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.

Bookish Dreams and Other Speculations

I believe every reader has his or her own unfulfilled bookish dreams. I have quite a few.

To be gifted a book on my Birthday (or on any occasion for that matter) has to be the one on top of the list! Amazingly, no one has ever gifted me a book that I had not myself chosen in prior. Sometimes I would get a gift voucher. The problem is, before I buy a book I tend to do a lot of 'research'. I look at a book and say "Hey! This seems interesting!", but I never buy it immediately. I read up a lot of reviews and quite some time would pass before I decide to read it. The freshness and joy of discovering something new is always lost this way. The Fellowship of the Ring, Three Men in a Boat, Agatha Christie's The Big Four and Asimov's Foundation are some of the few books that I happened to read in a considerable state of ignorance and those experiences are still unbeatable.

So that's the major one. Some of the others are - to form a 'Sunday Book Club', rummage through a second-hand bookshop and discover some unknown masterpiece, get together with another reader and spook each other out by reading aloud M. R. James's ghost stories on Halloween night and so on ad infinitum.

A comment by my Hyper Rational Alter Ego: No! I don't think this can be an infinite series. The number of such fantasies that can be entertained by any given individual must surely be finite.