63 pages • 2 hours read
Sara Nisha AdamsThe Reading List
Fiction | Novel | AdultA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Prologue-Part 1Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1: “The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger”
Prologue Summary: “The Reading List”
It is 2017. Twenty-something Aidan returns to the Harrow Road Library, which he and sister used to visit when they were kids. He remembers the “magical” feel of the library, how he would burrow into stacks of books and find an escape from the difficulties of his home life through stories. Now, after so many years, he meanders through the fiction shelves. He is uncertain what he is looking for, knowing only that he needs “to know how something will end” (2). As he sits alone at a table, he watches an older patron, a woman, sticking a note into a copy of To Kill a Mockingbird. Aidan, curious, recovers the note once the patron departs. He finds in “neat, looping, warm, inviting” handwriting a list of eight novels (4)—in addition to the Lee title, Rebecca, The Kite Runner, Life of Pi, Pride and Prejudice, Little Women, Beloved, and A Suitable Boy. The note says only, “Just in case you need it” (4). Most of the titles mean nothing to Aidan—he is tempted to take the list with him, but he leaves it in the book and departs the library.
Part 1, Chapter 1 Summary: “Mukesh”
It is 2019. Mukesh Patel, more than two years after the death of his beloved wife of more than 50 years, Naina, still struggles with his grief, what he terms “the Time of Eternal Quiet” (13). It is Wednesday, his shopping day, and he dutifully prepares to head out to the neighborhood grocery store. He checks the messages on the answering machine from his three grown daughters, Vritti, Deepali, and Rohini.
Only recently have the three daughters, concerned over their father’s slow recovery from their mother’s death, begun to sort through her things. In the process, they unearthed a library book Naina had never returned: The Time Traveler’s Wife. Naina had been a lifelong reader, bringing home stacks of books from the Harrow Road Library. Mukesh, for his part, was not much of a reader, preferring to watch nature documentaries while Naina read.
That night, on impulse, Mukesh tries reading The Time Traveler’s Wife. Initially he struggles, but he gets involved in the sci-fi romance of the two lovers from different time dimensions and how they commit to live their love every day, despite knowing they can never be part of the same time. As Mukesh reads each night, the story touches him, as it illuminates his own struggle to adjust to Naina’s death.
He decides he will return the book to the library and maybe try other titles.
Part 1, Chapter 2 Summary: “Aleisha”
Aleisha is working at the Harrow Road Library for the summer, before university begins. Although her brother had done the job some years earlier and had recommended it to her, Aleisha finds the days long and boring. The library has few patrons, and she is not much of a reader, so time drags.
One afternoon, she is sorting through stacks of returned books when an old man walks in. She dreads having to help him—she puts on her “resting bitch face” (22). The old man is returning a book and wants help finding something to read. Aleisha is in no mood and dryly suggests he try Google.
Immediately, seeing the confused and hurt look on the old man’s face, she feels guilty. She returns to her stack, and in a returned copy of To Kill a Mockingbird, she finds a neat, handwritten list of eight novels with the invitation: “Just in case you need it” (4). Something draws her to the list. The note is anonymous and offers no explanation for the choices. On impulse, she thinks the old man might also find the list useful. They might both need it.
Part 1, Chapter 3 Summary: “Mukesh”
Rebuffed by Aleisha, Mukesh wanders about the library, clueless. He happens to find the nonfiction aisles and locates a copy of The Highway Code, a nonfiction review of government specifications for transportation systems. When Aleisha returns to help him, Mukesh refuses the help and bolts from the library.
As he walks back home in the withering summer heat, Mukesh wonders if developing some interest in reading might help him bond with his granddaughter, Priya. For years, Priya and Naina had shared a mutual love of reading. Although Mukesh tried to interest Priya in the nature documentaries he loved, Priya was a reader. Mukesh recalls Naina in the last months after her grim cancer diagnosis, how she diligently talked to Mukesh about the time she would be gone. He knows the old wisdom that life must go on, but he cannot shake the heavy feeling of being alone, still.
Part 1, Interlude Summary: “The Reading List: Chris”
It is 2017. Chris, struggling in the aftermath of a breakup with Melanie, drags himself out of bed for yet another day alone. Searching for something to do to help cheer him up, Chris decides to visit the library. He has always been a reader and thinks reading might help.
At the library, he finds a copy of To Kill a Mockingbird on a table, as if waiting for him. It has an elegantly written Post-it underneath it. The note recommends To Kill a Mockingbird, explaining how it offers a magical place that might provide a splendid escape, should “your” life become overwhelming. The note is not signed. It touches Chris, and he begins to read the book. Immediately, he relishes the story. He finds another note folded into the book, a list of eight book titles in the same elegant handwriting. Somehow, Chris feels that “the list [is] for him” (38).
Prologue-Part 1 Analysis
These opening chapters are bookended by interludes, which are set in the last weeks of Naina’s life and two years before the narrative present. The interludes set up the argument about The Transformative Impact of Stories. In the Prologue, Aidan seeks the shelter of the Harrow Road Library, which he recalls from his youth memories of happy moments with his mother and kid sister. Unlike Chris—and, in 2019, Aleisha and Mukesh—the reading list “doesn’t mean anything to [Aidan]—just scribbled words on a scrap of paper” (2). Aidan rejects the reading list, denying it the opportunity to touch him, to change him. This is significant foreshadowing of Aidan’s suicide later in the book. Though Aidan seeks comfort and respite in the library, he is no longer able to find a happy escape through fiction, and he rejects the opportunity for connection that the list offers.
Chris is the opposite. His heart shattered by a recent breakup, Chris (whom Aleisha dubs Crime Thriller Guy because of his penchant for spending long hours reading mysteries) decides to spend the afternoon at his favorite haunt, the Harrow Road Library. Naina’s note in To Kill A Mockingbird reads, “I hope it can be an escape […] a bit of respite” (36), which intrigues and speaks to Chris. Like Aidan, Chris is called: “The list was for him—he knew it” (38). Unlike Aidan, Chris says yes and takes the list with him. That feeling of connection, even if it is to the mysterious other who left the book and the list, has already begun to transform Chris and help him emerge from his heartache.
In the character of Mukesh, the novel explores The Difficult Process of Handling Grief. Much like the couple in The Time Traveler’s Wife, Mukesh understands how love magically (and tragically) exists in two tenses simultaneously. Though Naina is no longer with him, Mukesh still loves her deeply, to the extent that even two years after her death, Mukesh cannot find his way to the normalcy he knows she would want for him. The routine he follows prevents him from appreciating the magnitude of his grief, and his daughters, attentive as they are, cannot help the pain he carries with him. Mukesh has lived a life of narrow horizons and limited adventure; Naina was his world, and without her, he is left in lonely stasis.
Finding one of Naina’s unreturned library books begins his journey toward overcoming his grief. Mukesh is not ready to let Naina go and move on; this makes The Time Traveler’s Wife the perfect novel to start with. To Mukesh, the book “[brings] her back—even if just for a moment” (16), which is precisely what he needs at this point in his life. Mukesh’s reaction to The Time Traveler’s Wife further illustrates the transformative impact of stories, as he experiences, for the first time, a deep emotional connection to characters in a novel. This sets the stage for Mukesh proceeding to handle his grief through storytelling.
The Reading List, however, is the story of the redemption of two readers. The initial meeting between Aleisha and Mukesh in the library is awkward, even confrontational. Although the two will come to experience The Reward of Intergenerational Friendship, for now, the two do not mesh. Aleisha is completely unaware of Mukesh’s life story, and at first, she has no interest in learning. She is disrespectful and uninterested, judging the elderly Mukesh’s struggles with the library’s automatic door and rolling her eyes when he says, unhelpfully, that he is “looking for some books” (23). Mukesh has come to be moved by reading, to seek a connection to his late wife and his young granddaughter; to Aleisha, however, he is simply an annoying old man. Aleisha curtly dismisses his journey by pointing to the shelves and saying, “[T]he novels are over there” (25), which reveals she has much to learn about connecting with other people. Aleisha, for her part, is focused on her own personal struggles, as her shattered family tries, and fails, to cope with her father’s abandonment of them. The weight of her home life prevents her from greeting others with patience and compassion, and Aleisha is not yet ready to form external bonds—particularly not with a stranger so much older than her.
It is then that Naina intervenes—and a miracle occurs. Aleisha finds one of Naina’s lists in a returned copy of To Kill a Mockingbird. Her initial response is to chuck the folded note, but something “[stops] her” (27). Aleisha cannot explain what is compelling her, but she somehow knows that the answer to the old man’s question is the anonymous list. Aleisha unknowingly facilitates the opportunity for Naina, two years dead, to communicate with Mukesh, a moment that recalls several such serendipitous moments in The Time Traveler’s Wife itself.
These opening chapters set up the novel’s terms: Aidan is lost, refusing the gift of stories; Naina uses the magic of stories to defy death itself; Mukesh feels the magic stirring of storytelling for the first time; and Aleisha is compelled by a ghost she does not even know to try to bring the gift of fiction to an elderly man she has only briefly met.
