The Reading List

Each of the novel’s sections is structured around one of the eight books on Naina Patel’s reading list. As Mukesh, Aleisha, and others make their way through the list, the books, their characters, and their themes all become elements of the novel’s own thematic arguments. Although Mukesh and Aleisha reveal enough of the plots of the other books to provide critical connections, the novel argues that books speaking to books is part of the community of reading that novels have always created.

The first part is centered around The Time Traveler’s Wife, the last book Naina checked out before her death. Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife tells the story of Henry DeTamble, a 20-something librarian in Chicago who is genetically prone to uncontrollable flights into time. Henry meets Clare during one of his time tumbles, and though their relationship is complicated by Henry’s time traveling, the two fall in love, marry, and have a child together. The novel focuses on Clare and how she spends her life waiting for Henry, well into her old age. This book, Mukesh’s first foray into reading fiction, helps him understand how pining for Naina is part of the magic and tragedy of love.

Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird transports Mukesh and Aleisha to the sleepy rural town of Maycomb, Alabama. The story follows a brother and sister, Scout and Jem, who learn important lessons about treating other people with dignity and respect. Between their reclusive neighbor Boo Radley and the trial of a Black man wrongfully accused of raping a white woman, Scout and Jem learn the need to see others as human beings. In this, the novel alerts Mukesh and Aleisha to the danger of their lifestyles of cautious disconnection from others, and the importance of family for emotional and psychological well-being.

Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca introduces a gothic element to the novel. Set in a manor in the wilds of the southern tip of the UK, it is the story of an unnamed woman who impulsively marries a rich widower. After arriving at his remote estate named Manderley, she begins to feel the haunting presence of the first wife, Rebecca. The housekeeper, Mrs. Danvers, is obsessed with Rebecca and hostile toward the narrator. She manipulates the narrator into trying to “replace” Rebecca in order to ruin her marriage and nearly pressures the narrator into dying by suicide. It is eventually revealed that the narrator’s husband never loved Rebecca, who he claims was cruel and manipulative; he admits that he murdered her in a rage when she told him she was pregnant with another man’s child. The novel’s moody tone spooks both Aleisha and Mukesh. Its cautionary tale about the dangers of allowing the past to overwhelm the present is not lost on either.

Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner recounts the difficult story of betrayal between two young friends: the wealthy Amir and the son of his family’s servants, Hassan, both living in Afghanistan. When Amir witnesses the brutal rape of his friend by other kids in their school, he says nothing. Later, his family moves to America. More than 20 years later, Amir learns that Hassan was shot during the Soviet occupation and that he wants Amir to return to war-torn Afghanistan to rescue Hassan’s son. After harrowing experiences negotiating with the newly installed Taliban government, Amir rescues Hassan’s son and brings the boy to America. The story shows Mukesh, unwilling to let go of his dead wife, and Aleisha, chained to the emotional pain of her family’s disintegration, that the past cannot be ignored but must be confronted to ensure ultimate victory over its pull.

In Yann Martel’s Life of Pi, an Indian boy named Piscine Molitor “Pi” Patel, the son of a zookeeper, restlessly explores the universe as a spiritual thing. He is fascinated by the function of the soul. When his father moves the family from India to Canada, the boat, with many of the zoo’s animals, is caught in a storm and sinks. Pi is left to drift in a lifeboat for nearly a year with a tiger, an orangutan, a zebra, and a hyena for company. Each animal comes to suggest a different layer of the soul, and the sea drift becomes an important (and harrowing) spiritual journey. The lesson is not lost on either Aleisha or Mukesh, who both accept the difficulty of spiritual journeys as they move away from the familiar and find the courage within themselves to take risks.

Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice gives Aleisha and Mukesh important reminders about the complex interplay necessary when the heart seeks others. The polite parlor games played in Austen mask the realpolitik of courtship and marriage. In the intrigue of Elizabeth Bennet and Fitzwilliam Darcy, the novel captures the hesitant movement of the heart itself, eager to love but careful of its every move. Reading Austen gives both Mukesh and Aleisha insight into their own fledgling courtships: Mukesh with his late wife’s friend Nilakshi, and Aleisha with the charming stranger Zac Lowe.

The courtship narrative then leads to the celebration of family that centers Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, the classic story of the four March sisters and their loving parents. As the sisters work to keep the family vibrant and financially solvent when the father is serving as a chaplain in the Union army, they face the challenges of love and family. They must figure out how to maintain their dreams even as they are faced with increasingly adult responsibilities, and they seek moral guidance from deeply rooted Christian faith. The novel’s uplifting ending is not lost on Mukesh, who has dinner with Nilakshi, nor on Aleisha, who has her first date with Zac.

As the novel turns toward Aidan’s death by suicide, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, an elaborate and tragic ghost story, suggests how quickly death can haunt a person. The story revolves around a self-emancipated woman named Sethe, who killed her eldest daughter to protect her from the enslavers who threatened to take them back to Sweet Home plantation. Sethe, her daughter Denver, and a man named Paul D encounter a woman called Beloved, and Sethe, believing Beloved is the manifestation of her deceased daughter, destroys her life to care for her. Eventually, Denver reaches out to their community for help, and Beloved disappears. Aidan’s death threatens to push Aleisha away from all the bonds she has formed, back into isolation; but, as with Beloved’s Sethe, death is not the last word. The section closes with the community open house, a celebration of neighbors and community that echoes a similar scene in Beloved.

Finally the novel closes with a most unlikely selection: Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy, a sprawling mutigenerational family saga set in mid-20th century India and its struggle for national identity after the departure of the British. A constant theme is how the women in each generation look for the ideal marriage partner, a suitable boy. In this, the novel echoes Mukesh and Aleisha and their movement by the novel’s close to find that suitable Other, someone to shatter their loneliness at last.