to the river by olivia laing (july 2023)

published in print for champaca bookstore, july 2022
the champaca book subscription is a subscription programme by champaca bookstore, wherein carefully curated books are sent to subscribers across india every month, according to a yearly theme. as part of the subscription, the champaca team writes a curation note, contextualising the books we’ve chosen within the yearly theme. these notes are written by one team member each month, but are not personal — they are written in the general voice of the bookstore.

This year, we start our new theme thinking about books that centre our connection with the world around us, especially in times of loneliness or isolation. From July to September 2022, the Champaca Book Subscription is reading about nature as refuge, and the ways in which the natural world influences us and how we live in it.

Our first book is Olivia Laing’s To The River. Known for blending memoir with cultural history and criticism, Laing is the author of a number of works on loneliness – The Lonely City, an exploration of five artists who lived and worked in New York City; and The Trip to Echo Springs, a study of writers in the grip of alcohol addiction. We’ve chosen her first work of nonfiction, as she walks the banks of the River Ouse and traces its history across centuries. The River Ouse is famously the river where Virginia Woolf drowned. Half a century later, in the wake of the end of a relationship, Laing seeks to discover the mysterious pull of the waters of the river.

To The River is named for Woolf’s To The Lighthouse, a novel that dwells on the passing of time, mirroring the ebb and flow of the sea. In Laing’s work, the rhythm of the river likewise becomes a metaphor for the ebb and flow of time, and of life itself. We loved how Laing combines meticulous research of the place’s political and cultural history with her own week-long walk around the river, bringing in a thoughtful and personal dimension to the book. 

Through vivid and careful observations of the world around her, Laing brings alive the ways in which landscapes hold meaning – meaning that we construct ourselves, by making rivers into metaphors, or dark skies into bad omens, but also histories that are written into the world around us like a palimpsest. Laing reminds us that there are stories all around us. From the banks of the river, she gives us a glimpse into the past of a country, the brilliant mind of a troubled writer, and her own relationship with nature. 

At the beginning of a new theme for a new year of reading, we wanted to remind ourselves to hold hope in our hearts and minds. For this, we send you a thoughtful book that wonders about purpose and meaning in the world: A Book of New Beginnings, put together by Jerry Pinto. A thoughtfully compiled anthology of poems, excerpts, and quotes, the book reminds us gently of the hope and comfort in everyday things. In his introduction, Pinto writes of the very human tendency to look for meaning in “life’s seeming randomness”. 

And finally, we are thrilled to be sending you something very special: the first publication from Champaca Bookstore, Virginia Woolf’s wonderful essay ‘How Should One Read A Book?’. We hope this reflective, playful, and insightful essay brings you a new perspective with which to approach reading. 

Virginia Woolf looks to the sea, and Olivia Laing  and Jerry Pinto find solace in other people’s words and the way they can reveal the wonder of what is around us – a reminder to slow down and look at the world carefully, as we embark on a year of new books.