AWRITER FRIEND remarked that he had not anticipated how thrilled he would be by his first visit to the Golden Temple in Amritsar. “Imagine all these people milling around, all there to worship a book”. He acknowledged that he was choosing to see it that way. But who can blame his poor book-weakened mind? Particularly when a big, old heavyweight classic is involved.
The book addict can’t help defamiliarising the familiar, plunging the ordinary event into a plot. From early childhood she is accustomed to smiling blankly at the public, her mind still on page 43, now amiably dogeared, while she waits for her parents’ friends to clear off. Of course, you know that she figured ways of smuggling books into the house when the board exam ban was on (tucked into the waistband of her jeans, for instance, was the simplest). Of course, you have met addicts who have told you that they have figured ways of reading in the shower – one stiff arm sticking away from the downpour and soap. Of course, you have heard of those children who read the Bible for the stories or worse, Playboy for the same. Book addicts will tell you these stories if you look faintly sympathetic or even detached, accustomed as book addicts are to worried frowns from potential lovers (“Oh you read”) or loud exclamations (“What a thick book”) or outright derision (“First rank, first rank”). But don’t let the silly anecdotes of the reading life fool you. Self-deprecating humour, whether sincere or not, is a byproduct of the reading habit — just as clean fingernails are a byproduct of medical school. But the reader does not actually think of herself as an idiot savant, a sad, clownish creature on the same spectrum as the figure of the genius in Hollywood movies — a figure created by that Victorian notion that the intellectual mind is necessarily crazed and unable to deal with either life or household chores. Quite the opposite, she thinks she is prepared for anything. Scott of the Antarctic has taught her to die with dignity under snowy drifts, Katy to live as a gentle, near-annoying invalid, Foncho to seduce a stepmother and Harriet Vane to look askance at the perfect if loopy lover. Most of all, more than penury, dignity, sickness, erotomania, books have prepared her to look askance. Mothers and lovers may worry but books do not create fluff-headed romantics who believe in the happy ending and swing their legs while waiting for their prince to come. Unfortunately reading does turn us into painfully demanding pessimists. The reader sees the world in the clear grids and lines of narrative convention. In a high-speed chase, it is inevitable that two men carrying a sheet of glass and/or a fruit-cart will attempt to cross the road. It is inevitable that the happy family will be estranged, love will wither and age will fade. Your best friend and husband cannot help falling in love with each other. Bad people get away with murder and war will break out. Peace not so much. Success will be hard-won and transient, originality will be laughed at. The very young reader will fix her cold gimlet eye upon her parents and wonder (even aloud) whether they are being mean to her that morning because of their unsatisfactory sex life. All those parents who stop their children from reading because they worry that their offspring may become dreamers, unable to deal with ‘real life’, should be congratulated. For the most misguided of reasons they have hit on the one best way of ensuring their children’s well-being. For most readers, the book they have right now is not enough. Neither is the world. Published here. | ||
Delhi
1. Your best bet is Daryaganj's Sunday book market. Buy all your best sellers and genre fiction from the guys who are selling everything for Rs 20 or Rs 10. Save the rest of your money for the seriously good buys. Though Daryaganj booksellers are not the experts that the old Flora Fountain guys were, some of the sellers are beginning to display some panache and acquire collections with a common subject or style. Bargain everywhere. Strangely the line of booksellers outside Broadway Hotel seem to have books in better condition and more importantly, more unusual books. Don't take impatient friends with you. This is a slow process. In the summer go there in the afternoon, after 3 and carry a bottle of water. Even for a dedicated book-buyer the mornings can be nasty.
How to get there: Take the metro to Chawdi Bazaar. Take a rickshaw to Golcha cinema.
(This is an ongoing project. Will add more bookshops in a bit.
NS Harsha, Cosmic Orphans
1. Get mildly drunk afterwards at Thugs so the summer haze is even hazier as you clutch your books on the way home.
2. Buy Ikea catalogues even if you have no interest in light Scandinavian furniture. Because apparently its a national pasttime and do you want to be left out.
3. Buy Vadehra Art Gallery's March 2008 auction catalogue and gawk. Yes its already on the streets and thats the closest some of us will ever get to possessing beauty.
4. Wonder if you married NS Harsha, as L wants you to, would you ever wander around buying second hand books in Daryaganj except as an ironic experience.
5. Wonder why you have no control over your finances but still feel guilty about buying new books.
A cathedral in Maastricht, Netherlands which has been turned into a big, beautiful bookshop.
Some odd conversation with Bottle Imp started me thinking. Who is my favourite character in Indian writing in English? I don't know! It should be shocking but it isn't... what characters has IWE thrown up so far that you feel attached to them afterwards... as if they meant anything.
My responses surprised me a bit.
Akilan of No Onions Nor Garlic ranked very high.
YoungUncle from Vandana Singh's series
Toby from one of the short stories in Nalini Jones' What you call Winter
Sartaj Singh from Vikram Chandra's Love and Longing in Bombay
Bharat from Kavery Nambisan's The Truth about Bharat (Almost)
The cook in Kalpana Swaminathan's Page Three Murders
Thin, thin, thin pickings...
Which ones are yours?
Meanwhile: I love Patricia but really! I mean really!!
Via: Patricia of Booklust
ON THE Internet you can find atleast three other people who share your unlovable, shameful habit. Any unlovable, shameful habit. Even book cataloguing. A dozen new social networking sites allow you to share lists of books that you have read or want to read with thousands of other people. That rude girl who sniffed at you at a poetry reading, the quizzer whose houseful of books you covet, the former CEO of a national bookshop chain, hundreds of Indian fans of Paulo Coelho and a thousand others whose favourite philosopher is Ayn Rand; you can meet them all on these sites.
With all the bookblogs, booksellers’ sites and social networking sites we already have did we need a social networking site for booklovers? Apparently we did but didn’t know it. Goodreads, LibraryThing and Shelfari, like many phenomena on the Internet, turn previously amorphous, even unknown
desires into necessities. These new sites understand that very few committed readers have ‘favourite books’ and allow you to upload as many books as you want. (Library Thing allows you to add only 200 titles for free. Beyond that you will have to pay a fee to support your habit).
Beyond the basic similarities, each of these second-generation social networking sites have tiny addictive details. Library Thing, the oldest of these sites, has the Unsuggester which tells you the names of books that you are least likely to enjoy. If you liked The Road to Serfdom by FA Hayek you are unlikely to like The Devil wears Prada, it informs you. Goodreads has an understated, quiet interface but appeals to the compulsive listmaker for the ease and efficiency with which you can add books to your ‘read’, ‘currently reading’ and ‘to-read’ shelves. First sessions on Goodreads are typically difficult to end as each book you add reminds you of another book you just have to add. Then each time you log in you find yourself screwing your eyes shut to remember the books in shelves you have left behind in other cities.
Balasubramanian, a 25-year-old management student at IIT Kharagpur likes Shelfari for its extremely attractive interface that puts large images of book-jackets on your “shelf that you can gloat over. So much better than stupid people’s faces.” Goodreads allows you to compare book lists with other users so you can find out how many books you have in common and how closely you agree on the rating of books you have in common. All the
sites have groups based on location, genre or an abiding passion or hatred for an author. So far Goodreads is the only one with a private messaging system, an absolute necessity in any site with social networking ambitions. It also points you to users in your vicinity and user online at the moment.
These sites have definite value for new enthusiasts who want to go beyond Paulo Coelho and Robin Cook, but don’t knowwhere to start or for people in the same locations who want to swap books. But what value do these social networking sites have for the serious reader, a notoriously antisocial being? Gayathri Venkatadri, a consultant with a software company in Mumbai only uses Shelfari to track her current reading. She says that she has no interest in joining any of the groups on the site because she would rather read the book than “some chappie’s idea of lit-crit.” Vivek Nityananda, scientist at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, who frequently leaves bookshops in a penurious state, was immediately addicted to Goodreads. For readers like him these sites indulge the affectionate remembering of books read. But his sessions on these sites mostly leave him with a boa constrictor-like whole. What sites like Goodreads, Library Thing and Shelfari do is tap into the communal, exhibitionist and competitive behaviour patterns in readers. They are built to let readers greedily browse other people’s bookshelves, nod at old hardbound friends and smirk at unfortunate choices. If your hubris acquires some knocks when you find a 19- year-old’s bookshelf with everything ever written by any author with an Eastern European surname (including those from Slavoj Zizek’s wilderness years) then the Internet is the better to hide you with, my dear.
PROFILE-BUILDING on these sites is not the exhausting, encyclopedic, Sisyphean affair of other social networking sites. What do we care when your
birthday is, what your favourite colour is and what kind of boyfriend a Facebook quiz says you will make? Your list says you own everything that Charles Bukowski ever wrote? You have a hardbound copy of Ian McEwan’s Saturday? Your favourite book is The Unbearable Lightness of Being? We now know all we need to know.
Can one discuss social networking sites (or anything on the Internet) without alleging that something sordid awaits the imprudent?Nityananda wonders whether one Good - reads user ‘Bookpig’ with 4,000 books on his/her ‘read’ shelf is actually a pretty code absorbing all booklists around it. Venkatadri
also has her healthy dose of scepticism about the massive tomes listed on some profiles. “Beowulf? Who do they think they are kidding?” When asked whether she thinks there may be Shelfari users who hope to make non-cerebral acquaintance with other users, she was inclined to agree. “I had my pictureon the site for a while. Now I have a picture of a tree instead.”
Anne Fadiman says there are two kinds of book-lovers, the courtly lover and the carnal lover. The carnal lover’s books have broken spines, yellow stains and and more than a nodding acquaintance with the nether regions of households such as the kitchen and the loo. This lot adore literature but not are not reverent towards the corporeal form of books. The courtly lover’s books, on the other hand, tend to live in dust-free cathedrals of cellophane. Now with a Mac, a webcam and decadent software called Delicious Library this community can display their book collection and also presumably ‘out’
their catalogue love of epic proportions. By scanning the barcode on the back of any book Delicious Library places the bookjackets on your digital shelves along with reams of information downloaded from multiple web sources. The Delicious Library usercan browse, search and sort books on their
digital shelves. You can synchronise your library with your iPod and even keep track of the items your friends are borrowing using Delicious Library’s loan management system. The only worm in the Apple is the idea of a Delicious Library user ever lending anyone her books.
Carnal lovers of books too have their place in the electronic sun. Bookcrossing.com (Motto: Don’t be shelf-ish with your books) is not from the current crop of booklovers’ sites. Founded in 2001 “bookcrossing: the practice of leaving a book in a public place to be picked up and read by others, who then
do likewise” entered the Concise Oxford Dictionary in 2004. Bookcrossers “release books into the wild,” (a coffee-shop, a friend’s house, a cyber-café)
and register this on the site.) Another bookcrosser picks it up, reads it and releases it in turn into the wild. The incredible adventures of innocuous books are thus charted on the site.
To courtly lovers bookcrossing is a punishment out of the Old Testament. Having joined the Mumbai Book Exchange Group on Shelfari in a weak moment Venkatadri is loathe to lend her books. “When I imagine lending my book to someone from an online book club, I think ‘hello stranger take my
firstborn.’ ” Bookcrossing.com is the online manifestation of a rare trait even among carnal booklovers: an altruistic desire to have other people read a particular book that is so strong you are willing to never see the book again. Perhaps not so rare? As of 10 September 2007, the site had over 586,000 members, with over 4,200,000 registered books.
Bookcrossing has entered popular culture having featured in a soap opera subplot, in tirades by angry authors who genuinely believe we should buy not borrow their books, in endorsements by captivated authors like Neil Gaiman and of course having given rise to book-crossed lovers. Even in India where bookcrossing is not really popular yet, an intrepid book La Centurie: Poemes Amoureux de l’Inde Ancienne is currently somewhere in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands waiting for a reader to come along. There is no doubt that it really is a successful social network. Despite Shelfari’s spamming abilities that resemble the Black Death of 1665, we can only speculate whether the new dedicated sites will still be a fix we can’t live without
First published here.
Ok orkut was dull and facebook astoundingly so. Having given them enough time to be even marginally entertaining it is time to delete the damn things.
In the meanwhile I have found a social networking site which satisfies all my OCD desires but requires me to do nothing. NO uploading pictures, NO profile writing, no social networking in effect.
Goodreads is so so satisfying. I have not had so much secretarial pleasures since I archived my school's collection of photos. It is a pleasure akin to bursting bubbles in bubble wrap and a distant cousin to picking nits.
Also good to confirm that I have spent my life reading junk. Oh Francine don't judge me.
Had to do a mini spring cleaning and came across lots of sentimentalia which ended the spring cleaning. Which is the whole point of sentimentalia. That it stops you in your purposeful tracks like a wistful lottery seller who accosted you on Monday morning and leaves you mooning .
I don't mind throwing out love letters. I have deleted folders of emails without the flicker required to make it even ruthless. But the things that slay me are those quickly written rude notes scribbled when you are vela or wished you were vela. There were notes from 18 years of bored-to-tears education and then the last few years of bland sunny-faced efficency which allows itself meanness in notepads thrust back and forth at Monday meetings.
I found some nasty chits recorded in a conference pad during a brief and fascinated visit to academia. They have the overlay of look-i-am-so-clever-ness because the puns made references to the essays and excerpts from major primary texts hastily read the previous week. Some of them are rather brilliant inspired by the erudition of my Charlie's Angels who read and connected enough to make mortals quake. By then I had stopped calling this hasty literature 'chits' and had learned to call them 'notes' and were quite capable of making ignorant Doestovesky allusions. In school of course 'notes' were what teachers gave you and chits are what you passed to Sujay about the talcum powder on Seetalakshmi Miss' left cheek.
In class 5 a porcupine-haired classmate decided to burst smoky sputtery red crackers in class. We had a 75 year old teacher who didnt seem to notice that we were breathless from laughter. I was astonished and no one ever explained how it all really happened. In class 9 Namita-from-Saudi (who was later arrested by the Australian police for kicking her landlady's cat) ate oranges in the front row with a blissful expression. Sure the oranges were in her desk and sure she popped them into her mouth when Mr. Chand was not looking but the smell that went from the first row to the last row where scary Aman sat. For years oranges smelt like rebellion and laziness and do-I-care-really-about-The Final Examination?
There is something of the same wild-eyed barely suppressed giggy quality to notes exchanged clandestinely at meetings and in classrooms. They never make any sense to anyone else and no one ever finds them funny other than you and your co-conspirators. But when Anjali (who married a boy with profile like a Greek coin) and I spent two whole hours of Sociology class writing rude couplets to each other we thought we were gods. "Someday they would write our biographies and these chits would be so useful," I thought.
After bumping into sentimentalia and feeling entirely unable to throw the chits out I looked around for books about clever-fella-note passing and saw some strange city lights.If you needed proof that the West will document anything and will upload everything here it is and here. On a helpful and loony front is this list of suggestions on how to pass notes.
Nice Hat. Thanks is a collection of poems by Matthew Rohrer and Joshua Beckman both wordsmiths and friends who transcribed their improvisations and word-play . Some of it is just a couple of lines and some of them run into a few pages. Rohrer and Beckman (unlike Anjali and me) were award-winning poets whose casual word-play is like Sanjeev Kapur's midnight snack. So while some of it seems self-indulgent and vague the rest is surprisingly interesting poetry
In terms of oho-aha moments the green wreath goes to a prim little essay about the note-passing etiquette of Japanese nobility. According to the starched and ironed Elizabeth Derby some of them wrote notes in tankas, short poems of 31 syllables each. " Many examples of such poetry survive today, but information about the context in which they were written and the author's personal circumstances can be limited." You don't say sister.
She goes on to note that in a novel about a relationship between a cool dude and relatively paavum woman the cool dude is put out by her boring note writing style 'unable to get rid of its Chinese robes and wet sleeves.' Elaborate conventions and high expectations attended these games stressing everyone out I am sure. Then why not write regular letters? Derby attributes it to the 'cult of beauty.' And yaay for the cult of beauty.
After a long vegetable stretch I went with Bottle Imp to an interesting lecture tafseer organised and came away happy. Bottle Imp and I are usually incapable of behaving like adults when together and recently distracted ourselves at a gathering (what is that word!!! what is one gathering? )by playing Name-place-animal-thing. At the lecture we came this close to exchanging notes but I was for once interested in what the speaker was saying. And what a loss because we could have written such clever notes.
Man Listening To Disc
This is not bad --
ambling along 44th Street
with Sonny Rollins for company,
his music flowing through the soft calipers
of these earphones,
as if he were right beside me
on this clear day in March,
the pavement sparkling with sunlight,
pigeons fluttering off the curb,
nodding over a profusion of bread crumbs.
In fact, I would say
my delight at being suffused
with phrases from his saxophone --
some like honey, some like vinegar --
is surpassed only by my gratitude
to Tommy Potter for taking the time
to join us on this breezy afternoon
with his most unwieldy bass
and to the esteemed Arthur Taylor
who is somehow managing to navigate
this crowd with his cumbersome drums.
And I bow deeply to Thelonious Monk
for figuring out a way
to motorize -- or whatever -- his huge piano
so he could be with us today.
This music is loud yet so confidential.
I cannot help feeling even more
like the center of the universe
than usual as I walk along to a rapid
little version of "The Way You Look Tonight,"
and all I can say to my fellow pedestrians,
to the woman in the white sweater,
the man in the tan raincoat and the heavy glasses,
who mistake themselves for the center of the universe --
all I can say is watch your step,
because the five of us, instruments and all,
are about to angle over
to the south side of the street
and then, in our own tightly knit way,
turn the corner at Sixth Avenue.
And if any of you are curious
about where this aggregation,
this whole battery-powered crew,
is headed, let us just say
that the real center of the universe,
the only true point of view,
is full of hope that he,
the hub of the cosmos
with his hair blown sideways,
will eventually make it all the way downtown.
Billy Collins
