FINDING THE PLOT IN A WORLD OF BOOKS!
I still remember the
first time in my life I could not put a book down. It was my Enid Blyton phase,
and the book was ‘The Secret of Moon Castle’. Eerie dim lit rooms, clanking
suits of armour, paintings flying off the wall and eyes moving within portraits…
all designed to leave me awake, my heart in my mouth all night.
Of course, I was no stranger
to tales that sent a chill up my little spine. Before I began to decipher words
on my own, my maternal grandfather, a litterateur in his own right, would seat
me beside him and describe the events of poems as eventful as ‘The Highwayman’,
The Lady of Shalott’ and ‘Lord Ullin’s daughter’, all of which were specially
meant to scare the heebie-jeebies out of impressionable young minds. After all,
they all had elements of suspense, violence and death. However, the way in
which he recounted the stories made me hang on to his every word and fall in
love with English poetry even at that age.
https://kathleenbaldwin.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Alfred-Noyes-The-Highwayman-on-blue-background.pdf
My mother, his
daughter after all, took the baton from him. On balmy nights, we would sit in
the garden where she would transport me into a world that seemed so far from what
I was used to. The two images that still remain in my mind are from two of my
favourite classics of all times – The Count of Monte Cristo where a young
Edmond Dantes is shipped off to the Château d'If, a grim prison, that looms before him, where he is
sentenced to spend the rest of his life for a crime that he has not committed.
The second image that populated my dreams for ages was that of Quasimodo, the
mishappen hunchback of Notre Dame, who falls in love with the exquisite
Esmeralda and discovers that he has a heart after all. Two brilliant stories that carried the gamut of all human experiences - love, betrayal, greed, passion and retribution.
Goodreads
I had the opportunity
to spend two years with my paternal grandparents while in school since my
father was posted in a station that had not many good schools. While there, I
discovered myriad books on Indian mythology, including the seven volumes of
Krishnavatara by K M Munshi. While I was aware of the epics, having read them
in their simplest form, I understood that there was so much more to the playful
Krishna than I had ever imagined. Like a wonderstruck Arjuna witnessing him in
his resplendent Vishwaroopa, I peeled off the layers, my young mind delighting
in nuggets of wisdom disguised as wonderful stories.
Hindu
Amar Chitra
Katha nestled beside Archie comics, Greek and World folktales opened new worlds
and Little Women and Pride and Prejudice found space alongside Ruskin Bond,
Tagore and RK Narayan. What was amazing was that my parents bought me (and my
sisters) books every month, not based on their prices but on the content they
had to offer. Birthdays found us waiting to tear open our gifts and to squeal
in glee when we found the exact books that we had been longing to read. It was
a beautiful childhood, indeed!
The Statesman
Humour came in the form of the inimitable PG Wodehouse, who regaled us with his witticisms, his sagas on Bertie Wooster and his stoic Jeeves, his adventures of witty damsels, absent minded earls, indomitable aunts and frankly ‘dodgy’ characters who could not be trusted. Many a time I found myself chuckling to myself on a train, or in my balcony, over the descriptions which only Wodehouse, with a straight face, could come up with.
Waterstones
From very
early in life, I realised that I wanted to be a writer. I began with writing my
first poem at the age of ten, and today, many decades later, I needed to give
back something to the world of literature, albeit in a small way, a kind of
homage, perhaps. That is how, with the help of Readomania Publishers, I brought
out three adaptations for young readers, just so they could delve into them and
decide whether they need to go the whole hog and dive into the originals.
Needless to say, these adaptations are extremely close to my heart.
Today, my
greatest regret is that reading sometimes takes a back seat, with life having decided
to butt in, in so many ways. I take longer to finish a book, and sometimes, I
do need to re-read certain parts to take the essence in. While the books I had
read in my youth and childhood stay on, firmly entrenched in my imagination,
some of the books I read recently do not. Is that because my concentration
levels have come down, or are the books to blame? Maybe more the former, I
guess!
Dan Brown, Khaled Hosseini, Arundhati Roy, Coleen Hoover, Kristin Hannah, Chitra Banerjee, JK Rowling, Haruki Murakami, Kazuo Ishiguro, Shashi Tharoor, Abraham Varghese, Ashwin Sanghi, Amish Tripathi… the list of popular writers is open-ended. Readomania Publishers helmed by the intrepid Dipankar Mukherjee, is one publishing house bringing out interesting and intriguing books in myriad genres for adults and children.
Today, more people are writing than ever before, and it is impossible to get your head around all the books written across the world.
This post is a part of ''Plot Twist Blog Hop hosted by Manali Desai and Sukaina Majeed under #EveryConversationMatters.
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