Bibliopective

Thought I'd write a quick account of the reading influences that make up my past as a bibliophile... Not bothering with completeness here (that post would be inconveniently long), but going for a big picture, sort of. Don't ask why I'm doing this... (Well ok, its because someone asked me the other day how many books I've read this year, and that got me thinking;) To me, this serves as a recollection and possible forensic evidence to see how I became what I am... to anyone else, I guess look in here for some recommendations!

As with most people, I started with comic books (those lovely, corny predecessors to what are now called "graphic novels"). I grew up on a staple diet of Indrajaal comics - the Phantom, Flash Gordon, Mandrake the Magician - and I read some British stuff; the black and white StarBlazer, Commando and Hellblazer series. DC and Marvel were not very readily available in India (or at least Aurangabad) at the time, or I would've loved to read Spiderman and Superman and Batman... In any case any trip to the bus station near my house was usually accompanied by some rather diabolical wheedling directed at dad...

I was also heavily into Enid Blyton - those school stories which no self respecting guy will admit to reading unless tortured (one series was Mallory Towers methinks, and there was some other school with Twin Sisters whose surname started with a C), and her Scooby gang-esque detective stories (Famous Five, Adventurous 4 (my favorite), Secret Seven, and so on. The Hardy Boys - I preferred Case Files because they gave an added kick of reading something meant "for older people". Hitchcock's Three Investigators (who served to give my mind's eye a forever glamorized vision of scrapyards), and Arthur Conan Doyle's opium loving 222B Baker Street resident.

And then there was Doctor Who (which I could write a whole separate post about). Oh, and let's not forget the Disney canon (Jungle Book, Pooh) and J M Barrie, and Lewis Carrol as beginnings of my science fiction/ fantasy habit, and... sigh... enough. Bottomline, lots of roots.

By the time I got to high school, I had read up on H G Wells (Nirat lent me the War of the Worlds, thus convincing me he wasn't a pompous prick, - which it turns out he is anyway :) - kickstarted our friendship, and the rest is history), Edgar Rice Burroughs (more than "Me Tarzan, you Jane", to me this guy was "Me John Carter, you Woola") and moved on from B fiction, comics and those 10 Rupee a piece Illustrated Classic pocketbooks to paperbacks...

Jeffrey Archer's "Not a penny more, Not a penny less" was my first 'novel', and forever addicted me to the epic/ pacy/ spy/ geopolitical/ romantic fiction of the likes of Frederick Forsythe, John Grisham, Robert Ludlum, Irving Wallace, Erich Segal, Arthur Hailey, Tom Clancy... through high school and junior college, I had plodded through most of their stuff. Come to think of it, add one sneakily read Harold Robbins book to this list... :)

Three people I could never really stomach were Sidney Sheldon, Erle Stanley Gardner, and Robin Cook. The first because the writing was too... pulpy, the second because of some mental block that prevents me to date from picking up a Perry Mason book, and the last because from a very early stage, I had come to rather hate biology, medicine, and hospitals.

During high school, I used to go with Dad to the S.B Science library, where I read through the near complete Asimov collection; books like the Foundation series, or some Robot books, and so on. My quarterly or so trips to Pune meant a visit to Hong Kong Lane and Popular Book House on Deccan and picking up at least 7 - 8 books in one go.

I started reading the unabridged versions of books I had read in shorter versions - starting out with Mark Twain (Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn, and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court)... moving on to Jack London (I love the Call of the Wild), R L Stevenson (Kidnapped being a favorite - I actually didn't enjoy Treasure Island as much) and others.

All this time, I was also into non-fiction. Encyclopaedias fascinated me, ever since a colleague of my mom's gave me an "Illustrated Encyclopaedia of Facts and Figures" for having won a GK contest in school in the 4th standard - a little red volume I loved dearly. (I promptly used it - in the 6th/ 7th standard to teach others the truth about birds and bees... but that's a another post I'm alluding to!) School later afforded me the Childcraft and World Book encyclopaedia sets. Dad's college library meant access to the touchstone of encyclopaedia's - Britannica. My love of trivia springs from there I guess... or maybe I'm just weird (I keep saying that!).

Somewhere in the middle of all this, I was also becoming philosophically and "historically" inclined. This was mostly between various romantic disappointments - being in love isn't conducive to philosophy, Richard Bach's idiotic soliloquys and my momentary rapture toward "The Bridge Across Forever" notwithstanding. So in one particularly heartbroken moment, pondering the uselessness of all existence and the evil of the female species in general, I picked up Will Durant's excellent "Story of Philosophy".

This was a real eye opener. I thoroughly loved the Socratic method (based most of the pacing dialogue in the fiction I would get to writing eventually on it). Later, when I was web-savvy and got into ebooks (filthy pirate that I was/ am to date), I also partially read translations of Plato (by Benjamin Jowett, whose translation of the Apology still rocks my world on a reread) and Aristotle, Spinoza and Kant, Confucius and Sun Tzu (mystic bastards), Descartes and Bacon - you get the picture.

Cartesian philosophy in particular, in retrospect, had a pretty sneaky impact on how I think today. That, and whatever pseudo-analytical outlook engineering managed to impart to me.

The other big thing engineering imparted of course was Ayn Rand's "The Fountainhead" and "Atlas Shrugged", Somerset Maugham's "Of Human Bondage", and stuff like Anton Chekov and books on Indian Philosophy. All of these being extremely formative influences not only on my own self, but in the creation/ modulation of the social circle then prevailing around me (and not necessarily for the most obvious of reasons).

A love for history was natural, given my love for trivia (I think I got this in legacy from my grandfather on mom's side, just as I got a love of astronomy from my mom). My first big buy in the history theme was William Shirer's "Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" - a book I read and digested so thoroughly, at one time I could rattle out a pretty comprehensive dramatis personae for World War 2.

Soon, I had discovered H G Wells' "A Short History of the World" which lead me to read the greater "Outline of World History" and parse through Gibbons' "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" and many others. History is wonderful because it gives you so much perspective - even when it is written by faux-socialists like Nehru (Discovery of India, anyone?)

Later came my Fantasy phase (sufficiently written about in my Fantasy Bibliospective). That list is a little out of date now - in the time since I wrote it, I've been to Ursula LeGuin's Earthsea, and visited Steven Erikson's Malazan empire (keenly awaiting book 6 - Bonehunters), and I read The Last Unicorn, and I've read Neil Gaiman's Stardust... and so on. Perhaps in many ways this return to reading fantasy and science fiction (Asimov's Foundation series, Dan Simmon's Hyperion quartet etc. being the major signposts in that journey) is a departure from the analytical bent to a faux-mystical imaginitive one for me...?

(Note to self: Need to write that science fiction bibliospective I referred to in the fantasy bibliospective sometime soon - maybe this weekend, since I have the time?)

For some reason I was never into Indian english fiction - another mental block which I should get over perhaps. And I wasn't one to depend on bestseller lists at any time (although I did end up reading a whole lot of bestsellers).

So here we are, in 2006 and my bibliospective is like the undiscerning hunger of a glutton, and a connoisseur's banquet rolled into one. On the anvil right now, Joseph Campbell's "Hero with a Thousand Faces" which I hope will not only explain the genre of myth to me, but will also explain my recent preference for it.

One big regret in my current lifestyle is the inability to read as much as I'd like, and the recent emergence of movie watching as serious competition to the book habit in my life. Heck - the biggest plus in my student life was bunking classes and reading... too bad I can't do that if I go in for a post grad spell (diabolical laughter)...

It is such a wonderful habit, reading. Or scratch that. Consuming. Opening yourself to inputs auditory, visual, literary and digesting as much of it as you can. And then of course spinning something of your own out... Consuming without feeding others is against conservation laws. Hence this blog, in some ways...

Too bad I'm neither reading, nor writing as much as I want to... was telling someone the other way I have a dual condition - the equivalent of intellectual gluttony (lots of consumption), and intellectual constipation (not enough output). Oh and by the way I've almost entirely lost the capacity to read a regular book, ebooks having become mode du jour.

So there you go... and here I am, intellectually gluttonous, constipated idiot. And a rambler too...

Peace... Out.