A personal account on reading

They say ‘reading maketh a full man’. But let me tell you what reading did to me. My biggest influence to pick up reading was my mother. She had perfected the art of reading. The only advice she gave me on reading was to read what you like. In hindsight, probably it was the greatest advice she ever gave me. So I started reading—what I liked—because my mother allowed me to do so.

As a 12-year-old, I initially read adventure stories and then moved to detective stories. Sherlock Holmes fascinated me. I used to read while eating. My mother never made a fuss about that as I’ve seen some parents do. When my mother saw that I was hooked on to reading, then she started her manipulations. As I started flipping through various literary genres, she in a roundabout way began to suggest me titles and authors. She was so subtle I didn’t know I was falling into the trap. So at the ripe age of 16-17 I was reading works of some of the celebrated authors like Dostoevsky, Tagore, Mark Twain, Tolstoy, Wickramasinghe, Sarachchandra, et al.

I didn’t understand some of the stuff I read. But I kept on reading because I was hooked. A few years passed by and adolescence hit me. I kept on reading as Forrest Gump continued running. Then for some strange reason I started rereading some of the books I’d read several years ago. Then it hit me. It was like reading a completely new book. Plots, characters, incidents and dialogues that made little sense were unraveling before my eyes.

Let me give you an example. When I was about 13 my mother recommended me a western novel called ‘Shane’ by the American writer Jack Schafer. The story was about a gunslinger called Shane, a mysterious stranger, who was a full man sure about himself, who helped the family of Joe Starrett - a hardworking honest man, to defend himself and his farm from thugs.

This was exactly how I read and understood Shane when I was 13. But when I re-read it when I was probably 18 or 19, a whole lot of nuances I hadn’t seen or never knew existed in the novel were opening up to me. I could see the natural attraction between Joe Starrett’s wife, Marian Starrett, and Shane, but how honourably they dealt with that; how broad-minded the simple and honest Joe Starrett proved to be and how respectful Shane was towards the entire Starrett family.

The whole point here is that certain books give you new dimensions when you read them at certain stages of your life. This helps to broaden your world-view and prevents you from being narrow-minded. All this happened because my mother allowed me to read what I liked. She knew I would progress from detective and romance genres once I was hooked on to reading books that would give me much better insights into life. Today I hardly read fiction as I am into nonfiction. So, kids read what you like and don’t listen to anybody who says otherwise.