This is my first interaction with the Chicken Soup for the Soul books, a set of books I was always sceptical about from the beginning; I’ve never bought a copy to date, a personal bias as it is the genre of self help books, so when an opportunity came to try my hand at reading it to know what it entails, I clicked on the blogadda review button. That in short is how I got hold of this book and started reading it.
As the snippet goes, the book has 101 stories divided into 13 sections with respect to the specific areas for the Indian or any working soul. This demarcation is helpful for a reader as they can choose which section is relevant to them and make a mental note as to how to read the book. Therefore, directional in reading.
Narrative wise, it is linear so to speak, a reader can start from the cover and end at the blurb. However, a better way to read it, is try your luck – remove the book mark (hope all of you use bookmarks, Flipkart gives you reasons for their use always ) and open randomly at a page; you’ll find a story– the end or the beginning (rarely does a story in this collection cross 3 sides) and then direct yourself, that’s what a couple of my friends (and I) did when they saw this book lying on my table this last one week. It takes hardly 5 minutes to finish a tale and move on to the next, therefore, reader friendly and a page mover … in a matter of 10-15 minutes, we would have finished quarter of the book! And this is no exaggeration.
The stories are short, they are easy reading — when I say easy, I mean you can read them anywhere, without putting a thought to them, straight from the heart, and uncomplicated… (no reading between and beyond the lines skills required), but relatable (hence, quotidian in theme), because we would have faced such incidents in ours or others lives. They are life experiences, “small miracles that attract readers” (Farmania, from the Editor’s note to this book) as written by or narrated to people, all deriving optimistic waves from the incidents and transferring them on to a reader.
Observation: The books looks loosely epistolary in structure. There is no direct address to the reader, however, the names of the writers of the piece is at the end, and in italics.
I happened to read many of the stories in the bus yesterday, and in an hour I was done with as many as 15 stories. Nevertheless, each story gave an impulse to live, it was a window to somebody else’s lived experience, a problem and a solution that came out of a practical situation and how they solved it with help from within them, family, friends & strangers. Therefore, for me on a personal note, reading the stories was akin to watching a film with a happy ending.
Recommended, of course, but not my type of book. I need some more meat to chew in a book… the self help books and movies such as Zoya Aktar’s second venture “Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara – I have similar issues with them.”