Long Live Books - Sneha

Books have had countless opportunities to become irrelevant, and yet, they haven’t.

What makes this interesting is not simply that books survived technological change, but that they survived cultural change. We live in a time shaped by speed. Everything around us is optimized to be faster, shorter, easier. Attention is fragmented into seconds. We are constantly encouraged to move on to the next thing.

Books resist this. A book does not adjust itself to your impatience. It does not become shorter because you are distracted. It does not compete aggressively for your attention. It simply exists, waiting. And that makes books strangely radical.

Most modern systems are built around engagement. They want to hold your attention, predict your preferences, and reduce the time between desire and satisfaction. Books ask for your time, attention, and patience. Reading is one of the few experiences left where progress cannot be outsourced. No one can read on your behalf, and no shortcut can replace the act itself. 

Perhaps that is also what makes bookstores so interesting. A bookstore is a strangely defiant space; people walk in without certainty. They browse without urgency, they pick up books they may never buy, read a few lines, and move to another.

From a transactional point of view, this makes little sense, and yet, it happens every day because bookstores do not only facilitate purchase; they facilitate consideration, and consideration is becoming rare. To consider something means to pause long enough for curiosity to form. 

Books ask for that pause. Bookstores protect it, and working at The English Book Depot, I get to witness this often.

People still walk in, they still browse, they still pause at shelves longer than they planned to. Books endure not because they keep up with the world, but because they refuse to. 

Long live books.

Book Recommendations by Shelf-mates

A bookstore is, at first glance, a place of abundance. 

Shelves stretch endlessly, filled with possibilities, stories waiting to be picked, opened, and, often, forgotten. But behind this quiet abundance stands the people who work among these books.

They are not just surrounded by choice, they are defined by it.

Every day, they handle dozens of titles. They know what sells, what lingers, what gets recommended too often, and what quietly slips past unnoticed. And yet, when asked to choose a single book—one that, in their view, must be read at least once—their answers are not shaped by popularity, but by something far more enduring: personal conviction.

It is this act of choosing, out of excess, that makes their recommendations worth pausing for.

For Santosh, the choice rests with Twelfth Fail.

It is telling that this is not a book he has read once, but twice. In a space where new books are constantly within reach, returning to the same text suggests something deeper than casual appreciation.

Twelfth Fail does not rely on embellishment. It does not dramatise the struggle for effect. Instead, it presents an unvarnished narrative, almost austere in its honesty. Perhaps this is why the book endures for him, because it reflects persistence.

If some choices emerge from recognition, others arise from a sense of expansion.

For Shankar, that choice is The Alchemist.

He describes it not through analysis, but through effect: it offers another world, one that invites exploration. The Alchemist operates less as a story to be consumed and more as a space to think within. It gestures toward ideas of purpose, coincidence, and the pursuit of something intangible without insisting on a singular interpretation.

In this sense, its value lies not in what it says, but in what it allows the reader to consider. Then some choices return us, not outward, but inward toward familiarity, language, and lived reality.

Javed’s recommendation, the Hindi translation of Heart Lamp, is significant for this very reason.

To read a text in translation is always to encounter it differently, but to read it in a language that feels closer to one’s own is to experience a shift in intimacy. The stories in Heart Lamp do not depend on scale or spectacle. They move through quieter spaces like domestic, social, and deeply human. 

What unites these selections is not genre, theme, or style. It is the fact that, in a place defined by endless options, these books were not just noticed but chosen.

To choose, in such a context, is an act of filtration. It requires setting aside the noise of trends, the pull of novelty, and the weight of expectation. What remains is something quieter, but far more deliberate.

These are not books that demand to be read. They are books that have, in some way, already proven themselves to the individual who returns to them, reflects on them, and offers them to someone else.

And perhaps that is reason enough to read them. Copies of these books are available at the Book Cafe and The English Book Depot.

- Sneha

Notes on Reading

I have always noticed how people hold books. I started observing this unconsciously. I’ve seen people fold the corner of a page without a second thought. The gesture is instinctive, almost absent-minded. They do it mid-sentence, mid-feeling. The crease becomes a private marker of urgency: I will come back to this. There is something unapologetic about it. The book is not being worshipped; it is being used.

I’ve also seen the opposite. The careful insertion of a bookmark. The smoothing of a page before closing it. The quiet refusal to let the spine bend too far. These readers handle books as though they are preserving evidence. Their movements are controlled and precise. The object remains intact, symmetrical, composed.

And then some write in the margins. Not aggressively, but thoughtfully. Underlines in pencil. A question mark beside a claim. A date written softly at the top of a page. I once borrowed a book filled with annotations and found it strangely intimate—like overhearing someone think. In contrast, I know readers who would never allow ink to touch paper. For them, a book arrives complete; it is not a surface for dialogue but a structure to be respected and exited without alteration.

Watching all of this, I began to realise that these are not trivial habits. They reveal something about how we approach ideas—and perhaps how we approach everything else.

None of this feels accidental to me anymore.

I have caught myself changing over time. I used to dog-ear pages constantly. It felt efficient, almost instinctive. But now it makes me uncomfortable. I annotate instead—light pencil underlines, small notes—and I always use a bookmark. I’m not entirely sure when the shift happened. Perhaps I became more attentive to preservation. Perhaps I simply became more conscious of how I wanted to interact with what I read.

That is why I find this subject quietly compelling. A book, after all, survives both kinds of handeling and i don’t think there is a correct way to handle a book. But I do think the way we do it says something precise about us. And once you begin noticing, it is impossible to stop.

Sneha

-The English Book Depot

Writers Writing for Writers

#BrewingKnowledge

I was talking to one of the staff members at EBD today — a shelf-mate, and we noticed something quietly interesting. Almost everyone who walked in and struck up a conversation with us was writing something. A novel in progress, a poetry collection saved in a notes app, a blog on Substack or thoughts spilling into Instagram captions.

Everyone had a story they wanted to write.

Nowadays, we see more writers than readers, especially online. Words are everywhere, constantly being produced, shared, and posted. Yet rarely does someone walk in and say, "I'm a reader."

Somewhere along the way, being read began to feel better than reading. Validation became easier than attention. Writing offers visibility & reading asks for patience. And in a world chasing instant responses, sitting with someone else's words feels almost like a lost habit.

This creates a quiet contrast between writers and readers, a widening space where stories are written endlessly, but not always received with the same depth. A world full of voices, yet fewer listeners.

Sneha

Intern at The English Book Depot

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