The Reading List

Introduction

Sara Misha Adams’s The Reading List (2021) is a heartwarming novel about a list of recommended novels, left mysteriously in a library book, that comes to circulate among the patrons of a small branch library in the West London suburb of Wembley. The novel celebrates the old-school joys of reading: the act of getting involved emotionally with stories about made-up people doing made-up things. Marginalized in a world of a-literates—those who know how to read but, too entranced by the fetching lure of gadgets, opt not to—books can still create communities of sympathetic souls. The Reading List, Adams’s first novel, became an improbable international bestseller, helped not only by generous critical reviews but also by buzz on social media, where readers hailed Adams’s ability to capture the simple magic of reading.

The novel chronicles the unlikely friendship between Mukesh Patel, a quiet, mild-mannered 70-something widower, and Aleisha Thomas, a whip-smart teenager drifting indifferently through her summer job at the Wembley library before she heads off to university to study law. Although neither one is much of a reader, the two together read all eight books on that mysterious list. Those books illuminate the joys and sorrows, agonies and ironies of the emotional lives of both characters.