Book Shop Memories...

I'm not much of the reading types, but some how if I get to like a certain book, or an article or any piece of literature for that matter, I would fall in love head over heals and this Book Shop Memories is one of them. It happened to be in my 12th grade English prose book, it was a different lesson compared with the others in that book, there was a lot of personal touch in it.

After a while, after years when I started exploring internet, and when I started reading literature in the net, I happened to read it again... It was so different, probably it caught my attention and love for it may be because I was nostalgic, however, this is one interesting essay I would say, I’m not trying to judge the language used or the way it was narrated. I at a point (I would have read it so many times) started wondering if Orwell ever worked in a book shop? And reading more about him I figured the answer, No!

It makes me wonder how he could have wrote it so well without working in a book shop, You have a lot of pages to write and explain a character if you write a fiction, but this guy brings all the characters right in front of your eyes in a one sentence description! He analyzes common people along with Dickens, Thackeray, Jane Austen, Trollope etc every character he talks about, he makes sure he convinces they exist.

The essay is about a second hand book shop in London, but I have seen these kinds of people in my life here in Chennai. And so common that we see various sidelines jobs in most of these small shops here. (I can’t help laughing when I think about all these small shops selling reliance phones when it was launched!)

Second hand book shops and in Chennai Lending libraries are of course, memories to a lot of people. I remember my Bro going to these book shops. I’ve seen him feverishly reading Regional comics and graduating to reading Ponniyin selvan, Aristotle and Plato, I still envy him spending so much time on Sundays reading books when I try to swap TV channels for nothing! And it also reminds me of another close friend who would read Sheldon in the 8th grade, all from second hand bookshops. I’m sure they have great memories about them and they would thank for such an existence.

I was more of a Want to be ‘Kapil Dev’ kids and would compromise for a bottle of ‘Gold Spot’ to a book; hence my visits to book shops were very limited! (I regret) But had a great love towards ‘Tinkle’, that’s the only thing I would pick up there when I go with my bro, and I haven’t graduated much from there, I still borrowed ‘Tinkle’ from a kid when I was traveling from Bangalore to Chennai.

This essay impressed me so much that at 24 I started reading literature… I finished
Spilling The Spanish Beans, Mark Twain The Licensed Jester, Future Of A Ruined Germany and Why I Write, by the same author in the same day. Thanks to Orwell, as it helps me a lot in the kind of industry and profession that I ‘am in. I feel so good when I talk about literature the little I know, and give examples from them in class.

And I wish I had a lot of bookshop visiting memories…nevertheless its never late. Thanks to George Orwell and his unpleasant Book shop Memories!