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.