I grew up on a healthy dose of books. I remember asking my mom to show the pictures in the comic strip series from her Kannada magazines and asking her to read them for me. Books always held this fascination for me.
Every time I go into a book store, I experience Nirvana. People who come out shopping with me are aware of this and take extreme measures to avoid bookstores.
Although I started reading fairly early on, I did not get to read any English books for entertainment or pure joy of reading till I was almost eighteen. That is probably because English was not my first language and I wasnt quite comfortable with the language for a long time.
So, my Enid Blytons were read at the age of eighteen, followed by Nancy Drew series and Hardy boys and such. That probably explains my fascination with anything simple and has childlike innocence to it. I have read and re-read William Blake, Robert Louis Stevenson, Oscar Wilde, Mark Twain etc, multiple times; each time the book revealing a new facet of its characters, some hidden meaning or changing my own perceptions.
I remember reading “The Treasure Island” opened a new world to me. However the one that makes me go nostalgic is a poem by RL stevenson called, “Sing me the song of a lad that is gone”. There are times I feel like resigning to my adulthood and go back to being a child again. This poem embodies all that whimsy.
Sing me a Song of a Lad that is Gone
by Robert Louis Stevenson
