And again.

What book could you read over and over again?

“There are two motives for reading a book: one, that you enjoy it, the other, that you can boast about it.”

Bertrand Russell

I think I started reading around grade 7 or 8. Because until then, the school did not have a dedicated library and I never considered reading comics as reading books. Comics were just that, comics, they were never books. Even today! So, the multibook, pre-bound Amar Chitra Katha comics that parents had gotten the oldest sibling (she started reading young. Like kindergarten young) were all handed down after they had gone up and down the street in various book exchange adventures. The comics I got to read were for the most part complete, only a few had pages torn, worn out, or missing. I remember reading a couple of Amelia Janes, then there were some random Secret Seven and Famous Five, then I graduated to Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys, probably in high school balanced by a couple of Arthur Hailey and Sidney Shledon and Michael Crichton and Stephen King. Once I had access to the library, it used to be a couple of books at any given time.

But before high school, during primary and middle school, reading was not something I spent time, effort, or resources on. It was something that I had to do on a rainy day, not something I enjoyed. In grade 7, during one of our many SUPW sessions, my General Science Teacher who was also our class teacher and our SUPW teacher noticed that most of us had finished with the craft activity and were sitting and chatting. To keep the class silent, she offered to read a book to us. We did not have a library in the school, and the kinds of books the school stocked were either copies of the bible or general knowledge books like the big book of Answers or Competition Success Review. So, when she offered to read a book, we were not too keen, because no one wanted to substitute our talk time with information. But she had to keep the class silent, and she did not have the usual ‘books’ on hand, so she offered to read out her book for us. She was reading Robin Cook’s Coma. And none of us had ever read this book. But we were not as eager as she wanted us to be, and this would only mean that we would keep disturbing the class. So, although she was halfway through the book, she offered to read the book after an introduction.

She was good. Astonishingly good! She introduced the genre and spoke about the author. Then she described the plot and introduced the characters, and this took about 30 minutes. Eventually, she opened the book and started reading excerpts. Some parts of the chapters she had already read herself but which she thought we would find interesting. And then the bell rang. The collective sigh of disappointment was spontaneous and hilarious. Here we were a bunch of seventh graders who weren’t even interested in the book to start with and yet, we were disappointed with the fact that she had only read what seemed like two pages from the book. We were hooked and we wanted more. So, she offered to read a couple of more pages until the final bell, instructing us to follow the instructions, pack our bags, and get our baskets as silently as possible so we would not disturb the others. At the final bell, we had only progressed a couple of more pages and were still hooked in the book, so she offered to read us the story every day, after the last period until the final bell, which gave us almost 20 minutes of reading time. So desperate were we, that we agreed. For the next couple of weeks, our class was the silent class after the last period and until the last bell. It was almost as if there were no children in class. The principal who sometimes did her rounds around the premises at that time, was stunned to find our class so silent. Initially, she thought we were penalized, and getting one of the many lectures our class used to get because of our unruly behavior. But when she figured that we were listening to a story, she was happy that we had finally found something that captured all our attention and kept us quiet.

The book got over well within the month, but our thirst for medical mysteries grew. Over that year, for as long as teacher M was our class teacher, we spent approximately twenty minutes reading a few pages of a book by Robin Cook (or an author she was reading then) every day. In just 30 minutes, she had converted us all into ardent followers of medical mysteries. Our class won the ‘Discipline Cup’ that year for managing to be consistently quiet in the last 20 minutes of the day. Every day! And this is an author that I always boast about. It’s a genre that’s an acquired taste, science fiction and medical mysteries have always enthralled me, and Robin Cook has always been my all-time favorite.  

Then there is the second motive for reading a book, because you enjoy it, and any regular vanilla Mills and Boon would suffice to bridge this gap. I read M&Bs because they are non-complicated romances. Boy meets girl. Or Girl meets boy. Falls in love. Gets married. Lives happily ever after. There is no chaos. No confusion. No mystery. No heartache and no drama or worry over who will die at the end. These two live happily ever after. And I liberally intersperse any of the other genres of mystery, science fiction, murder mystery, horrors, and thrillers that I usually read with these brain-numbing feel-good romance books.

“Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested”

Sir Francis Bacon

I have read most of Robin Cook, Stephen King, Colin Forbes, Arthur Hailey, and John Grisham and I have read an astonishing number of romance novels as well. So much so, that I can tell you that romance as a genre has multiple subthemes that run through them. And that, I still prefer the vanilla, plain-as-day, regular romance books. If given an option, then I always go back to reading a book from one of these genres interspersed with romance and maybe a new author from a different genre, like the Cassandra Clare books or the Twilight Series or any of the dystopian fictions doing the rounds today. For me, these are the books that are to be tasted while the usual suspects of Robin Cook, Stephen King, and others from that generation (generation is used more in terms of books released around a similar period, (of the late 1990s to the early 2000s) are books that I chew and digest because of the standard of language used in them. The plots were detailed and based as close to the real world as possible. Authors today can be tasted, but the number and kind of modifications or assumptions made of and in the English language, make assimilating the information based on a dystopian future seem like a lot of effort.

“You know you’ve read a good book when you turn the page and feel a little as if you have lost a friend.”  

Paul Sweeney

Self-help books and books on general knowledge or entrepreneurship are usually books that are read multiple times. These are the books that must be chewed and digested. We mull over them, think about them, and see how we can adapt the information so we can adapt it to make a sustainable change in our lives.