Why this paperback apartheid?

Manas Gupta

This new 10 book challenge doing the rounds of social media got me thinking. If you’re fond of reading, is it really possible to choose just 10 best books? Possible, yes. But will you ever be satisfied with such a list? I doubt it.

Interestingly, while my many erudite friends promptly produced lists with Shakespeare and James Joyce and Kafka, one senior journalist spoke with warm nostalgia about the Sudden books — an entertaining series of thin action-packed cowboy thrillers that centre around a lightning fast gunman. And the revelation brought a smile to my face, for I too spent many a winter curled up in a quilt with some tattered, yellowed books of Sudden and other westerns.

Books can evoke different sentiments in different people, but the memory of the first time you encounter a particular book/author that gave you pleasure, stays with you. Everyone remembers those Famous Fives that transported you into the English countryside, with adventures on islands and Timothy and ginger ale.

I don’t quite remember when I picked up my first Shakespeare but I remember my first Robert Ludlum (The Holcroft Covenant) , read on a half-broken sofa in the winter sun, amid the chaos of a house being whitewashed or my first Alistair MacLean (The Golden Rendezvous), which may not have been his finest book but was certainly my favourite MacLean.

Then there were the James Headly Chases, murder mysteries that moved at breakneck speed but had some bizarre covers of women in various states of undress, usually with no link to the story plot at all. These were usually read after being covered in newspaper pages.

Some of these lighter reads, which often make certain connoisseurs snub their nose at us (quite unfairly, I might add) have played a far bigger role in providing me pleasure or helping me while away my time in buses, trains and waiting rooms, than the so-called classics. 

Once, I was delighted to spot a Leon Uris book (one of my favourite authors) at the home of a renowned English professor from my college, and asked him excitedly if he had read it.

“I don’t read bestsellers,” he announced, coldly, in that tiny house which had more books than seating space.  I felt I had shrunk by a few inches under his gaze that day. 

Frankly, this paperback apartheid is unfair and really needs to end.

“I like Wilbur Smith.”

*Smirk*

“These Anurag Mathur and Amish books are horrendous.”

“Um, really? I, er, liked some of them.”

*Horrified look*.

Or just: "What! You read comics? At this age? Comics are for kids."

Oh come on! Whatever happened to the “to each his own” thinking. Vanished in the world of social media?

I feel that this peer pressure, combined with the fear of judgement, often forces people to choose “safe” books for these lists. I’d like to follow my colleague’s choice and make a new list, one just of books that gave me pleasure. Maybe, I’ll even read some of them all over again, and pass them over to my daughter in the hope that she likes them too. But if she doesn’t, I’ll be quite okay with it. Honest.