Read any good book lately?

oh hell.

when i was a kid, life was so simple. didi had a rack of huge books which she had won over the years (and to which i added a few more); there were small ones & big books, racy thrillers, abridged classics, great stories from the past & greater tales of the sci-fi, ramayana & mahabharat, stories from the panchatantra & akbar-birbal, there were amar chitra kathas, there were jungle heroes like phantom & magicians like mandrake. there were heroes on a ship like Jim, and on a boat like Huck; there were smart ones like Tom & petrified ones like David; super sleuths like Hardy Boys & Jupiter Jone's gang. there was Sebastien vs Holmes & the ever dapper Poirot's egg-shaped head. there were knights on a round table, knights taking on windmills & knights fighting dragons, knights in chains & knights climbing on dark towers. there were betrayed knights & knights on a round table; there were heroes of the sea; madcap captains & bandy-legged sailors, wild whales & wilder seas. there were merry outlaws & dastardly ones. there was a sense of adventure infinite, in whatever i read or did.

you see, it was rather easy to become a bookophile in those times. there was simply too much magic in the air. and the shelf had plenty of books to read. so, whenever there was an afternoon to be whiled away, there was always some ready adventure to go on.

Cut to now. If what i had then was, say x, now i have 100x. The choice available to spend a lazy afternoon away has just expanded to include almost anything under the sun...or has it ? somehow, Coleridge is right across the centuries & contexts, when he says

"Water, water, everywhere,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, everywhere,
Nor any drop to drink."

its just that now, i just have way too many books to read from, but not any one to read. somehow, the question: read any good book lately acquires a desperation quite contrary to its implied meaning.

somehow, the quest to find a good one is all the more harder, maybe thats because i have a lot..or maybe thats also because we've ceased to create classic literature any longer. the sort that could appeal even after a couple of readings and be just as inviting as it was at the start. i wish, for once, there was a book i could read without the creeping lassitude that comes along with it. a lassitude of having read that before, or of seeing that plot unravel the way it does eventually. Its like Orwell foretold,

A nation of warriors and fanatics, marching forward in perfect unity, all thinking the same thoughts and shouting the same slogans, perpetually working, fighting, triumphing, persecuting -- three hundred million people all with the same face.

Oh why, oh why cant there be something that remains inside your head for years with the exact same thought & expression as it was when you first read it. And till the time, something like this comes up, the desperate plea remains.. btw, read anything good lately