Chennai has a special bond with books. Whether it’s a cosy library space opening onto the view of the azure sky and streets hidden by green canopies, or older rooms with pale walls and stuffy racks of books, the city has an abundance of spaces for bibliophiles. For many, childhoods were eager visits to nearby lending libraries, a wander into the extensive rows of bookstores with their parents, and a mandatory visit to book fairs. It also meant devouring more collections and discovering hidden reading spaces.

The city’s love affair with books is told through its people. Their stories reveal how Chennai itself becomes a recurring character in their reading journeys. With book nooks, quiet reading rooms, and libraries, Chennai has been an oasis for readers, opening windows to a deluge of books and authors.

Jayaseelan Nagalingam reminisces about his childhood days in the 70s — on his way back home in Purusawalkam from the library with a book in his hand, containing his joy of reading. For this 65-year-old, who is fond of historical novels, reading became a habit hard to ignore, even when his life was engulfed by work. He inherited the reading bug from his mother, who was an ardent fan of Tamil writers like Sandilyan. He quips, “But I started with Tamil comics.” English being just one subject in the school curriculum, the classes barely helped him to understand the language. His major exposure to English was through the books he read.

“There were many taluk and district libraries in the city,” he says, adding that he would lose track of time and space and read till late at night in a taluk library near his home. A retired railway employee, who has travelled to many places, he notes that not many cities have the accessibility to books as Chennai does.

Jayaseelan passed on the gift of reading to his grand-niece, Christyana Rose, who says, “My granduncle was a great influence on me. He has a good collection of books at home.” She took the baby steps into the world of words and illustrations at her granduncle’s house, but later, the school library became a favourite spot. Christyana’s meagre pocket money wasn’t enough for her to buy the books at the school fairs. But she would visit the school library with time-worn rooftiles old, dust-slathered stacks of books, bearing the musty smells of the withered pages, where she would go with her ID card anytime and pick anything she liked. She recalls, “I was still moving around in the circles of Roald Dahl and Enid Blyton. I had to go to college to graduate from children’s literature and go to The Da Vinci Code. I started with Dan Brown and then went to Jeffrey Archer.” She skipped the romance genre, even when the entire city was hooked to Twilight.

In college, she had memberships in libraries across the city, but the American Library, British Council Library, and Connemara were the most affordable ones, she says. Calling the British Council Library a hub for book discussion, she says, “They’d print out the book scheduled for discussion, give it to us, or send an email of an excerpt.”

Once in college, she was introduced to books like P Sivakami’s The Grip of Change, Sara Aboobacker’s Breaking Ties, and Che Guevara’s The Motorcycle Diaries. It was also a turning point for her as she was learning about the ground realities, like the caste system.

While she was expanding her reading, Tamil literature, too, started growing on her. Christyana’s friend and her partner would read books to her. “On their recommendations, I picked up Jeyamohan’s Vanangaan, Yaanai Doctor, Aram, Sotru Kanakku.” These are stories close to heart; stories about familiar people and places, as opposed to, she says, “people from Seattle or New York”. Reading, at different stages of life, has rewarded Christyana abundantly, allowing an immersive experience into English literature and then to the grim realities through Tamil literature, while the city always offered corners of escapades.

From small lending libraries like Kandan and Easwari to the spacious Connemara and Anna Centenary Library, with rows of tall bookshelves, these are repositories of different genres of books. Anuradha Sivaraman, a writer turned corporate banker, says the city was a feasible place for reading. Her dad would frequently take her to the Landmark Bookstore in Nungambakkam and Higginbothams. Born to bookworms, she acquired the habit of reading partly from them. But their tastes in books were entirely different. Her home was a haven of new conversations and ideas. While her mother’s way of passing on reading to her was by taking her to libraries, she has seen her granny read “heavy feminist books”.

This lover of romance novels spent a lot of her time going to second-hand bookshops, which she remarks are many in Chennai — Triplicane book shop lanes that college students would throng for old textbooks. She says, “Those shops helped them in their broke college days.” Coming to the present, Anuradha notes that the city has many spots like the Writer’s Café with their aesthetic nuances built around the concept of books and reading spaces.

Chennai has been a comfort for Sangita Chakraborty, who began her reading journey with Bengali classics — Ray’s Feluda series, Rabindranath Tagore’s short stories, and the translated Russian folk tales. She recalls her most memorable visits to the Goethe Institut’s library. “The place not only offered books, but an entire experience — an understanding of how reading is not merely a habit, but a powerful and dynamic skill that opens doors to the world.”

Having experienced the quiet joy of reading, Sangita, a school teacher, tries to share this experience with young readers through storytelling sessions. “I’ve always been drawn to children’s books, especially those by Eric Carle, Julia Donaldson, and Judith Kerr. There’s something so heart warming about them — children love listening to the stories, and I find myself just as captivated.”

A joy to be shared

Age no bar, the city never fails to bring joy to bibliophiles. Ask 14-year-old Parvathy Venkatachalam, and she gushes about the “hidden nooks and crannies” in the city. This young reader entered the world of books through the British Library’s Summer Reading Challenge, which she participated in a couple of years ago. “I read 20 books in four weeks by upcoming authors I had never learnt of,” she says.

Parvathy is now always in search of small novelty bookstores to find Indie authors and new books. Like any book lover who hoards as many books as possible, she makes it a point that buy at least 20 second-hand books at the Chennai Book Fair for “astoundingly low prices”.

Books have also helped Parvathy make unforgettable bonds. “I try to force my friends to read any book, and we usually bond from there. I have also made a lot of friends by browsing the shelves at Crossword, and starting up a conversation with a random girl who is flipping through my favourite books,” she says, adding she instantly befriended a girl who was reading The Book Thief at an inter-school competition. The most beautiful part? They are still in touch.

Anuradha, who also believes in bonding through books, is passing on the habit of reading to young kids by gifting them. “I gift books to my colleagues’ and neighbours’ kids.” She says she has now become the akka who distributes books.

With many libraries being upheld and book communities popping up in various pockets, the question: Is the reading culture still prevalent?, seems to have an answer. Whether you gift a book, recommend one, talk about your favourite authors to your friends, read your favourite passages to them, or recite a poem to your beloved, books are a love language in themselves, and the city is sure to preserve it.

[Written by Anusree PV of The New Indian Express. Views expressed are their own]