Reading as a Small Act of Resistance

a yawning cat leaning on a stack of books

Lately, I’ve been coming across endless social media threads where people argue about what everyone is reading. If you read thrillers or fantasy, you’re not serious enough. If you read only classics, you’re pretentious. If you reread books, you lack curiosity. It goes on and on. Watching these discussions, I keep wondering: when did reading become a performance?

Those arguments always leave me uneasy, because my relationship with books was never about status or appearance. For me, reading has always been something different. From the moment I discovered books, it was a small act of resistance.

I was not one of those children born with a novel in their hands. As a child, books seemed boring, and reading felt stereotypically feminine — something I wanted nothing to do with. I did not like “girly” games or interests, and I certainly did not want to be the quiet child with a book.

It was my mother who changed that. One day she came home with a present — a book, not in English, called Charlie’s Destiny. It followed the adventures of a cat whose mother leaves him at the harbour so he can travel the world. Beneath the adventure, it dealt with deeply human things: loneliness, growing up, uncertainty. I did not know it then, but opening that book was my first quiet refusal. It was the first time I stepped into a space that did not ask me to perform, compete, or prove anything. It did, however, ask me to be open-minded and curious.

That is how it began.

Once Charlie led me into the world of literature, I started reading everything I could get my hands on. I read obsessively, sometimes blindly. Most of the books I read as a teenager were far beyond my maturity. I did not fully understand them — but I read them anyway. Some, like Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, I read repeatedly. Looking back, I realise that even when I did not grasp everything, I understood enough to feel that something larger existed beyond my immediate surroundings.

But even then, reading was not simple. I had to fight for it.

I grew up between two very different worlds. Both of my parents are doctors — both successful, both devoted to their work and to each other. My mother loved theatre, music, films, and literature. My father had no patience for any of it. He came from a high-caste Indian background where education meant prestige, discipline, and measurable achievement. For him, knowledge had to be useful. It had to produce something concrete — preferably a degree, preferably medicine. Studying language or literature, he saw as foolish.

My love of books and languages seemed, in comparison, ornamental. “Anyone can read books,” he used to say. “Every idiot can learn a foreign language.”

Being seen as an idiot in my own father’s eyes hurt badly, of course. But I consciously decided not to care about his opinion. And as if the tension at home were not enough, the world outside was also beginning to unravel.

Around the same time, the country I was born in was being destroyed right in front of my eyes, and many people around me had fallen into war madness. I was twelve years old when the war in Yugoslavia started. Not even fully a teenager — there wasn’t anything I could do, my voice didn’t count. Public language grew louder, harsher, more certain. I felt increasingly small within it.

So I went to libraries and bookstores — I discovered the British Council library, full of books, films, and series from another world. What can I say?! Thank you, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, because Sherlock Holmes definitely helped me preserve my sanity in those years, when many people — including my own father — thought I was insane, a child struck by the horrors of war in my “neighbourhood.”

Throughout those war years, I held firmly to literature as my only refuge and window to the world at the same time. War led to sanctions. Sanctions led to border closures. Gradually, I found myself a prisoner in a country I could call many things, but not truly my own. Books were the only way I could leave without leaving.

All the while, my father remained convinced that my devotion to books was foolish. The more he insisted on shaping me into something I was not, the more stubbornly I resisted. Over time, that tension hardened into distance. Our relationship was irreparably damaged long before he died.

I once believed that growing older would make reading easier — that the need to defend it would simply disappear. But even later, reading remained contested ground.

After I lost my parents, I found myself in situations where reading was seen as pretentious and therefore unacceptable. I could not even open a newspaper without being mocked or shouted at. There was some leniency for romance novels — they were considered “appropriate” for women. So I read those. At least I didn’t stop entirely. Even so, there were periods when I felt lost, as if wandering through a dense forest without a clear way back to myself.

Today, I am an adult and free to buy and read as many books as I want without being humiliated. I still see reading as an act of resistance — against a world ruled by money, power, and violence. And that is why I can’t, no matter how hard I try, understand those social media arguments. What is important, and truly brilliant, is that people read, and that reading is again seen as something fashionable. It doesn’t matter what they read — romantasy, thrillers, fantasy, classics, contemporary masterpieces… As long as it makes you feel good, as long as it helps you get through the day, as long as it gives you something to feed your mind with, every book is a little victory.