Left Cold...and Warm by Reading

It's summer in South India and in last week's Bookwise column, Latha Anantharaman wrote about books that left her cold in spite of the sweltering heat by sheer power of suggestion; the same suggestive power, she says, that warms one's body and soul, on a cold winter evening, just by watching a sitcom set in a centrally heated apartment in Manhattan. Here's an extract —

I tried that same power of suggestion this past month, while sweltering under a
whining ceiling fan. I fingered the bookshelves and poked through the towers of
unread books on every table, and I constructed a new stack of summer reading.

The first thing I happened on was a volume in a stash from Scholastic,
Shiver, by Maggie Stiefvater. It had a snow-white cover, with wintry branches
and one small dot of blood. It was a story about a golden-haired girl and a
wolf, as so many good stories are. It called to mind Red Riding Hood, bleak
winds, starvation, and yellow eyes lurking in the pines of the Black Forest.
Most of all, it probed the female fascination with wild animals, especially the
ones we're warned against.

However, I have, summer or otherwise, never felt the need for a book that could leave me chilled, being the sort of person who goes after books that radiate warmth. And nothing warms me like the first few chapters of The Fellowship of the Ring. Of course, there are other favourites too. Give me Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell and The Sunday Philosophy Club anytime!

Book Post!

I read Latha Anantharaman's column, Bookwise, in yesterday's The Hindu: Metroplus with that unmistakable sense of joy that I always experience on reading a fellow bibliophile's account of her love affair with books. In this installment, she talks about the joy of receiving books by post. Here's a delectable extract from the column in which Latha places an online order for the Seamus Heaney translation of Beowulf and waits in suspense over the sort of tastelessly produced edition she might end up with —

For Rs. 250 and free delivery I expected a cheap India-only edition, with some
typographical errors. What I got was an impeccable Norton critical edition, and
the supreme happiness of getting a book in the post. Since then, editors have
sent volumes by post for review, sometimes in slender packets, sometimes in a
hefty cardboard box. Generous friends send book parcels.

This resonates well with me, because I've always lamented the lack of the suspense element in my encounters with books (see my post Bookish Dreams and Other Speculations). The closest I ever got to waiting in suspense for a book was when my uncle mailed me the first volume, The Solitudes, of John Crowley's Ægypt novel cycle from London. It arrived a week later, neatly packed in a padded envelope (lined on the inside with bubble wrap!), and I held in my hand a beautiful, firmly bound paperback edition, published by The Overlook Press. For the first time in my life I experienced "the supreme happiness of getting a book in the post". I knew beforehand what book and exactly what edition I was about to get, having looked it up in Amazon.com myself. Therefore, my satisfaction was predominantly derived from the physical act of holding the book in my hands, ruffling through its pages and taking in the sweet odour. Unfortunately, unlike Latha, I haven't received books by post since then. Nevertheless I'm happy that her column got me thinking about this.

The Library of Babel

I've decided to add a new page, The Library of Babel, to this blog. The stimulants behind this effort are the Recommended Reading and Books Read in 2010 pages in Heather's blog, Say the Trees Have Ears. In the Recommended Reading page she maintains a list of short descriptions of books that may be of interest to readers of her blog, apart from being her own favourites. The Books Read in 2010 page contains a list of books that she has so far finished (re)reading this year. She rates these books on a scale of 0-5. One amazing thing I came to know on reading her entry For the Love of Books is that she's read 156 (!) books in 2009 alone and on an average reads 100 books a year! That's truly amazing for someone like me, because I'm not sure if I've finished reading a hundred books in all my years as a serious reader, though I must have read hundreds of books in bits and parts. However, I've always wanted to maintain a list of the books in my collection (library?). So, The Library of Babel will contain the ever evolving list of my favourite books (regardless of whether they've been read in full and digested or only nibbled at!) and maybe, as well, a small list of those books that I intend to add to my collection (and read!) in the near future.

It's a Tale

I guess most people would be able to figure out that the title of this blog is inspired by (actually, it is in fact exactly the same as) Umberto Eco's foreword to The Name of the Rose. But the title that I really had in mind was It's a Tale, which in turn was inspired (this one was really inspired!) by John Crowley's Little, Big. In the end I just decided to go with Naturally, a Manuscript because I thought it possessed the virtue of greater recognizability. In fact, it immediately brings to mind a world of books, manuscripts, narratives, tales, signs, words, intertextuality, the relationship of the written word to the world that it encapsulates and sheer postmodernist intellectual playfulness. This is exactly what I want to talk (write, type, think, silently converse...) about. I really want to believe that an underlying, unifying theme of this blog would be how life itself is in some way a narrative, a never ending tale that is continuously being told, written, imagined...this is in part the theme of Little, Big as well. Though I really want to believe this, I feel that when I look back on this blog a few years hence it would be as varied in its themes as the narrative of life itself and as idiosyncratic, opinionated, intellectually playful, downright crazy and verbose as I myself am and my varied interests are.