The ramblings of a book lover

I happen to be one of those people who visit bookstores with no specific intent but to walk around and waiting for a surprise to come up. A habit that a lot of my friends find funny as they go in with a specific book or books in mind and walk out once their objective is met. In the least they know exactly the section they want to hit. I admire that, don’t get me wrong, but i for one always feel like a kid in a toffee shop every time I walk into a bookstore.

As i meander through various aisles it is always nice to meet old friends, prim and proper, arranged alphabetically in their shelves, waiting for someone top pick them up and make them their own. Some of them urge me to stop to pick them up and go through their pages, most often to revisit the moments that one always remembers vividly in that book, for instance i can never pass a copy of Catch 22 by Joseph Heller, without reading the page where Doc Daneeka explains what Catch 22 was to Yossarian, in my opinion those are funniest lines ever written. Often these books also transport us back to the times when we had read the book for the first time, the first impression it had on us or at the very least it reminds us of those precious moments tucked away in a corner or that long journey which till then had been relegated to the trash can in our minds.

I do not really have a single method of selecting a book, sometimes I’ve picked a book just because the cover was attractive or the title or the author suited the mood of the moment. Unfortunately, books that i pick up often ceases to be this wonderful journey after just a few pages, not because it wasn't written well, but because the powerful expectations in our minds and the words in the book do not match. Often though, there always is a book that comes along and creates magic in its way. For me, one such book this year was the Shadow of the wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon, i honestly didn't expect much from this nondescript book, having had a conviction that most translated books stink. I was so pleasantly surprised that I had discovered a book that I would cherish for a lifetime. As i read this book I felt that I was a silent character in the book, always looking out for something new at every turn, thoroughly enjoying it when quest was rewarded. There was a downside though, after I finished reading this book, most other books I might have enjoyed normally appeared very boring. This seems to me like life itself, we go along our path, when something or someone wonderful comes along, creating magic in our lives. When they do go away, there is this vast emptiness that takes time to fill. Unlike, life though, books can be reread, the magic may not be the same but any book lover would agree with me that there is this almost childish glee when one encounters an interesting scenario or a subplot one had forgotten about after the first reading. I encounter these in nearly every book I reread, even the ones that ive read more than a dozen times previously.