What happens next?

My festive season was spent in pursuit of “what happens next”. It began with an early birthday gift from one of my oldest friends — three books by Keigo Higashino. Like an enabler (though I doubt  it was intentional), he sent me one each from the author’s three series. I’d never heard of Higashino, but I did recall ‘The Devotion of Suspect X’ being a rather big deal when it was translated to English. I started with that.

This coincided with my first girls’ trip: a vacation in SE Asia planned and executed on impulse when my friend was taking a break from work and I was kind of suffering a burnout. (Work stress is no joke even if you love the work).

We left the day after I receive the books, and I took ‘TDoSX’ as the obligatory to-be-read-on-holiday book. And I actually made proper headway without compromising on vacation-specific shenanigans.

Incidentally, the trip was also a sequel of sorts. I WOULD like to forget my first vacation to SE Asia — a disaster of epic proportions from which I returned with more emotional damage than what I left Kolkata with. So this one was somewhat of a do-over.

But I mustn’t digress. I returned with ‘TDoSX’ almost done, and, before I finished it, I ordered the sequels of ‘TDoSX’ and ‘Malice’, the first book of the second series.

I read ‘Malice’ in record time, then bought the remaining books in either series.

This year was also one in which my new books didn’t have to languish in the TBR pile for more than a month. Out of 12 books I wrangled out of the festive season, 9 were sequels. I read all in a month and a half.

I’ve never been a patient person. The suspense, I fear, might actually kill me. So, I never take a chance. I wait for TV/web series to run their course before I start watching; I don’t read two books at the same time because I need to know how one ends before I can invest in another; I shun ‘to be continueds’ like the plague.

But, to no one’s surprise, I’m easily swayed if it’s crime fiction. And it’s an author’s debut work.

This year, and last, I began a number of ‘-ologies’. And the tail-end of the year was all the more important since a few of the part IIs and IIIs were published.

My understanding of part IIs underwent a sea change. The antiquated example of “movie sequels never live up to the expectations” was flipped on its head. I personally had a do-over or two, and, like a better SE Asia trip and story continuations that kept up — and sometimes surpassed — the intrigue of the first instalment, it dawned on me that second chances aren’t all about dirtying the paper with a poor eraser or an inadequate whitener. It isn’t about advertising that it is a do-over either. Rather, it is a chance to improve.

I may not be able to erase mistakes. And the world may still catch me messing up. But there’s always the opportunity to write a sequel. And it might just turn out to be a better read than the first part.