My own personal book club

When I was young, we never seemed to have enough money for me to buy books.  Other than books for school, that is. 

Throughout my life in the old country, money was tight.  My parents did the household budget and accounting in the presence of us kids, and we were all well aware that there was no free money lying around.

Often, the parents borrowed from the rainy-day-fund.  We became intensely aware that the rainy-day-fund was being depleted.

I knew it was a luxury for me to buy books.  

So, I relied on the local library.

That small library had more what I needed those days.  Heck, that library even had Fahrenheit 451, and The Prophet, which are evidence enough that it was not a bad library by any means.  I didn't fully understand what I was reading, but that did not matter one bit.

When we moved to the big city of Madras, I made wonderful use of the libraries at the American and British consulates to read newspapers and magazines.  I don't recall borrowing books from either one.

Attending graduate school at a university with more libraries than I could have imagined, with more books than I could have ever dreamt of, meant that I now had even less of an incentive to purchase books.

But, every once in a while, I do buy books.  And am always ready to loan them to anybody who is interested.  Why would I not want others to read the books that I read?

Over the four decades since the end of high school, I read more non-fiction books than full-length works of fiction.  I read plenty of short stories in The New Yorker and The Atlantic, but rarely ever did I pick up a novel to read.  Years went by without buying a novel because I found contemporary full-length fiction to be unappealing.  Were I in the mood for one, I preferred to go back to the classics. 

In recent years, I have gotten back to reading novels.  What started as carefully curated summer reads have now become a part of regular life, especially during this unplanned and forced retirement.

Even the local library is a part of my life now--for the first time after the Neyveli years.

Ironically, I am picking up the old habit of borrowing books from the local public library when one half the country is hell bent on banning books. 

The dystopian future that Ray Bradbury described in Fahrenheit 451, in which books were burnt because they triggered discomfort in people, has arrived.  Like the premise in Fahrenheit 451, Republicans understand that preventing people--especially kids--from reading books that are critical will make it easier for them to govern over unthinking and brainwashed masses.

Republicans are out to prove that Bradbury was correct in saying: “You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them”.  Stop young people from reading altogether, or at least from reading the "wrong" books, and, as one of their leaders famously said in a different context, Mission Accomplished!

I will head to the local public library and pick up two books that are on hold for me to borrow: The Death of Vivek Oji, and Burnt Sugar.

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