I seem to have come a long way since I read my first book, Enid Blyton’s The Secret Seven that I borrowed from a local library some 30 years back. Noddy, Asterix and TinTin saw me through Primary School while Nancy Drew and The Hardy Boys kept me company through my days in High School. Summer Holidays were spent reading, Reading in the morning, in the afternoon and in the night. Sometimes three Hardy Boys’ books in one day! I then graduated to more mature authors like Agatha Christie, Irving Wallace, Ken Follet, Alister Maclean, Arthur Hailey, Jeffery Archer, Sydney Sheldon and other contemporaries. A good book can be very gratifying. The ones I have read brought out the setting in such vivid detail that the lingering taste of Stout on my tongue or the directions to Saville row comes from books. During School and College I spent most of the time reading Fiction and was addicted to it for over fifteen years. Sometime during my stint in Mumbai I discovered the literary world – Non Fiction, since then I have hardly read any works of Fiction, one exception though has been Rowling’s Harry Potter series. Literally one thing led to another and today I am surrounded by books on various arcane (not in my opinion) subjects – From Freud’s Interpretation of dreams to John Adam’s Wealth of Nations. Looking back I sometimes wonder, How did one thing lead to another? How did reading become so addictive? What do others have to do to develop reading as a habit? Here are some notes from my trunk.
An excellent way to start is to read a page a day. Or better still read when you have your morning tea. Read while commuting to work. Place books by your bedside table and read before going to bed. .You’ll be surprised you would have read more than a page.
Pick up something that interests you. It could be the latest Jeffery Archer thriller or some self improvement guides. But pick up something interesting and something that you need not plough through by brute force.
Carry a book with you. You’ll be surprised at the opportunities you get to read a page. Take a book while you commute to work, take it during a journey. If there is time when you have to wait like for an appointment with a doctor you just flip it open and read a few pages.
Make a list of books that you want to read. Better still make a list of books that you want to buy. You can maintain a journal where you can write this down. During the course of your reads you would come across interesting anecdotes or facts Note these down in your journals. You can also create a list on Amazon and add to it. This way you would also get a picture of the cover. Literary reviews appear in every major newspaper and magazine. Cut the interesting ones and paste them in your journal. Use your Journal to keep a log of all your reads. You can also write a short review piece on each of the books you have read along with the start and Finish dates.
Enroll in a library. Its possibly the cheapest way to get access to books. The next best option is to visit a second hand book shop to get dirt cheap books.
Enroll yourself in a good Book Club. The weRead Book Club on Facebook is probably the most popular network for Books. They also have a list of top 200 books that one should read during a lifetime. It’s a good place to start.
And finally turn of the television, the cellphone, your gaming devices and be off the Internet.
My reading habit has broadened my horizons, made me savor life that would have other wise been boring, it has made me taste stuff that I would have never dared, it has taken me places that I have never been to. After all there is no point in being literate if all you do everyday is to watch soap.
