It was with great purpose that I packed my suitcases when I left Delhi last summer. They were heavy not with food as is customary, but with a collection of books that would have long been gathering dust (had they not been kept inside a closed bookshelf). University life, you see, had not been at all kind to the first “official” pastime I ever had.

Soon after I procured a room in Singapore, I found myself also procuring a membership from the National Library. And if that weren’t enough proclamation of my campaign for renewed prosaic consumption, I also ended up being gifted a lovely Kindle for my birthday (from the even lovelier G).

Thus armed, I embarked on a journey of recovering my voracious appetite for the chapter-chopped chronicle. Here’s how I’ve fared so far:

1. Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky
2. The Tell-Tale Heart, Edgar Allan Poe
3. The Catcher in the Rye, J D Salinger
4. To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
5. Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut
6. Kane and Abel, Jeffrey Archer
7. The Secret Crown, Chris Kuzneski
8. The Girl Who Played With Fire, Stieg Larsson
9. The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets Nest, Stieg Larsson
10. Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit, P G Wodehouse
11. Chronicle of a Death Foretold, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
12. Kafka on the Shore, Haruki Murakami
13. And Then There Were None, Agatha Christie
14. Crooked House, Agatha Christie
15. Dune, Frank Herbert
16. Ender’s Game, Orson Scott Card
17. Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture, David Kushner
18. The Last Lecture, Rany Pauch

It’s not terrible, but still a distant cry from the yours truly of yore who used to finish several books a week (a particularly memorable one-day reading of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince comes to mind).

What’s interesting is that the list of books that I began reading but couldn’t keep up with is also nearly as long, which is a telling sign of the changing times (I’ve almost never not finished a book in the past). Some of them are non-fiction ones though – can I pretend that they don’t count?

Oh well. Time for Susan Sontag’s On Photography!