main responsibility of a writer to the reader is to be worth reading.

To Shashi Tharoor, books are like the toddy tapper’s hatchet, striking through the rough husk that enshrouds our minds to tap into the exhilaration that ferments within. He hopes his new volume, Bookless in Baghdad, will prompt some of that exhilaration

“A book about books?” my friend, Amit, asked quizzically.

“Sort of,” I confessed. “Or at least about writing. And, of course, about reading.”

“So,” he retorted, “A book about books.”

This slightly circular exchange was prompted by the publication of my new collection of literary essays, Bookless in Baghdad, which pulls together a number of my ruminations about the pleasures and perils of the written word, which have appeared in various publications around the world over the last dozen years. It’s a book that will appeal only to people who are such devoted readers themselves that they think reading is worth writing about.

Of course, it might also appeal to those who have the time to read about books but not enough time or opportunity to read the books themselves. My reflections on writers as diverse as R.K. Narayan and Pablo Neruda, Nirad Chaudhuri and Malcolm Muggeridge, prompted one interviewer to ask whether the book could be called a ‘travelogue in reading.’ It’s an intriguing phrase, and I’d say, ‘why not?’ Travelogues are often about places the reader may not be familiar with and may never visit, though sometimes they spark the reader’s interest and send him or her off to the travel agent. So in acknowledging that this book does include disquisitions on books and writers who may be unfamiliar to some readers, I also hope they will stimulate interest in further exploration.

Over the years I’ve written a number of essays, columns and think-pieces on various subjects. A lot of them happen to be about literature, books and writing. And there were enough of them to have achieved a critical mass, as it were, to deserve a wider and more enduring readership than those of the publications in which they had originally appeared. At least my publishers, Viking Penguin in India and Arcade in the US, thought so. I felt slightly guilty that I was publishing a book without taking the trouble to write a new one, but the reaction of many readers in India, where the book has been out for a couple of months, has made me feel a lot better. Over the years, my material has come from life as much as from the page. The title essay was prompted by a visit to the ‘book souk’ on Al-Mutanabi Street in Baghdad in 1998, at the height of the sanctions, when I saw middle class families selling their books in order to survive.

Another essay recounts the story of a quixotic quest with my former wife for the perfect place to pay an idiosyncratic tribute to George Orwell, inspired by our reading of his Homage to Catalonia. But there are also somewhat less anecdotal essays, analysing the Indianness of Salman Rushdie, for instance, or the un-Indianness of literature’s quintessential brown sahib, Nirad Chaudhuri. One essay answers the question, ‘Is there a St. Stephen’s School of Literature?’ Another muses about literary festivals. There are rueful pieces about being savaged by a critic (and savage pieces that might be rued by a critic).

After all, growing up as the child of middle class parents in urban India in the late ’50s and ’60s meant growing up with books. Television did not exist in the Bombay of my boyhood, and video games (let alone personal computers) were not even a gleam in an inventor’s eye. If your siblings were, as in my case, four and six years younger (and worse, female), there was only one thing to do when you weren’t with your friends: read. And so I did. I read copiously, rapidly and indiscriminately. The habit has survived, though I do much less of it now in a more crowded adult life. In Bookless in Baghdad, I wanted to share with my readers the pleasure and provocation that reading has given me, in the hope of offering some of the same pleasure and provocation to my own readers. In the process, of course, I have also made my views clear on a number of issues and ideas as well as on the writers who have expressed them. As the essays make apparent, I am not a passive reader. I react to what I read, both in the act of reading and when I have finished a particular work. But though I have written many columns in which I discuss specific books, there are no book reviews as such in this volume. The essays speak of reacting to the experience of reading certain authors. Though some are light and whimsical, they emerge from a passion for both writing and reading that goes beyond mere observation.

Enough said. The book speaks for itself – as must all books. So I hope my readers will dip into it and allow their curiosity to be sparked. Earnest interviewers have often asked me (as they have undoubtedly asked other writers) what I saw as my responsibility to the reader. There are entire essays in the collection that seek to answer that question, so I don’t want to simplify my arguments with a one-liner. But there’s one thing I’ll add to the points I make in the book: the main responsibility of a writer to the reader is to be worth reading. To me, books are like the toddy tapper’s hatchet, striking through the rough husk that enshrouds our minds to tap into the exhilaration that ferments within. I hope Bookless in Baghdad will prompt some of that exhilaration.

The most difficult moments of my childhood came on one day every year, the holy day of Saraswati Puja. Hindus dedicate the day to the Goddess of Learning through prayer and ritual and, paradoxically, by denying themselves the joys of reading or writing. Despite the most strenuous efforts, I could never master the required degree of self-denial. If I successfully pushed my books aside, I would find myself reading the fine print on the toiletries in the bathroom or the fragments of old newspaper that lined my clothes drawers. But I think the Goddess forgave me these transgressions. For I continued to read and to learn from books; and now she has even allowed me to write a few of them.

Shashi Tharoor, the award-winning author of eight previous books, is currently an Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations. His most recent volume, Bookless in Baghdad, is a collection of essays that have formerly appeared in various international publications.