Good Books Even Speak For Readers’ Experience
Subeh Tarek :
An intoxicating smell creeps through the cover as mere pages animate in a bibliophile’s collection. Beyond the inscriptions in black ink, the scented happiness, termed “book” possesses new tales – sometimes of life, other times, of love. In the duration of the past one and a half years, we have spent days reminiscing chronicles of pouring rainy days or scenic winter mornings. As hard as it was to claim isolation as part of life, it was harder to admit our longing for bits of the tiring old routines. We bonded over coffee or found a new hobby. But somewhere along the way, our desire to return to the relentless days was hard to hide. Like everyone, I too felt a yearning for the pre-pandemic world. And in those gloomy moments, my whispering epiphany announced that I miss the thrill of ticking off a book from booklistlike the days before the pandemic, and writing about it nostalgicallymight be the only way out.
While describing their literary ventures, bibliophiles often find themselves in a space to explore beyond just the worded book reader experience. In other words, their surfing through the pages of hardcover broadly resembles that of a commuter. The only difference being, commuters hassle to their destination while readers do so in search of knowledge. If I were to write on my commute to literature, I should step in with my introduction. According to my little googling on book readers and their habits, it is mostly safe to establish myself as an old-school reader. So, it is only fair that when I talk about books, I disclose my admiration not only for the books but also for the memories that reside within them.
In my childhood days, the mandatory vacation chores included rearranging the bookshelves to make space for new books. In those non-Marie Kondo days, my clueless organizing spirit loved turning the first pages of parched old books hiding deep inside the shelves. Looking back, when I try to search for the dawn of my book journey, this brief memory sparks accompanied by a picture of pure happinessevery time. Between those wrinkled, yellowish pages, there dwelled an incentive, subtle yet loud enough for my childish mind to accept. And there I had my first literary experience – Thakumar Jhuli. As my childhood memory permits, the book stood a little higher in the ranking than Grimm’s Fairy Tale Classics declaring my love for fantasized dramatic scenarios pretty fearlessly.
In terms of books, an unannounced yet general rule always stands out – the older the book, the better the smell. Although enthusiasts often have an undecided take in this pondering opinion, they do firmly agree on one thing – the redefining aura of a book with passing time. I think the words speak even for the book readers’ experience. As I grew older, I found myself glued to the heavy books that were not my cup of tea a couple of summers ago. Most of my teenage years were spent bookmarking the young adult fictions on my shelf. Belonging to the target audience, I was pretty faithful to John Green and Nicola Yoon. But my thriller-loving self is entirely indebted to Dan Brown and Sydney Sheldon for letting me know the thrill of finishing one more page. Though I still rant over how Rowell didn’t do us justice with the three words of Eleanor to Park, I love re-reading the pieces that reflected my thoughts as a teenager.
But it would be an unfinished memoir if I don’t mention the onesI love with all my heart till this day – Satyajit Ray’s Feluda and SharadinduBandyopadhyay’s Byomkesh. The literary gems in those books curated memories that I cherish beyond realities. The books are the ones that get credit for my love of traveling and trying out new things. But while we are on the topic of detectives, Holmes cannot go unnoticed, right? Though BBC’s Sherlock tops my list of most binge-watched series, my first encounter with the residents of 221-B Baker Street was through ‘Hounds of Baskerville’, a dreadfully addictive introduction you could call it. However, haunting or romantic, dreadful or psychotic, sparing time for the volumes in shelves will always be an invitation too good to ignore for me. In retrospect, my epiphany from a nostalgic day resulted in a very simple confession- expressing the superiority of happiness I savored through books is a hard task to do. I realized that the journeys may remain penned or not, the moldering books will live on. With dusty rose smell glued onto their pages, the books will illuminate the darkest alleys, sometimes of bookshelves and always of minds.
(Subeh is a 3rd semester student of Islamic University of Technology, Bangladesh)
