Bonjour Bookworm

Oft have people questioned my habit of splurging my rather meager salary on books, specially since the kind of books I buy don’t exactly come cheap – there are those who wonder at my insistence on buying original copies, instead of the pirated copies available freely on the footpaths and at small book vendors. Apart from that fact that I firmly believe the author deserves his royalty even if he is dead and buried several feet underground, there is the fact that these kind of oeuvres simply aren’t available in the pirated version, since they aren’t exactly consumed by the larger audience, and if I may, common audience! Tell me when you last saw a copy of Marquis de Sade’s Incest, or Ellen Feldman’s The Boy who Loved Anne Frank or Lawrence Durrell’s Monsieur gracing the footpath, beckoning you with open arms, inviting you to pick it up and take it home with you? And then, how do I explain the sheer pleasure of holding an original publication in one’s hands – the feel of those crisp pages, the words on each page staring back at me unwaveringly, urging me to devour each alphabet? I guess this, despite my increasingly regular (not to mention disturbing) spells of inability to read more than a couple of pages a day, is what marks me as a literary snob and a bookworm…

Bookworm – oh how I reveled in that pseudonym, even more so than my other plume de nom, Plain Jane…and how I ache to read once again with that voracity that made me devour books with a ravenous hunger of one who has been starved of Literature, even though reality was that I was always surrounded by it. Yesterday after a really long time I found myself lost in the book, oblivious to other commitments and responsibilities, and I spent a blissful afternoon transported to another world as I greedily worked my way through The Boy who Loved Anne Frank – a brilliant work that not only moved me, but has forced me to question my interest in the Holocaust. It made me wonder how I could possibly pretend to understand or even sympathise with the pain of the victims – me who was born in a society where “war” is something distant, when my only associations with starvation and poverty are with what I see (but not feel) on the roads as I commute in a bubble of comfort in my air-conditioned car (or even that rickety, uncomfortable bus which also puts me several ranks above them.)…

This morning I started Incest, a work that scandalized the readers when first published, with it’s exploration of the most devious and skin-crawling morally evil act. To be able to say that I’ve read one-third of the novel already (and this mostly while commuting) makes me want to gloat and crow in sheer exhilaration.

Welcome back Bookworm – it was real lonely without you…hope you plan to stick around a while! Amen!

Current Music:- Don’t Talk Just Kiss – Right Said Freddie, Be My Baby - Vanessa Paradis
Current Mood:- Indolent and sensuously relaxed, after a glorious body scrub and long hot shower…and itching to get under the covers and finish that book ;-)