Books and reading

I most definitely have a very good memory of early childhood days; in fact, I have once written a post about my earliest memories from  Age 3 right up to the time I was married. But try as hard as I can, I just cannot remember when the first time was when I ever picked up a book to read! It now seems to be something I was born with, mainly because I cannot remember a time when I was not reading and when I didn’t enjoy it.

Over time, my love for books and reading has evolved, stabilized and reached a kind of equilibrium and has become one of the constants in my life. Any voracious reader would vouch for this – over the years, we all end up becoming a very unique kind of book lover with a profile that is so very individual and particular to us and has no similarity to any other. In this post, I am trying to capture some of my so called “eccentricities” as a book reader and lover. These are seemingly random facts and in no particular order so would request anyone who reads this to refrain from trying to derive some pattern. :P

1.    I have grown up with a strong aversion to reading most non-fiction (read business related, philosophical, self improvement here) works, however popular and acclaimed they might be. I might pick one up on an urge but I find it extremely difficult to go through the entire thing. Earlier on, I used to actually buy some which had received very good reviews but when these literally started gathering dust on my book shelf, I decided to spare myself the expense.

2.    On the other hand, I love to read autobiographies or biographies. Looking over the shoulder of a great person, in his  / her own words or someone who has researched them meticulously and reading about the events and paths they walked down gives me a different kind of high. This could even be a series of episodes of someone like Sane Guruji who has so beautifully narrated childhood remembrances about his mother’s love. This one was in Marathi, a language in which I can fluently speak but reading Marathi for a period of time doesn’t come so easy. But with “Shyaamchi Aai” (Shyam’s Mother), this problem didn’t arise even once and it didn’t stop the tears from coming during some poignant moments! Another very different example is “The Painted House”, essentially a work of fiction by John Grisham but based on various elements of his childhood in rural Arkansas and which provides a bird’s eye view of Grisham’s own childhood. A must read for every Grisham lover, and not just for his departure in this book from his usual fare of lawyers and trials in the continental USA.

3.    Then there is my penchant for collecting some books which are on my all time “must have” list, books which I know I will definitely read but have not yet been able to, maybe just daunted by the sheer size of the tomes – some examples of this are the English translation of Shriman Yogi (a highly recommended Shivaji biography), The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (managed to get hold of a beautiful leather bound edition second hand, that makes it even more appealing) and The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe, one of my most favourite authors from the macabre and thrilling stories genre.

4.    There are some people who love to fold a corner of the page to mark it for when they pick it up again. It may work for some but I can’t bear to fold even a single page on any book even if it means that I have to hunt a few moments to pick up where I had left. Don’t you think that if you have really been reading the book, you’d be able to find your way back soon enough? J My books have to be in pristine condition and as far as only I handle them, they are. This has sometimes led to small arguments with S but then, they are her books as well and so now, I let her be. :P

5.    I have a very good friend, let’s call her A (she is actually one of S’s best friends). We hardly speak – but when we do, we connect as if we had never had such a long gap in between. And our biggest binding factor (other than S, of course) is our mutual love of books! We can talk books for hours on end and the best part is, we both seem to like the same kind of books. So if I know, A has read such and such book and has loved it, I am definitely bound to do so as well. So, we don’t need to think too much about what to gift each other. J You’ve heard about book worms; now you hear of book friends too. A, S and me have grown up together and it has been great to trade phrases like “bull in a china shop”, “blistering barnacles” and “ten thousand thundering typhoons” with A and see the flabbergasted looks on the other kids faces!

6.    I have always thought that in the instances where movies have been based on books, they have never ever been able to do justice to the books, never ever. Well well, maybe Godfather (Part 1) was as good and maybe Lord of the Rings came close as well, but then, that’s just a needle in the proverbial haystack. And then, I watched The Pursuit of Happyness (am yet to read the book, but the movie was so so good that I have really high expectations from the book).

7.    Put me in a Landmark or a Crossword outlet or of late the Flipkart website, you can leave me alone for hours on end and be sure I won’t get bored or complain. The simple pleasure of browsing through all those books, reading through their summaries, getting to know new authors and newer genres of writing makes it all worth it. The only flipside is that my wallet tends to get correspondingly lighter at the end of it. L

8.    My one dream was to be able to buy books to my heart’s choice and stock them up in my very own “floor to ceiling” book cabinet. I fulfilled that dream; as some of you may know, my new home has a 13 feet height (as we live in an apartment building in Mumbai where space is at a premium, this is well worth mentioning) and I ensured that I got built a 12-foot book cabinet right in our living room and have housed all my books there with space for more to come. But like all good things, I foresee the day when even this bookshelf will be left with no more space and then I shall have to think of other innovative ways to store my books.

9.    My first thought when I think about what I want to gift someone dear to me is books. Obviously, I also give due importance to what kind of book they might prefer and gift one accordingly. So, if you ever receive a book from me as gift, consider yourself to be dear to me (at our own peril ;P).

10. My earliest memory is of reading lots and lots of Enid Blytons (The Famous 5, The Secret 7, The 5 Find-outers, The Secret series, you name them and I have read them; even including the St. Clares Twins and The Mallory Towers series), Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew novels and those too at a very frantic pace. Another childhood favourite was The Three Investigator series by Alfred Hitchcock which I devoured with glee; these were even better as the 3 boys starring in them were much closer to my age then. I was then also on a feed of Amar Chitra Katha, Tinkle and Indrajal comics including Phantom, Bahadur, Flash Gordon and Mandrake.

11. S, having known me from when I was all of 11 years old, is privy to my craziness of reading and has accordingly gifted me (as a post wedding gift) the entire Tintin series!!! The glee on my face when I took delivery of those was a sight to behold. J I have had my eyes on a very good deal for the entire Asterix comics series available on Flipkart for a while now and when my own guilt burns out, I will take that plunge as well.

12. My latest find are graphic novels and have recently read 2 very good ones – World’s End by Neil Gaiman and The Dark Knight Returns of DC Comics (yes, the latest movie craze is based on this one). Another one highly recommended to me is called Watchmen and I am waiting to get hold of it. Reading graphic novels needs a very relaxed frame of mind just in order to make sense of the author’s original intention combined with the extremely “graphic” layout of the novel itself. Without an open mind, you might just end up skimming over the entire novel, getting a gist of the story and concluding that it was a drag whereas the sequence of events may have actually been very interesting.

13. Another interesting fact is that mythological works like the Mahabharata and Ramayana have been written again and again by various authors who lent it their own voice and special touches; many might feel that such rendering would be just a repetition of what they had already read, say in the Valmiki Ramayana but to me, each reading has had its own charm and has, in its own special way, added up to make my understanding and pleasure of this epic tale something magnificent and mammoth. Ashok Banker’s Ramayana is a case in point – would urge all Ramayana lovers to take these up if they haven’t already done so.

14. As of last count, I had 101 books which I have bought but not yet read. Having written this here, I am suddenly feeling very guilty and I shall end this post right here with a resolution to curb my urge to buy books even if it means tying my hands together before entering a bookshop. So there!