kar khud ko itna buland ke khuda bande se khud puche teri raza kya hai

Friday, June 19, 2015

I love big books and I cannot lie!

Reading is a consuming hobby, Mr. Reader. I find reading a very intimate experience. Often a book becomes a window to the soul of the author. A good book sometimes draws all your heart into it. You laugh and cry with the ups and downs in the stories. And sometimes, very rarely, a wonderfully great book morphs its fantasy into your reality and reduces the reality of your every day humdrum routine to a bleak background. Many a times I have found my moods involuntarily syncing to the stories in an ongoing book, like a chameleon camouflaging into its surroundings.

I am not however a typical book nerd – I cannot read everything; I cannot read something having merely encountered it. I have not read many a famous classics and must reads. I have often tried forcing myself to it, challenging the limits of my self discipline, and I have more often than not failed myself. I simply cannot read a Shakespeare (there, I said it). I have tried but the old English is too alien for comfort. I cannot even read half the contemporary bestsellers – Umberto Eco, Jeffrey Archer, Danielle Steel, or uh-G.R.R, Martin (yes, I gave up on Game of Thrones, ah there, I said this too!!); I love an Agatha Christie but I fumble painfully halfway through a P.G. Wodehouse. But when a book rhymes with me, oh what a wonderful feeling that is! Like you have found a companion, a very familiar companion, like you have found a tiny piece of your soul.

Some books have stayed with me, like memories of special dates-forever to be remembered and enjoyed in the space of my mind. Harry Potter, Pillars of the Earth, Elizabeth’s Women, A House for Mr. Biswas, – I think the list of my favorites wobbles zig zag through genres.  I think so far I have read around 150 novels (I cannot but suppress a faint smirk). But that’s the catch- the more you read, the more you know how much you haven’t read. And it is always the most humbling experience to enter a book store-as if the hundreds of unread books were judging you like the portrait-headmasters in Dumbledore’s cabin. 

A library or a good bookstore feels like a vast palace garden- rich in the pleasures to be explored. I think everyone has a list of books – books you have already read, books you pretend to have read (but have only made through its first quarter), book you have secretly read (and cannot publicly confess so), books you want to buy, books you want to read, books you don’t want to read, and of course a list of books that you haven’t even heard of. 

I fancy that one day I would write a book myself. I found an amazing idea in a book I read, Mr. Penumbra’s 24 hours bookstore, where the story has a group of people who all write a book each about all things they learnt in life, and the books’ safety is guarded more carefully than even the life of the people who wrote it. I think I would want to write such a book too- just one big fat book, and pour all my heart into its pages, and reveal all that I have ever felt and learnt.

P.S. >>
Actually Mr. Reader I have currently laid my hands on Shantaram-a-what-a-what-a-what-a-book! Amazing, just amazing- I have only yet finished the first few chapters of it, but I am already drowned deep in Shantaram’s world. I think I will write a new blog soon- quoting some lines from the book- for the pleasure of reading is sometimes too much to have all by yourself!  Stay tuned, Mr. Reader  J