Mission Impossible

Let me confess, this mission I am talking about is nowhere nearly as complex as the plot of a MI movie. Even then, Ethan Hunt has completed five missions, while I am still stuck on my first.

This happened at a home warming party recently. 

I joined the party late due to horrid traffic and was in a really foul mood. Immediately went to the make-shift bar and poured myself a liberal amount of alcohol. I had just downed a few sips of some rather potent gin, when the new home owner caught me and excitedly started showing me her home.

As we neared the end of the passage, I could hear loud voices from the bedroom. I was in no mood to socialize with this loud bunch and started making excuses to my friend. Drunk conversations need a different energy level and I was not up for it.

Paying me no heed, my friend pushed the door open. 

‘Have you read Snowman?’

‘No way, you need to start horror with Carrie’

They were discussing books! I guffawed in my head and with a rather goofy grin entered the room with her.

Quick introductions went around and I was just making myself comfortable at the corner of the bed - when this group asked me my favorite book.

I was stumped. Just one?

I could talk for hours to anyone about books. I have made friends at my library over authors. I can discuss characters, plots, twists in the plot - hours on end. But choosing a single book as a favorite? I had never thought of it before. Everyone was looking at me expectantly. It must not have been more than a few seconds really, but in my head it was at least an hour.

‘I don’t know. I can’t pick one’ was my honest answer.

It was not the duration of time I was given to respond. The discussion moved on to other topics. The heat was off me. And yet, I was highly distracted. I kept running through my favorite reads.

The Bone Collector? The Pelican Brief? The List? Shall we tell the President? Sherlock Holmes?

Through sheesh kebab and chips with assorted dips, I still kept at it.

Shogun? Little Women?

When I ran into my friend sometime in the evening, told her about my dilemma and asked her for a favorite book. She is as avid a reader as me.

‘Harry Potter’, she said without batting an eyelid,’ or could be Lord of the Rings’, she added cautiously a few seconds later.

She could not settle on one book either, but she had narrowed it down to two. My mind, on the other hand, was suggesting more books with each passing minute. 

Game of Thrones? The Bridges of Madison County? The Ten Kings? The Da Vinci Code? And how could I forget Harry Potter? Mental whack to self.

Though the conversation ended with the party, my mind was on a mission looking for the elusive answer. It has been more than a month since the question and I am none the wiser.

I could tell you authors I love to read – writing styles I enjoy reading. Maybe tell you a favorite in each genre? But no, I can’t choose one favorite book. It is mission impossible for me. 

The Making of a Bibliophile

I am not sure at what age I got addicted to reading.

Maybe it was the school library.

The school library introduced me to the adventurous world of Famous Five, Secret Seven and Hardy Boys (somehow did not manage ever picking Nancy Drew). Got introduced to the American school life through the Sweet Valley Twins franchise and also to the grown up world of Jeffrey Archer and Robin Cook. Jeffrey Archer and Robin Cook were my first encounter with pulp fiction. They were my favorite authors for the longest time. Today it is difficult to point to that one author who is my absolute favorite.

Maybe it was my parents. They read a lot.

My mother was a voracious reader – absolutely loved reading. She introduced me to Perry Mason and Sherlock Holmes.

Somehow am certain, I would never have stumbled across the epic Erle Stanley Gardener if it was not for my mother. How I usually pick a new author: I randomly flip open to some page in the book and give it a read. If it felt good, I pick. Else drop. Given how old school Erle Stanley Gardener is, I am pretty sure I would have given him a miss. I have given P.G. Wodehouse a miss because of my highly evolved selection process. And I do not change my mind about authors easily – I have not read him till date. 

As a wedding gift, my mother had received a vintage “Sherlock Holmes collection” from her brother. I remember I used to read it off the table or the floor since it was too big to hold!

Maybe it was the smell of books – the intense smell you get when you enter a library. It was and continues to be as heady as petrichor for me.

I remember going to Ram Krishna Mission library with my folks. There used to be missionaries studying, reading or taking copious notes at the big wooden tables. And absolute silence - I remember hearing the pen scrape the paper that was being written on.

The silence felt strange then. But now I know better - people were busy reading! I understand that feeling today. I can get lost in the world of the authors creation – absolutely oblivious to the world around me. Since the library survived on donations, they did not have the most recent books obviously. But they had a big collection. The bonus was – you could keep the book for more than a week unlike the library at school. Was introduced to Leo Tolstoy, and Somerset Maugham here.

I sometimes wonder if I should read those books again – not sure what I would have understood then. Somerset Maugham still makes me run to a dictionary! But in hindsight, reading such heavy material probably made me look out for another library.

Imagine my delight when I chanced upon a circulating library near home. It was choked full with books from ceiling to floor, authors new and old and had a very avid reader as the library owner!

My life has never been the same. In a matter of weeks, the owner understood my taste and started recommending new authors and books. Discovered some really amazing authors here: Daniel Silva, Robert Tanenbaum, Harlan Coben, David Baldacci among a host of others.

I still visit the library and take the owner's suggestions on new authors and books.

The school had a return policy of a week. So did the circulating library. There was real pressure since I did not like leaving books unfinished then. The other alternative was to buy the book if it was so intriguing. But my parents did not encourage buying books: “You will not read them again. There are too many books you are yet to read”. So I ended up paying fines in case I took longer than the designated one week(which happened when the books got bigger).

I disagreed with them, somehow I thought I knew better (like every other teenager). I started putting together a little book for myself. It has a list of authors, along with their books I have read. Have a neat little marking system as well – green for WOW, black for DON’T BOTHER. The idea was: once I can afford to buy books, I would buy the books marked in green. I have slowly started buying those books I had so loved – it feels so good to somehow have them in your own home.

I am yet to prove my parents wrong about one thing though: I am yet to re-read the book collection I am trying to carefully put together. I hope to prove them wrong sometime – and chances are I won’t. I have stopped reading books midway if they bore me, I don’t waste time on stories which don’t hold me. Re-reading a book? Slightly unlikely as of today. The problem is there are too many books yet to read!