Reading The Authenticity Project

 

Getting started

I placed an online order of the book The Authenticity Project by Clare Pooley sometime in Jan 2023. During the few days I was waiting for the book to arrive, I had exclaimed to C that the only imagery that came by when I thought about the book was me gently and lovingly dropping on the bed with the book in both my arms. And reading it to my heart’s content. Like it was a real person!

That was how much I was excited by the book; of course I did not know what the book was about and chanced upon it by recommendations from somewhere, and the convincing point for me to buy it was Sophie Kinsella’s take on the book. So… the imagery of me lying on the bed with the book could be because I was going to read a fiction book after a long time: not the serious ones along the lines of The Kite Runner or The Good Earth, but the light-hearted ones. Speaking of that category, I've loved reading Sophie Kinsella's books, and was even more delighted that she had written a praise for this book.

Forgotten 

I guess by the end of the first quarter of 2023, after dad's death-facing episode, I kinda lost touch with the book. Add to it the table tennis rigor and other distractions associated with it, new books (Five Regrets of the Dying and so on), dad's death, mom's cancer treatment, and new school for the boys. So, it was basically a perfect sabotage to make me completely forget about the book, as well as the whatever little flow that I had in my life.

Getting back

I hardly remember why I got back to the book. Perhaps, I chanced upon the book after I rearranged my so-called library because mom had come back after six months of staying away at M's place owing to chemo treatment. And add to it my memory of the fondness with which I held the book the first time and started reading it.

The feeling

With any book that I am reading, I mostly rely on the bookmark to pick where I had left, and I've never had difficulties picking up the context, even if I was coming back after a week or so. But then, they were all non-fiction. With this one, when I started reading from the page where I placed the bookmark, I could hardly remember why all the characters in the book were together in one place. So, I went back one chapter. Nope. Absolutely blank!

I knew all of them in the book, their back story, but then, was completely agnostic of where they are in their lives. I flipped back a few more pages and skipped a few more chapters back in time. And then, I completely gave it up. I felt like I had amnesia, not of self but of other people's lives. So, I decided that instead of being so unsure I might as well start from the beginning. So almost 270 pages of reading went in vain! I was like, me getting hooked to a book is like a rare phenomenon, and now this!

With the number of ‘work in progress’ books, I wonder how many times I am going to have to feel this way in my life…

~24Feb2025