I’ve been a reader all my life, beginning to read even before I learnt formally at school (I’m talking about the 1970s), because my family were readers and books always lay round, ready to be browsed. TV came much later, and city life in Kolkata (then Calcutta) had limited outdoor options, so reading was a favourite pastime!
I’ve always been a “fast” reader, getting so deeply engrossed in the printed world that the pages and hours flew past without noticing, until, alas, the final page hit one like a solid road block to the imagination!
I’ve been too impatient to write reviews, preferring to keep my opinion to myself, and getting almost immediately busy looking for the next riveting read. Indeed, I usually read more than one book at a time, probably to keep at bay the ingrained fear of running out of reads! In those days, there were books and more books (dictionaries, encyclopaedias and concordances to consult) and library memberships.
Today, with our vast online access, I don’t just fly through the pages. I pause and look up persons, places, events, maps, backgrounds and histories. I thus follow several narratives from different perspectives, at the same time. It slows down the book reading but enriches my literary forays. I prefer this meandering, pensive journey to the breathless haste of going through a single book. Strangely, I do not have any nostalgia for the smell of old (or new) books and much prefer my Kindle and other reading apps on my iPad, because this means I can read and research at the same time and carry my library with me when I travel. We do have a roomful of books and still buy them, but my husband and I have gifted a humungous quantity of books to the libraries of schools where we worked.
Now, in my fifties, probably as the outcome of this slower pace of progressing through books, and reading several other narratives about the story within, I’m beginning to want to sum up what I think about the experience of reading a book. I’m recording it here, just in case it helps you pick a good read in your idle surfing. These are personal, not academic reviews.