Book Worm

A couple of weeks back, I went to Landmark in Forum Mall to buy a book to present to my niece. I was searching for some good story books that would suit her age (7). Looking at the huge store with thousands of books, I went nostalgic about my childhood book reading.

When I was studying in my 4 std, I was introduced to "Chacha Choudry" comic, that was the first book, I've read apart from my school books. My mom used to lend it from her office collegues, which heavily helped me to while out my times during holidays.

Later we subscribed to Ambulimama which also went long for a year. Gokulum, which we started subcribing at the age of 11 changed my life from Comical to something realistic. Articles & How-to-do stuff in Gokulum where my favourites. During my 10th Summer holidays, I got registered myself to the local library, which upgraded my reading habit from Children Books to Thrillers & Novels. Those where times I used to LIVE at Libraries. I start from my home at 9:30 after my mom leaves to office and will be back at 1pm for lunch and again start at 3 pm and will be there till 7pm. Novels of N C Mohandas, Rajesh Kumar, Pattukottai Prabhakar , Sujatha etc where my life in those periods.

During my 11 std holidays I started buying books from Chennai Book Fair. The Book fair showed the Dangerous man in me. I bought books for Rs.5000 and completed all (nearly 30) books within 3 months of time. Book fair introduced me to various other authors and poets. Only to Desi :)

During my college days, I had little access to books apart from study related. To improve my English Knowledge, one of my friend suggested to read English Novels of Sheldon. Somehow, I never liked the way SS wrote his books. May due to the fact that I need to carry Oxford Dictionary throughout the completion of novel :D

My favourite in English Authors was James Hadley Chase. Again thrillers and nothing more than that. After joining my first Job, I had liberty to spend on books again, which poped up the terror of buying books for Rs.3K at Book fair.

During my Higher Studies, I used to read all kind of books in my College Library. I had a reputation of borrowing all the books at least once from my library and the effective user of the same :) Though I never claimed to read everything.

Now back to start, finally I chose to buy a TinTin Comic book, which was priced almost 10 % of my monthly salary :) Books are getting costly now-a-days !