About

Let’s just get one thing out of the way: I am a literature freak.

It is futile to deny my calling. Anybody that had ever done so has either been slapped in the head by life or ended up at Riker’s Island, except the ones who wanted to be there. I love books. They are my own little Disneyland. I’d rather read Cinderella than watch her (and I have—read her, I mean).

You’ve probably heard every bookworm say this: but there’s something about books. They’re . . . beautiful. They open up your mind to a plethora of possibilities. That’s the difference between books and everything else. The latter confines you. Everything else is like a drug that makes you see, hear or think a particular way. I’ll explain this with an example from Sherlock, the TV show: In the episode, “The Hounds of Baskerville”, Sherlock and Henry are sure that they have seen a hound. Sherlock puts that thought—the physical appearance and the idea of a hound—into John’s head, and later, the latter thinks that he saw it too. They were all under the influence of a drug that amplified their fear and paranoia and turned it into something that restrained their minds and thoughts in the form of a giant beast.

That’s basically everything about everything else.

You see something and you start thinking of a matter, a debate, a crisis in a particular way. That’s the basic principle on which the modern media works. You hear something and you think that this is how a particular thing or a person is supposed to sound. What you think is a war cannon can be a simple home video of a stupid experiment elevating to the heights of even more stupid.

Books are . . . open. They don’t work with a predefined notion in your mind. They don’t alter any perspective that you might have of a particular thing or incident or feeling. What they have is a blank surface—what they have is our mind, pure and untouched like a baby’s. It is in here that they start to put in colors and words and gradually build up feelings and sensations that have a strong, relatable foundation.

Books set our imagination free. Think about the difference between reading and watching Harry Potter. When you read about the cupboard under the stairs, you imagine how it must be on the inside, how many spiders there might have been hidden in the corners, how many years worth of dust and grime might coat the walls. You think about the castle at Hogwarts: you imagine each and every wall, room, crevice, washroom, classroom, Hagrid’s hut, Dumbledore’s office, the Quidditch pitch, Malfoy Manor, Azkaban, The Weasley’s home—you build them thought by thought and brick by brick. What you make then—what you read—are your own babies, and your personal connection with a story that someone else has thought of. There, you already have a new relationship.

When you watch the movies or TV Shows, you have everything served up to you on a silver platter. You start to think that Hermoine wore only a pink sweater and jeans while punching Malfoy, and that Bellatrix Lestrange’s gown was black and not dark green. That destroys the personal connection: it obliterates the creativity, the free reign that books provide. You can analyze a movie, think about, but seldom connect to it. But you can always connect to a book. That’s why avid book lovers have such a hard time parting with their old folios, because every time you give away a book, you feel like you’re parting with a part of yourself.

So, that’s basically it, then, what this blog is about: Me. You. Us. All of us. Because I cannot be the only person in the world who has found some part of herself hidden underneath the black ink in a journal. Let me see how many of you find yourself find yourselves in the books I mention.

Of course, it won’t all be about books. The entries might be broken up by mentions of my favorite songs (I am also an avid listener of music), TV shows or even something interesting that happens in my mundane life.

I wonder if I sometimes sound like a high functioning sociopath . . .