May your shelves overflow with books
Our family has a passion for reading. Consequently, we have heaps of books in our house. As we have not converted to Kindle yet, so our stack keeps growing. Recently, we gave our treasure a decent abode by building roomy bookshelves. Next, all the books of the house were gathered at one place and it was then that we realised that arranging the books on shelves is not a simple task.
Libraries the world over, follow the time-tested Dewey decimal system for organising their books but a home library is a whole new ball game. Here, for the sake of aesthetics, size and colour of spine are more important than the genre, author and language. I prefer to store my books standing upright but my son insists on laying them flat because vertical storage ruins the binding sooner. We, the argumentative Indians, managed to reach a compromise in this respect, now some books are arranged vertically and the rest in horizontal orientation.
For the sake of aesthetics, the hardbound ones with intact dust jackets were the first ones to find place on the shelf and all the paper backs with cracked spines were culled out. This was not an easy decision because my favourites such as Gone With The Wind, Roots, The Thorn Birds and Wings of Fire, found no place on the shelf. I read most of my books twice (this excludes the monumental tome, A Suitable Boy!). The first reading is a fast one to quickly reach the end and the second reading is slow during which I savour words and expressions. The favourite ones are read yet again (at least the favourite sections), leading to worn spines. Also once I read a book, I prefer to keep it within easy reach, so that I can go back to it whenever I want.
Going through my books, I travelled back in time when Khalil Gibran books were a prized possession while preparing for college elocution contests, or books by Mills and Boon publishers which were read on the sly. I can recall many books that I had borrowed from the university library and now miss not owning them. It is interesting how your perception about the same book changes in each decade of your life. For example, I now wonder why did I find Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde scary and was fascinated by concept international datelines in Around The World in Eighty Days or how I can now appreciate the literary brilliance of Midnight’s Children and Nanak Singh’s Chitta Lahu rather than decades ago when I first read these books.
The books on my shelf are not mere decorations, each book has been read by at least one person in our family (each one has a preferred genre). I read two books simultaneously, generally one light reading and the other more serious stuff, reading few pages from one or the other each day. At present, I am reading a Chetan Bhagat and a Kiran Nagarkar simultaneously.
In our family, a good book is sacrosanct. Making dog ears or using ink pen or highlighters in our books is blasphemous. The bookshelf is in our living room so it makes an interesting conversation piece. It inspires almost everybody visiting us to talk about books they own and most women nudge their husbands asking him to put his books also on display. Interestingly it is presumed, the entire collection of our books belongs to my husband and not me!
IT IS INTERESTING HOW YOUR PERCEPTION ABOUT THE SAME BOOK CHANGES IN EACH DECADE OF YOUR LIFE