18. Bibliotherapy: A 2023 retrospective

Looking back...and ahead!

A warm welcome to all readers, old and new :)

If you’re new and haven’t yet, do take a moment to subscribe: we publish Letters to the Reader twice a month, where we share updates, events, reading tips and book recommendations.

We hope you’re comfortable, warm and in the presence of people you love, at the end of a year that has been a rollercoaster for the world in general.

At the beginning of this year, we decided to designate a ‘Word for the Year’, and the word this year was ‘Reflect’.

So, reflect, we shall, as we look back upon one of the most pivotal years in the Project’s history so far. [PS: there’s a list of 42 books we read this year at the end]

Before we dive in, we’d love to extend an invitation to you.

Join our year-long Reading Programme in 2024, by becoming a member of the Readers of 42! Details when you click on the button below.

The year so far

2023 has been a year of discovery for the Project. We faced ups, downs, worked on a lot of experiments and are coming out with a ton of learnings and ideas.

We’ll sum it up for you below :)

1. After a digital partnership with the Jaipur Literature Festival, and a brilliant time on-ground there, we took time off in January for a few weeks.
   While on vacation, the wonderful parenting podcast Pops in a Pod, by Peter and Nadir released an episode we were part of, on all the streaming platforms (highly recommend checking them out). We talked about books from our childhood and gave out reading recommendations for different age groups. Give it a listen below!

2. Bibliotherapy, a term Nitin learnt about during the pandemic, came to my aid when we went through rough times of our own in the first half of the year. Reading kept my mind from going down paths I wasn’t emotionally prepared to confront. It kept me grounded, and gave me something to look forward to when things were scary and uncertain. Most of all, it gave me some much-needed comfort while navigating this difficult time.
   It’s not the first time reading has been like a balm for the soul, and it won’t be the last. It’s also why we do what we do :)

   

3. We worked on building relationships, and on nurturing existing ones. From authors, bookstores and publishers to brands with shared values, reading communities, book clubs and event venues, we gradually have been building our understanding of how this entire space works. (Shoutout to Delhi Reads for being awesome!) We reached out to some of our valued readers, and well-wishers this year too and collected all of their valuable feedback for us to implement in the year ahead.

   

4. The Project was born during the pandemic, and back then, our engagement with the community was largely online. After the world re-opened, let’s face it, everyone’s got Zoom fatigue and prefer in-person events. We focused on creating unique reading experiences for our Readers and others. We celebrated the 2nd edition of Towel Day, experimented with ‘Book Lovers Day’, hosted the ‘Kunzum-Biblio Bash’ in partnership with Kunzum, and organized Guided Reading Meditations.

   

5. Our research told us that in addition to handing the zine to people - they need a nudge to start reading it :)
   So we experimented with a ‘Readathon’. We shared 1 read from our zines every day, across platforms. We will restart the Readathon concept starting Jan 2024, focusing on 1 zine every quarter (4 zines to read in 2024!)

6. We also found value in creating curiosity and making an impact through in-person Reader sign-up opportunities. We started with a launch event for Volume 2 of the zine at Kunzum, GK2, Delhi. We also partnered with our friends at leap.club and set up an Experience Zone at their flagship event, the leap.club (af)fair, to tremendous response. The message was clear: people wanted to meet us, understand the Readers of 42 membership, and get a feel of our mission - to get people to #ReadMoreReadBetter!

   The Bombay Zine Fest followed, then the Opn Art House by Gaysi Family and finally we set up a section at the Bangalore Literature Festival thanks to the kind folks from Team Atta Galatta.

   

7. We worked with kids for the very first time, and plan to do more in the coming year to promote reading among children. As two lifelong readers who started our respective journeys with books when we were just 3 or 4 years old, we’d love for kids today to share in the joy! We held a fun storytelling session for kids from ages 6-7 from The Shriram School’s Kids’ Book Club which ended with them drawing their fave characters.

   

8. In a year of many firsts, we also held our first ever panel with esteemed author and publisher, Sridhar Balan, and Ajay Jain, the Founder of Kunzum. It was a fun, free-flowing conversation with an excellent turnout, and we had a great experience. Watch for more in the coming year!

   

9. We made our radio debut with RJ Sarthak on Radio One 94.3 FM on his show called Startup Stories where we talked about the journey so far, and all that we do to get people to read more and read better.

   

10. Our Reader-in-Chief, Nitin, made his ‘stage debut’ this year. The first was at Comic Con Delhi in a collaboration with Penguin Randomhouse India, where he took the stage to engage attendees in a fun comics quiz, and set up an interactive booth for people to sign up as Readers of 42.
    The second was at the Kommune Gurgaon Spoken Mic where he regaled the audience with part of his and our origin story :)

    

11. We realised that though we’d love to do everything ourselves, it’s not possible to keep up in the long run. So we’re hiring interns and volunteers who are as crazy about books and reading as we are! We worked with volunteers for the first time at the leap.club (af)fair and at Comic Con Delhi and are looking to work with a graphic designer and photographer in the coming year :) (psst: know someone? Feel free to refer them to us!)

We share a sense of immense gratitude for the experiences that the Project has made possible, through the wonderful people that make up our Readers and the extended book community.
We are excited and ready for the road ahead: with Volume 3 and 4 of our zine ready to drop any day now, and a whole year of reading, learning and moving forward together.

The heart of all that we do remains the same: to enable people to rediscover (or discover for the first time) the magic of reading, in a world that is full of distractions and quick dopamine hits.

We welcome you to start 2024 with the intention to diversify the kind of books and other forms of the written word that you read. Do this with us: we promise it’ll be one heck of a ride :)

Signing off,

Happy reading :)

Nandini

Storyteller-in-Chief

42 Books We Read in 2023

1. Everything the Light Touches by Janice Pariat

2. The Room on the Roof by Ruskin Bond

3. The Book of Everlasting Things by Aanchal Malhotra

4. Palestinian Walks: Notes on a Vanishing Landscape by Raja Shehadeh

5. The Education of Yuri by Jerry Pinto

6. The Girl With Seven Names by Hyeonseo-Lee

7. Chinaman by Shehan Karunatilaka

8. Sourcery by Terry Pratchett

9. Teen Couple Have Fun Outdoors by Aravind Jayan

10. The Blue Book by Amitava Kumar

11. Steal Like An Artist by Austin Kleon

12. The Hundred Names of Darkness by Nilanjana Roy

13. Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story by Martin Luther King Jr.

14. Days at the Morisaki Bookshop by Satoshi Yagisawa

15. The Bastard of Istanbul by Elif Shafak

16. Em and the Big Hoom by Jerry Pinto

17. Palestine by Joe Sacco

18. Speechless by Roshan Abbas & Siddharth Banerjee

19. Off the Shelf by Sridhar Balan

20. Everything is Out of Syllabus by Varun Duggirala

21. The Night of Broken Glass by Feroz Rather

22. MetaMaus: A Look Inside a Modern Classic Maus

23. The Strawberry Thief by Joanne Harris

24. Humans of New York: Stories by Brandon Stanton

25. Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden

26. Anxious People by Frederik Backman

27. Awards for Good Boys by Shelby Lorman

28. A Man Called Ove by Frederik Backman

29. Masala Lab: The Science of Indian Cooking by Krish Ashok

30. Karejwa by Varun Grover & Bakarmax

31. Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron: Seriously Funny Since 1983 by Jai Arjun Singh

32. The Machine is Learning by Tanuj Solanki

33. The Return of Faraz Ali by Aamina Ahmed

34. Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud

35. Woman World by Aminder Dhaliwal

36. Tharoorosaurus by Shashi Tharoor

37. Art Matters by Neil Gaiman

38. Failure to Make Round Rotis by Mehak Goyal

39. My Neighbour Totoro Picture Book by Hayao Miyazaki

40. A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf

41. The Testaments by Margaret Atwood

42. Manjhi’s Mayhem by Tanuj Solanki

Psst: Why no links, you ask? Well, we’d like for you to step into a bookstore and actually see, touch, feel and read the blurbs of these books :)