To all the books I have read before

I feel the same way about my books and my reading habit like most people feel about their soulmates, I wish I’d met them sooner. My heart doesn’t know love and hate clearly. It only knows to distance itself seven seas away or obsessing to the length of sacrificing food and sleep. Our relationship with my books is very similar. Either I obsess over you or we don’t see each other for a while. And when the intellectual itching starts again after a prolonged renunciation of literary diet I again pick up books and lose myself in between the pages.

My reading journey mirrors the dating life of most people. In my early days I picked books that were popular yet nothing substantial. Then slowly and steadily I started figuring out what I liked but soon realized that those favorites were again driven by my age, friends, pop culture reviews and limited to a particular phase in my life. Eventually I grew out of those choices. But that wasn’t the end of it, after all the true bibliophile is the one with never ending love.

Whether I met a hardcore book junkie or just a remote reader with few IITian authors on their shelf, everyone was eager to hook me with their favorite picks. Some would tell me why murder mysteries can never get boring and others expressed their undying love for the classics. Either ways I had my experimental time. I found some books that ended up becoming a one-time whirlwind romance and then were few where the connection was inexplicable. Some phrases, words resonated with me as if they were always within but lay dormant for all these years. Then there were others who were a complete breath of fresh air and helped me to acquire a taste for literary ingredients that I would have otherwise dissed.

There are loves in our lives that cannot be forgotten and cannot be experienced the 2nd time and you’d do it all over again if given a chance. Rilke’s ‘Letters to a young poet’ and Victor Frankl’s ‘Man’s search for meaning’ were something exactly like this. My affair with Coelho’s ‘Brida’ and ‘The Alchemist’ was a one-time scintillating romance that looked like something I wouldn’t go back to again.

Books make the garden of my mind more greener, they sow seeds for more imagination and take me to places where I have never been before. And therefore I thoroughly believe that the best romance one can have is with yourself and the second best happens with books.