The Thing About Books
“The Thing about Books”
Do you get that overwhelming euphoric feeling when you go inside a bookshop or a library? Do you smell through the pages of old books, yellow and worn out with time (and new ones!), and get that ecstatic sensation? Do you get that comforting feeling when you know you are carrying some books with you, even just for the sake of carrying it (not to mention, it is a cure for that toxic boredom, too)? During rainy days and bed weathers, do you just want to grab something from the book shelf with a mug of hot chocolate on the bedside table? If you have answered mostly “yes”, then let me tell you something: You are inflicted with book madness! Books, of fiction or non-fiction, are some kind of a drug. They tend to put us in a trance, bringing us afloat to another dimension apart from this physical earth. They leave us thinking, and at the end, past the last page, leave us with the side-effects. Somehow, we end up lingering upon the details that we absorbed from the pages. When we read fiction, we live another life (a couple of it or even hundreds). We obtain more perspectives. We see the world through a magnified lens and then through one with a wide range. One moment, we are a suicidal teenage boy who gets bullied for being a brainy, another moment we are an affluent bachelor who throws a weekend-long party every weekend in an attempt to see the love of his life who had long been married to another man. Today, we are Oedipus Rex. Tomorrow, we are Anne Frank. It is a rare case of multiple personality disorder that only lives within the corners of a book. Don’t you feel a little bit pleasant inside a house that shelters books? Someone said that poor people have television sets and rich people have books. I don’t think that with that person’s conviction, he only meant material wealth by ‘rich’. I believe that word implies something more essential than what meets the eyes. Perhaps, it suggests knowledge or wisdom. When we read, we invest in
Do you get that overwhelming euphoric feeling when you go inside a bookshop or a library? Do you smell through the pages of old books, yellow and worn out with time (and new ones!), and get that ecstatic sensation? Do you get that comforting feeling when you know you are carrying some books with you, even just for the sake of carrying it (not to mention, it is a cure for that toxic boredom, too)? During rainy days and bed weathers, do you just want to grab something from the book shelf with a mug of hot chocolate on the bedside table? If you have answered mostly “yes”, then let me tell you something: You are inflicted with book madness! Books, of fiction or non-fiction, are some kind of a drug. They tend to put us in a trance, bringing us afloat to another dimension apart from this physical earth. They leave us thinking, and at the end, past the last page, leave us with the side-effects. Somehow, we end up lingering upon the details that we absorbed from the pages. When we read fiction, we live another life (a couple of it or even hundreds). We obtain more perspectives. We see the world through a magnified lens and then through one with a wide range. One moment, we are a suicidal teenage boy who gets bullied for being a brainy, another moment we are an affluent bachelor who throws a weekend-long party every weekend in an attempt to see the love of his life who had long been married to another man. Today, we are Oedipus Rex. Tomorrow, we are Anne Frank. It is a rare case of multiple personality disorder that only lives within the corners of a book. Don’t you feel a little bit pleasant inside a house that shelters books? Someone said that poor people have television sets and rich people have books. I don’t think that with that person’s conviction, he only meant material wealth by ‘rich’. I believe that word implies something more essential than what meets the eyes. Perhaps, it suggests knowledge or wisdom. When we read, we invest in