My Reading Journey
I have always loved stories. One of my earliest vivid memories is my father narrating Mahabharata stories to me and my younger sister, and I could picture the scenes - Bhima shaking the trees and to make the Kauravas drop like fruits, Arjuna piercing the moving fish-target by only looking at its reflection, and Abhimanyu willingly going into the Chakravyuha, knowing he was going to die. I would ask him to tell me these stories again and again and again, never wanting them to end.
I had read a few children’s books my parents bought for me, but for a few years before 10, I wasn’t really reading anything. No one around me read books in English and no one knew age-appropriate books in Kannada for young adults. (It wasn’t until I went away to college that I started reading Kannada novels again!) But when I was in Class 5, I won a Famous Five book as a prize. As silly as it seems now, I was blown away - I was reading about kids my age (albeit in 1940s England), having adventures, going on picnics and catching criminals! I wanted to read all the rest of the books, but my parents buying me books “that I would only read once, and maybe not even that” was totally out of the question!
And so, I tried to find them online, fruitlessly for several weeks, until I finally came across a website that had all the Famous Five books, and turns out, also all the books by Enid Blyton. And so I set to reading all of them - roughly 120 books across several months. And then I saw that the website also had Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys and Three Investigators series, and I inhaled all of them as well. But, these books were only HTML files - it was a wall of text that I had to scroll down, trying to keep the lines in order, remembering where I had stopped by trying to remember the position of the scrollbar, and letting my music lessons slide because all I wanted to do was read about these adventures (I also once asked for a Swiss key to carry around in case I fell into an adventure of my own).
Malory Towers instantly became my favourite series - I enviously read about friendships and loyalty and pranks and midnight feasts, even as I was being bullied at school. And so, in a couple of years, I had read all the books on this website (some of them even twice) and didn’t know what to read next. Even though I went to a school in Bangalore, they didn’t have a good library or teachers who would suggest good books. Reading for pleasure was considered a distraction. However, Harry Potter was something I had heard was very very good - I just couldn’t find it on the internet! I had to track down a distant cousin who had the series, and promise that I would take very good care of the books before I could borrow them.
I fall in love with books quite easily - I read Harry Potter multiple times, made a list of all the spells, tried to find fan art, and took endless quizzes on the internet to see which house I belonged to. Once I had gleaned everything I could, I was once again quite clueless about what to read next. Until I discovered Rick Riordan!
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