Booked for Life

Come Sunday morning and time for my weekly ritual of dusting the three bookshelves begins. As my eyes sweep over my collection, I suddenly seem to walk back in the path of childhood memories - my first tryst with a fat hardbound copy of Ukrainian folk tales which weaved a magic realm inside my head and that was when I fell, in the customary hook, line and sinker fashion, in love with books.

Many a lazy afternoon of the summer vacation were spent devouring every Enid Blyton book I could lay my hands on – in a jiffy I would take off to some distant land of islands, hills and the sea, hand in hand with the Famous Five, the Secret Seven or Five Findouters.At one point I was so obsessed with the thought of joining a boarding school just to experience the joys of midnight parties like in St.Clare’s and Malory Towers series.But I have one grievance against Enid Blyton, her books always made me crave for food and would dig into some ‘murruku’ or some such assorted goodies imagining them to be jam tarts, jellies, baked cookies and chocolate éclair cakes.

After Enid Blyton, the teenage heroines Trixie Belden and Nancy Drew had me enthralled with their words. Trixie Belden did a world of good for my rapidly increasing vocabulary. As Nancy Drew was my first brush with teenage romance, which brings me to another of my favorite heroes - Tom Sawyer –words like ‘truant’ and ‘hookey’ were used in good amount thanks to Mark Twain’s influence.

During the busy school days, the colorful Amar Chitra Katha and Chandamama gave me company between dreary homework. The myriad folklore of India and the mythological legends of Ramayana and Mahabharat were brought to life through these colorful books long before the television series began.

The phase of playing pirates then arrived- Treasure Island influenced me enough to tie one of my eyes and pretend to be Long John Silver and try and sing in my best masculine voice I could muster ’Fifteen men on a dead mans chest, Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum.’Books like ‘Heidi’, ‘Black Beauty’, ‘Little Women’ and ‘Pride and Prejudice’ were the favorites in High School where every girl dreamed of finding her own Darcy one day.

With the arrival of college, the pulp fiction made inroads into my shelves. Sidney Sheldon, Robin Cooks, Jeffrey Archers, Ken Follet, James Hadley Chase, Fredrick Forsyth and Harold Robbins often accompanied me to long,boring lectures. But one book, which majorly influenced most college goers of the 90s was ‘The Fountain Head’ where Ayn Rand’s radical ideas and the philosophy of objectivism were happily lapped to be soon rejected as we entered the complex Corporate world.

In between all this I had discovered the joys of poetry – what started with poems in the English school text books soon found a place on my bookshelf - Keats, Wordsworth and more recently Emily Dickenson, Anna Akhmatova and Sylvia Plath. While fiction provided the food for thought, poetry was the perfect fulfillment of my aesthetic senses.

Corporate world gave me free bandwidths of internet to explore new authors. Soon John Steinbeck, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Somerset Maugham, Virginia Woolf, Oscar Wilde jostled for space on my bookshelf. Stricly a skeptic of non-fiction I even managed to read a few of that genre like Lee Iacocca’s Autobiography, Richard Bach’s ‘Bridge Across Forever’. Though my shelf hasn’t seen too many Indian authors –Ruskin Bond and R.K.Narayan have stood proudly among the other international writers.

Blame me on my total lack of patience, but these days I am unable to appreciate contemporary literature with the exception of a few (Margaret Atwood, Michael Crichton and J.K.Rowling come to my mind) or sometimes totally driven out of curiosity I did read books like ‘Da Vinci Code’.

Kids these days have more forms of entertainment than we did (cell phone games, video games, outdoor games and not to omit the ubiquitous cable TV) but I always tell them that there is more fun in flying to unknown destinations along with books than to all those places that the TV channels offer.

My journey of reading has had a colorful beginning and an interesting middle but I am happy to say that the end is nowhere near.