What Lilly’s Library Represents To Me

Growing up as a non-white reader in a non-Western country was interesting to say the least. You don’t realise how many Western cultural things you pick up on until you actually pause and look around you and go, wait, this is nothing like my lived experience. It took a good many years for me to unlearn the way media centralises white stories that I didn’t have to consume only those stories.

(I still read and watch them, because a) they are everywhere still even if now we’re getting our voices out as well and b) look, some of them are really good.)

I’ve talked about the first time I felt represented on the page before, but I still used to shy away from book clubs and the like because they once again never felt like my experience. They felt like things for other people, not for me.

(We’ll ignore the failed book clubs my friends and I attempted to start. Now we have a book chat where we talk whatever we’re reading and recommend books to each other. And I only just found this out from my sister who was not the reader of the family growing up. I’m so proud.)

Lilly’s Library – and before that the SARC – feel more like me. If you’ve not seen it yet, Lilly’s Library is a social media based book club curated by Lilly Singh sharing South Asian stories. SARC – or the South Asian Reading Challenge – is a challenge set forth to add more South Asian reads to one’s TBR. (I’ve blogged about it before though I have fallen wayside with actually reading much these days.)

A book community celebrating South Asian reads and culture? Recommendations ranging from biographies to romance novels to historical novels? Discussions about growing up Indian, about representation and what that might mean on an individual level? Recipes up on TikTok? (Yeah, this last one is primed directly for me.)

Sign me the eff up.

For the sake of complete transparency, I’m not actually reading these books yet. I’ve got a buttload of books on my TBR and yes, I am adding a bunch of these on – but I can’t stick to a reading schedule which is why book clubs don’t work for me. But everything else? The community, the dialogues, the videos – the recipes! It’s got me hyped that there is a place for South Asian stories, there’s a place for South Asian voices.

And for a very long time, it felt like if we wanted South Asian stories, we could only look inward. Look at South Asia, that those of us living in the diaspora could not find our faces and our voices internationally. It was – still is, at times – a depressing thought. Our stories are as much for everyone as the Western ones I grew up reading. Seeing readers – not just South Asian readers – realise and enjoy that now makes me so happy.

Maybe someday I’ll be able to keep up with and join in the book club discussions going on, but for now I’m stoked that there is a place, a platform, a community for South Asian readers to share their love for reading and their stories.