Bookends_Weekends

I frequently lose myself over book reviews and introductions to old classics. These past few months, I have been holding cherished conversations with an avid reader who's a passionate linguist as well. When reading becomes a source of much greater joy than other things deemed important in this material world, we know we have struck treasure. Three different articles today gave me immense joy. They reminded me the reasons why I read and choose to spend on building a book collection over everything else. First, about a Dutch town of Bredevoort, where books present better photo-op moments than windmills and is a book town with 20 permanent bookshops in a population of 1500. The town's only English bookshop is run by an Englishman named Leonard Webb settled for the past 30 years in the Netherlands. He runs a handsome one person, exclusively English, independent enterprise. Their oldest book is a religious text published in Latin in 1773. I recall texting a friend in the morning about not buying any more books but rummaging through second-hand bookstores for battered poetry volumes. We both shared a mutual laugh over it, but I know I could just as well do it. 

The second article was a book review about J.M.Coetzee's Disgrace by Sudipta Datta. I have come to fiercely love his reviews on Classics and Nobel reads. Sometime back he wrote about Graham Greene's The Heart of the Matter where a quote from the book nearly shattered me within minutes of reading it. "No human being can really understand another, and no one can arrange another’s happiness." If only we understood how interlinked our emotional chords are with people we love and place great faith and trust into, we would discard this quote by Greene without much thinking. "What an absurd thing it was to expect happiness in a world so full of misery?"  This took me through Dicken's endless and many varied worlds of misery and gumption, of courage and deceit, love and sacrifices and an underworld of darkened human emotions. It becomes too overbearing at the point of breaking my heart over and over again, umpteen times over literary characters and their misery. Their pathos brings my heart and mind to a standstill, each time I am gripped in their embrace. 

Third article was a refreshingly surprising and delightful introduction to a new writer who writes tales about characters whose settings mingle and interchange between the characters created by Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. The novel is titled, The Idiot by Elif Batumen. Yes, she's a deep lover of Dostoevsky and also wrote her first book that bore a title from his published books, The Possessed. I thought her sentiments are beautiful and show her passion for Russian Literature where she is so consumed by Dostoevsky and Tolstoy that her characters also alternate between situations from novels of these Russian greats. Mr. G Sampath who wrote a review of Batuman's book writes- "If you are, or were, a student of literature who has spent many nights in other people's hostel rooms debating existentialism, Proust, and Tolstoy till six in the morning, and then carried on the discussion over breakfast, and eventually dozed off during the morning lecture on Tolstoy, Proust and existentialism, then The Idiot will give you paroxysms of nostalgia." I did do all of this during my 20's and have spent quite a few sleepless nights recently over conversations about Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf, Romanticism, Thoreau, Sartre, Brodsky and notably Marx. Joys become much more pronounced when the fact that the world enjoys writing and reading about these source of literary musings come out and reach readers like me. It's very easy to collect books, perhaps easier to finish them as well. In the middle, lies the vast ocean pool of reading, chewing, spitting and relishing them. Eternally grateful for these pleasures of literature to The Hindu's Literary Review. You brighten up my Sundays and the week following this day.