In a recent visit to a book shop, I was astounded to see the size of it. It was about 300 sq.ft with half of the shop for toys and stationery and the remaining half was about 4 racks of books. Some familiar titles and some unfamiliar ones. The titles of the unfamiliar ones looked interesting but on reading the blurb, the interest was lost.

This was the third bookshop I walked into, looking for a book. In all the three bookshops, I had a similar experience. There would surely be bookshops which are bigger in size but those are a few and far between.

As a person who worked in a huge bookshop with rows and columns of books and of different genres, seeing the reduced size of bookshops was heart wrenching. Guess that’s the impact of less readership, more digital reading and audio books and perhaps other reasons too.

Visiting these book shops took me back my memory lane of when I first started reading books, as a hobby.

When I was in Grade 4, Appa had bought books by Fredrick Forsyth and Arthur Hailey and flipping thru the pages for his reading. I couldn’t understand much but loved the flipping thru and the words in it.

Sometime that year, I laid my hand on a book by Enid Blyton. That got me hooked. After that, I would lap up every book by Enid Blyton that I got a chance to read. The series of Malory Towers and St Clare’s were my favorite. The mischief the children were up to in their residential school would give me a broad smile and a few chuckles. Many years later I remember buying them for myself. When a friend’s daughter saw it and loved it, I gifted it to her. The same series, I got as a gift from another friend (from her collection) who heard me talking about it fondly. What goes around comes around. Gifting books gives such joy!!

When I was in my 9th, I recall appa being in Bangalore many months a year. We would come to Bangalore during holidays. My companion became the library nearby and every few evenings we would go to the library to borrow books. My tryst with library mmbership started then and went on until a few years back. Different places, different libraries but books and books and more books borrowed 🙂

As I grew, I moved from Enid Blyton to books of Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys and The Secret Seven.

I was soaking in books, learning and expanding my knowledge of vocabulary, English as a language, places, people and situations. There was a time when my friends would jocularly say, “You can talk anything around Malathy and she wouldn’t hear a thing.” I was referred to as a ‘book worm’.

I then moved towards books by Sidney Sheldon, Arthur Hailey, James Hadley Chase, Fredrick Forsyth, Jeffrey Archer. Alongside was my journey with Mills and Boons. Now this was certainly a different genre. I had my favorite authors in this genre as well. Places, situations, people, romance and what I loved the most learning – the art of wine tasting as described in some of these books and the description of places and people (loved the idea of the Tall, Dark, Handsome man). My depth and width of knowledge on various aspects expanded.

There were some books that I loved reading which I kept going back to – Mister god, this is Anna, Alice in Wonderland, Richard Bach’s Jonathan Livingston Seagull, Murphy’s Law (and this law in this book stayed with me  and helped me thru some tough times – anything that can go wrong, will go wrong)

When I got the opportunity to work in Landmark bookshop (in Chennai) immediately after my undergrad, I took it without a second thought. This was a wonderful two years of being surrounded by books. There wouldn’t be time to read books in continuity, as we would be engaged in different chores all thru the day – but just that feel of the books, arranging them, the smell of the almost freshly printed books, flipping thru them to read a paragraph or two, getting to know the different genres, authors, best sellers, publishers, ordering and reordering for books, taking a customer request for a specific book and so on and so forth.. When there was a lull in the customer walk in at some part of the day, walking around to the different sections and seeing the kind of books that are there, flipping thru them, reading a para or a page, the blurb. The list goes on..

This was also when I got to know that there was a genre called non-fiction and self-help books. Wayne Dyer and Napoleon Hill and Desmond Morris and Stephen Covey and the biographies and auto biographies. I didn’t gravitate to this genre so much except for the ones by Desmond Morris and a specific one by Stephen Covey called ‘The seven Habits by highly effective people’, which I would have read a zillion times (an exaggeration certainly – not a zillion but quite many times :-)). Changed my thinking quite a lot..

As a voracious reader, I tried my hand at books by PG Wodehouse but he is one author whose books I could never read beyond the first few pages. In an effort to keep trying, I would try reading after a gap of a few years but no no.. Just couldn’t and haven’t. I have let it go and making no more attempts to try reading his books. Well, such is life, there are some things we take to and some we don’t.

Libraries that I was a member in, had a section of books in Tamil –  A language that I can read and am familiar with. Having heard and read about authors like Sivasankari, Ramani Chandran, Kalki, Cho Ramaswamy (Thuglak, a Tamil Magazine of his – focused on political satire), I veered towards reading Tamil books too. Ponniyin Selvan was a book that was one of my first reads into history, with a fictional element to it. Cho Ramaswamy’s books in Tamil on Ramayana (which was one of the references for me to write a series of blogs on) and Mahabharata are brilliant in the way it is written. I am sure there are many more great reads in Tamil and haven’t forayed in it yet.

Oh yes, how can I forget British Council!! I became a member of it and would saunter all around the different sections, loved their cataloguing but didn’t quite take to their collection.

How much a fascination for something makes us make decisions in life!! The fascination for books made me enrol into a course on Library Science, in an aspiration to work in British Council. Neither did I complete it not did I seek work at British Council. I have always wanted a room or a complete wall dedicated to only books, That hasn’t happened yet but managed to have some shelves filled with books, some read and quite some not :-). As the years roll by, I also realise that my reading has widened in genres, depending on my changing interests and fascination.

The fascination for printed books remains and my dear Kindle feels left out many times. The musty smell of old paper and the fresh printed smell of new paper, is always a draw!!

What a kaleidoscope of a journey it has been with books.. Book as a companion, as a teacher, as a friend, as an entertainer, as an answer and as many many more.. Each of them making their own pattern and their own shape in my mind. They have shaped my vocabulary, my exeriences, the way I think and the way I am.. Incredibly grateful!!