Book musings

Book musings

Acts have names, like Reading a book, Noting down, Jotting the essentials etc. I love reading books – a carefully selected book, waited for patiently and paid with your hard-earned sal, beats many so called pleasures like festivals of this and that, themed malls and sale, a really great movie 98+ed in IMDB) with friends (hmm… may be I should retract that).

Was it not Poirot, (and no one but David Suchet comes to my mind), who said that his favorite Christmas is tucked warm in blanket on Christmas – Belgian chocolates by side , book in hand…

When will they give names to these (or is there already a verb for these in Swahili or in Tamil or in an Ayahuasca-intoxicated state, when you can name anything because language does not matter?:

• The sparing crunch of the spine, when a new book is opened – the slight shift of gravity, the slight opening of mouth, the slight thirst and jest one feels as the sea is parted.

• The blank page between the first page and title-author name details page – where books open by default. The cream colored all blank page – as though a half-absent reader would introspect and write what state he or she is in – before starting the book.

• The untangling of the hay type sound when we flip pages that originates at the tensioned left thumb (counter-supported by the ring finger to the back – who taught it to the there all by itself??)…

• …and as the book flips, in top view, the layers of pages travel like sea waves parted in a jiff – what do you call the mild burst of air that vortexs up to your chin from there? Bind whiff or bibliobreeze – what if a book-crazed future generation flies its nuclear-fuelled rockets with a chain reaction fuelled by this air burst because it is controlled and delicate enough?

• The obtuse angle that a book forms with the horizontal surface, confident and unfazed by the weight of the matter it contains

• The Toc that blinds us volatile with its uppercased words, its middle beginnings running into the next page (the shameless waste of it), the nonparallelism of phrase and sentence usage in its sub-headings like a half-constructed face – how would you survive such gross injustice and move on?

• The footnotes at the end – usability be damned. Some publisher taught that whetting the appetite of a reader comprises wetting the finger to shuffle back and forth? Why not there and then and now provide that elusive reference? If Pascal Quignard be read for salvation, his reference to Vinci’s paintings be then and there, not in a remote island at the end of the world. I cannot travel where I should not be – I belong in this page, I took years to assimilate the pain of Loren Eisely for the Mongrel that ran along with him by the platform because he fed it its last meal – in the depression years of Nebraska – and I should not be asterisked to a last page that says what Great Depression was all about.

• The thoughtless missing of a thoughtful bookmark – placed in a glued strap somewhere at the end. If its Shelock, it is a silhouetted pipe with spiraling smoke on it; if it is Richard Feynman, wuantum jiggles of Feynman diagram engulfs it; if it is Paul Erdos (the great mathematician who said “mathematicians convert coffee to theorems), hell – just show that. In the ROI-shareholder driven publishing world, why can there be no compassion for the reader?