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Saturday, August 21, 2010

Bookworm: Modern term for ardent booklover


If anyone happens to see me in the morning, taking my usual bus ride to work, there are two possible conclusions he or she might jump into. If someone who knows of my peculiar habits sees me lost in a world of my own with a book or a Reader’s Digest in my hand, when heaps of passengers are overflowing from both the entrances of the bus, the reaction would be, “Oh! that’s typical her.” But, to a stranger’s eye, my eye-locking with a book at that time of the day would be an act of a ‘super nerd’ or ‘creepy bookworm.’ Whatever the titles I am honoured with, my flirtation with books knows no bottom.
It is rather surprising how reading had crept into my busy school-day schedule which was tied up with sports practices, music, literary association work and of course studies. I guess, once you get so used to do something, it ceases to be a habit and becomes an addiction. Such was my love for reading.
Amidst my editorial bee-work, when Aunty Manel demanded a piece on ‘Reading habits of my generation’ I knew it was not going to be as easy as reading Jeffrey Archer. She may be true when she said there was a love-lost between my generation and books. When Thaththa said the only few young avid readers who are existing in the world today are either journalists or undergraduates, I nodded at his words. But, the fact that most of them raiding bookstores and library shelves out of sheer necessity than out of their love for books escaped his notice.
Do the folks in my generation read at all? I think they do. It is not fair by them if you expect them to read ‘Complete Works of Shakespeare’ when they are caught up with the rat-race to find jobs or move higher in their studies. They may run their eyes through the front-page headlines of a newspaper, maybe a little bit of sports and fashion; that is their portion of reading for the day.
The mushrooming blogs in the cyber space also do some work in keeping their reading habits away from the extinction lists; but the question as to how good the material these blogs provide is a point worth pursuing. Unlike in printed material such as books, magazines etc., most of these blogs carry raw-writing. So, the regular readers of these blogs (mostly the techno-loving youth) cannot help themselves from catching up wrong language expressions and bad grammar. The common complaint heard from newspaper offices about the scarcity of good writers shows the acuteness of the matter. Leave alone breeding writers, most of the CVs and bio-datas get rejected in the job process because they contain grammar or vocabulary errors.
Interestingly, a boy who turns out to be an extensive reader gets teased by his peers more than a girl who is found out to be a bookworm by her friends. This maybe another reason why my generation tries to pretend that books don’t exist. Apparently, the e-books that are quietly getting into the Sri Lankan scene are a relief to those who love to read but no time to hold a book in hand.
Like table manners, values and health habits, reading too should be planted from home and nurtured at school. Parents can monitor what their children read, but never pull off a book from a child’s hand and try to give the wrong message that you are against reading. As for me, my grandmother read me out stories from so many books and I was so enchanted by them that I knew every story by heart even before I learnt to read.
That is how I got into trouble! Today, anything which comes between me and my book gets the ‘trouble’ label straight.
After all, there’s nothing like curling up in my bed at the end of the day, hugging ‘The Road from the Elephant Pass’ for the sixteenth time and falling in love with Captain Wasantha over and over again.

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