For as far back as I can remember, I've loved books. Among my earliest memories are those of me and my brother sitting on the sofa with Mum reading to us from one of those 'Sapphire' fairy tale books we still have. When we grew older we would associate ourselves with the three billy goats gruff (in the Ladybird book series), me being the oldest and my sister the youngest, until the day I thought that ugly troll in the story was rather cute and decided to change roles. I remember my Dad reading stories like Chicken Little, the Little Red Hen, the Enormous Turnip, Ass' Skin (one of my favourites), the Musicians of Bremen, and even drawing a picture of Dorothy and Toto from the Wizard of Oz. When I got older and realised I could wield a mean paintbrush, I painted a monkey on my cousin's T-shirt, a dragon on my brother's and that naughty Matthew kitten on mine - all copied from books.
In those days, our pocket money just about covered the daily icecream we would buy and a little bit more; so, we had to wait for presents and I was happy when they turned out to be books. Plus, I would wait for the annual Parents' Day at school since that was when the prizes would be distributed and I always (except for one year, I think) got a General Excellence Award which was - yep, you guessed it - books. Usually, they were story books but for winning the best speaker award in a debate in the tenth standard, I got a Pears Encyclopaedia and for topping in the sixth standard, I got a dictionary (Websters'). That was my third dictionary, the first being his own 1937, Second Edition, The Little Oxford Dictionary that Dad gave me and which I still have and treasure (it has his schoolday notes too) and the second being the picture dictionary that Mum gave me which was quite a hit in school. Of course, there was this massive Chambers Dictionary ( I will never refer to another English Dictionary since this is the best) for common use at home, from where I picked up the Greek and Cyrillic scripts, and the Hindi and Marathi dictionaries. The first dictionary I bought was a русско-английский словарь, a Russian-English dictionary, from a book fair held in college by Mezhdunarodnaya Kniga, since I was teaching myself the basics of Russian at the time so I could identify cosmonauts on stamps from the erstwhile Soviet Union, but Dad gave me the money for that. So technically, the first dictionary I bought (read picked up with my own money) was the Cassell's German and English dictionary for Rs.70 (a lot of money in those days) which I still use.
I never could figure out though how they chose books as prizes. After getting a dictionary and books on electricity and mechanics, I got a fairy tale in a higher class so it was a little weird. I once got a book on gymnastics as a prize which was strange considering that our school was never big on sports and obviously as there was no gym, we never had even basic lessons on gymnastics. I didn't mind that book though as, in those days, I was an avid fan of gymnasts like Dmitri Bilozertchev, Aurelia Dobre and Natalia Yurchenko.
Back to getting books as gifts, one birthday gift from Mum was a set of two books by Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island and The Black Arrow. While I liked the former, I found the latter dead boring. I tried and tried to read it but I didn't manage to get past page 25 or so. So I hyped it up, and gave it to my brother as a Christmas present on condition that he gave me one of his Three Investigators books. He wasn't pleased with the agreement once he started reading it and that book still lies unclaimed. While on the subject of boring books, I did once come across an Agatha Christie (a Tommy and Tuppence book but I don't remember the name) where the only bit of action, if I remember correctly, was a dog running. I found it dead boring but I did manage to complete it, reading page by page in the hope that the next page would be interesting. Perhaps, if a movie has been made on that book, it would be a good deal more bearable. Sometimes, however, you watch a movie after reading a great book only to realise that you would have been better off without it. I enjoyed reading Alistair MacLean's Ice Station Zebra but was sorely disappointed when I saw the movie. If I had to choose between reading a book and watching a film made on it, I would opt for the former any day because when you read a book, you are transported to a different world, a world where you are free to imagine the characters the way you want them to be and where you can proceed at your own pace. Having said that, particularly in cases where there is more than one volume of a book and a television series or a movie has been made on it, it'd be very difficult to read a book without associating the actors with the characters, especially when one approves of the choice. I can never read Sherlock Holmes without seeing Jeremy Brett's face nor can I read the Yes Minister or the Yes Prime Minister series without imagining the characters to look just like Paul Eddington, Sir Nigel Hawthorne and Derek Fowlds.
So, as we grew, with each passing year, our taste in books changed. Enid Blyton, Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys, the Three Investigators,... We had limited choice in books, there being not many bookstores then as there are now. Every week, Dad would pick up a comic from the newstand - Phantom, Mandrake or Flash Gordon (whatever was published). And during school vacations, we would frequent the local library everyday for comics we didn't have (Archies, Richie Rich, Spooky, Casper, Sad Sack) and the Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys books. At first we would get just one of these books a day and three comics until we realised that while one of us was reading the book, the other two were just twiddling our thumbs waiting for it to be finished. We then would get three books everyday or every two days depending on how fast we'd finish them. I was crazy over the Biggles series and I managed to get a few hardcover books in those days for Rs.20 each. In 'The Cruise of the Condor', a 1932 story, there was a character called Slimy Silva and we kept that as a nickname for every slimy character we met. I guess we went through these phases where one sibling reads a particular author and the others also jump on to the bandwagon. For, when I was in college, more authors started appearing in the market and we latched on to Agatha Christie and Erle Stanley Gardner's Perry Mason series. I remember Dad taking me to the hospital for dental surgery - consequences of a botched-up root canal job. I had my jaw drilled but on the way back picked up a load of Perry Masons at the railway station because they were just Rs.22 apiece and settled down with one of them in the train. The big joke was that the school library restricted reading of these authors (Christie and Gardner) to just the teachers (no idea why) and when my sister, naturally having read the books at home, started recommending reading material to the teachers, most of them were scandalised. This was about the time I'd started building up my collection of classics as well, one of which, War and Peace, was appropriated by my sister at the time when she should have been concentrating totally on her Secondary School Certificate exams; she completed it overnight when all of us thought she was studying.
In college, I would save my pocket money and visit the old paper mart after class and pick up commando and western comics, both old and new for 50 paise to Rs.2 or a 3-in-1 for Rs.5. The price stayed steady for a few years within which period, I bought quite a good number. It was a lot of money in those days but now that I think back, it doesn't seem like much. But then, the cost of everything has gone up. I could travel by bus to college in just 50 paise; now, that coin has almost gone out of circulation. And so have those comics. Fortunately, Archie comic digests, of which I've also built up a collection over the years, are still available though they are getting more and more expensive with time. Did I forget to mention I also collect Asterix and Tintin ?
When I'd pick up those comics in college, the girls thought I was mad since they'd all read romance novels. Well, I guess I am a bit weird but I've also had my share of reading this stuff. It's okay when you're bored and want to complete book in an hour and have a good laugh in the bargain. Though I would settle for reading Pride and Prejudice over and over again, anytime, if it's romance one wants, or good old William Brown for a few laughs.
Over the past few years, I've been collecting books on history and historical personalities I like, stocking up on books by a few select authors, reading both fiction and non-fiction. Unfortunately, I can't buy anymore as I've run out of space to keep them all. Which may be a good thing for the time being considering that I still have a huge number of books I own that I've yet to read.
While I was studying, I would write in textbooks, usually underlining what I needed to read again or mark in the margin, either in pencil (if the book is expensive) or in ink and make notes wherever space permitted. In school, I would colour the drawings in my Hindi textbook as I found black and white rather plain. And in college, I'd draw pictures in my English textbook during the lectures based on the contents of the lessons. The back covers of accounts journals, being longer notebooks, were ideal for sketching my favorite football heroes; I still regret not having kept that back cover where I'd sketched Alexi Mikhailichenko.
In school and college, it was not uncommon to lend books though it was scary as sometimes people (students and their parents) accused you of not returning books you borrowed and sometimes pretended they'd never borrowed from you to begin with, as my unfortunate siblings experienced. Nowadays, I refuse point blank to lend my books for while I treat my books like babies, to a lot of people, a book is just a book - to be read and discarded once done with, whether they forget it somewhere or lend it to some other needy soul. When you're lucky enough to get it back from the borrower, you wish you had had the guts to refuse to lend it in the first place because more often than not, you will not recognise it as your own. So you lose your friendship or your book or both.
People at home are still getting used to my idiosyncracies when it comes to books. I generally cover a new book I start with plastic to prevent it from getting dog ears and to safeguard it from getting soiled. I hate it when people mark their place by folding the corner of a page and it makes me mad when they'll use one hand to read a book by the simple process of turning the pages they've read so the front cover of the book will touch the back. It makes my blood boil when a book is returned with curry or ketchup or ink stains (I guess there wasn't a tissue around) and I shudder when they use books to kill mosquitoes. I do not open a soft cover book fully to prevent, as far as possible, the spine from getting wrinkled. And I absolutely abhor the fact that some bookstores let people sit and peruse a book to their hearts' content without even bothering to check on the condition of the book when it is put back. I suppose I'm more fussy than most people about books, but that's me. Where books are concerned, I will not change and I don't think I want to.
