Tsundoku is a Japanese word I recently came across. It means surrounding oneself with unread books. And it is supposed to be beneficial in that it enriches our lives by constantly reminding us about what we do not know of, a humbling exercise sort of. The library that one acquires in the process is described as an anti-library. Umberto Eco is said to have owned such a one stacked with 30,000 books. We are not talking about the library of 1,50,000 books that Osho had, as he claimed to have read every single one of them. That is a real library, not anti!
My personal library was seeded sometime circa 1980 when my uncle the late Dr. S.N. Pillai gifted me with a used copy of a novel, A. J. Cronin's The Minstral Boy. My father would bring books from his official tours. I remember The Complete Works of William Shakespeare from Delhi and a cricket book Between Indian Wickets and Tagore's Our Universe from Bangalore among them. My cousin Srikumar Pillai handed me a bunch of science fiction books as he moved his house in Delhi. My mother did her bit in buying children's books and encyclopedias on a scheme from the university where she worked. In one of the lower primary school summer vacations, a babysitter girl was entrusted with the task of reading out a Balavijnanakosam (Children's Encyclopedia) to me in full. The earlier book buys were cheap-priced Russian authors, ranging from Maxim Gorky to the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky. That luxury came to a stop after the Soviet Union fell.
Unlike my son who abhors second-hand books, I like them. So during work in the 90s in Mumbai, I had a whale of a time buying from the Churchgate pavement sellers. Camus and Kafka and such weighty authors came from there. Plus light reads like Khushwant Singh and Shobhaa De and slim autobiographies of past cricketers which I would devour on long daily train commutes when done with magazines like Outlook, Savvy, Society, Business India, Gentleman or Life Positive. Curiously I befriended a Bengali seller named Chakravarthy who would not entertain bargains, saying that allowing for bargaining meant that he had cheated by jacking up the price in the first place. He had Pappillon, Catch 22, The Day of the Jackal and the whole gamut of motivational books like How to Read a Person Like a Book. I bought them by the cartloads. This guy had read the books he sold and was articulate about them. He told me about Eric Segal's Love Story and how when he went to the movie of it at Eros Theatre in '71, there was a sea of parked cars. We struck a tea--vada pav friendship. But there is something comical here. His books were pirated! How did this idealist approve of that? Years later I gave them all away to the booksellers back home in Palayam, deciding not to buy or keep any pirates. In Mumbai, I encountered the lady who is now the largest selling writer alive, Danielle Steel, through my niece Shefali who would devour her books at the dining table during lunchtime. Oddly I have read just one Steel in my life, that too ten years later. In the city of Mumba Devi I got my first autograph too when I took it from MT during the function to felicitate the Malayalam great on his Jnanapith Award win.
Next stop Bangalore was again good, with nice shops but the biggest discovery was Murty's 'Select' used books shop in Brigade Street, a place patronized by the likes of C V Raman and Mokshagundam Visweswarayya. It was from where I got Sir CP's Biographical Vistas, one of a dozen or so rare tomes I possess. Other later acquisitions include Nairsan's Memoirs of an Indian Freedom Fighter in Japan, KPS Menon Senior's Many Worlds Revisited, a collection of environmental poems called Vanaparvvam, the first book banned by the India government namely Stanley Wolpert's Nine Hours to Rama (Purchased from the US. I made the thecardinal mistake of lending this to a friend who never returned it), etc. Talking of bans, I have Rushdie's Satanic Verses too, but it is trash from cover to cover. I say it even as his Midnight's Children is one of my favorites.
It was a pleasant revelation to know that a good paperback in the US cost only as much as a burger meal. It triggered another buying spree in the six years I spent in the country. Books are of course nostalgia pieces. Recently I opened a Garcia Marquez novel to find the visiting card of an apartment community I lived in during the late nineties in Massachusetts, bringing a flood of memories. I was in Rochester, NY when September 11 happened. I browsed the net liberally at work, curious to read everything about America's past foreign military missions... so much so that I was summoned that week by my department head, an otherwise genial lady by name of Tammy Hall who informed me of my dubious achievement of being internet usage topper. So I took a day's leave from work and spent the entire day at the nearest Barnes and Noble, reading Peter Bergen's new non-fiction book in hardback, Unholy War Inc: Inside the Secret World of Osama bin Laden. The said bookstore in another city is from where I read a Anita Nair book for the first time and also Raj Kamal Jha's The Blue Bedspread which won him a fabulous advance, surviving on Starbucks coffee. Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things is among the books I have bought most copies of, obviously with the intention of gifting to people. I still do that. I give people Vikram Seth's The Golden Gate the same way some evangelists distribute free bibles on the roadside. Last year it was K. R Meera's slim novella Meera Sadhu and Khyrunnisa's hilarious column collection Tongue in Cheek.
Books have led to serendipitous discoveries. I was on 'all-India' tour from college and at a mall in Mussoorie, not far from where Ruskin Bond lived when I went to a used bookshop there, grabbed a random book and opened the page to read about details of Pulimood and Puthenchantha in my native Trivandrum! Yes, I am talking about Raja Rao's short but philosophical novel The Cat and Shakespeare. Rao incidentally had stayed in Trivandrum from where his guru Atmananda came. Melbourne is where I bought the most cricket books from, an addiction that stays. When I sought Dean Jones's sign on my copy of his One Day Wonders, he opened it and seeing the scribbled price, remarked in mock disappointment, 'Ah, its only 5 dollars!' Cricket books are a cultural voyage and not just about the game. That's why Suresh Menon can write a book on Bishan Bedi who retired four decades earlier and someone like me can eagerly await and buy it too! Meeting cricketer Merv Hughes at Angus and Roberston bookstore where he came for a book signing was memorable. His book, however, was not on cricket, but on his other passion, fishing. Now you get a sampling of a book that adorns my library but which I am yet to read :) Appreciation of film books started curiously enough by reading film screenplays in English (of arthouse Hindi and Bengali movies).
At the age of 16 I sighted a Literature Nobel Prize winner in Trivandrum! The literary festivals in Trivandrum in the past dozen years such as the Kovalam Literary Festival, Hay Festival and Mathrubhumi Festival have given an impetus to interacting with writers and autograph-hunting and of course some more book buying. What makes one buy a book? It is a compulsive and sometimes impulsive thing. Like comfort food, some people dip worries in comfort reading. A great critic like Prof. M. Krishnan Nair who wrote a popular book review column for 37 years opened my eyes to much riches in world literature, especially Latin American. Interaction with a voracious reader like Ashok Banker inspired me no end. Reading complements the other passion, movies as in going for the Italian film Il Postino (The Postman) only because it portrays the warm friendship that Chilean poet Pablo Neruda developed with a simpleton postman while the former lived in exile in a salubrious Italian village.
I remember as a teenager admiring Penguin India head David Davidar. Reason? The lucky bloke read books for a living! Boredom is a word absent in the lexicon of a book lover. I have never been bored for even a second in my life. Doctors' waiting rooms are wonderful opportunities to catch up on reading. Many years back I found myself one early December morning at Chennai railway station in line for a tatkal ticket for traveling the next day, my wife and son ensconced in our hotel room. The sudden cancellation of plane tickets necessitated by a whimsical decision of the US Consulate caused this situation. Cops made ticket-seekers take a seat, squat on the floor for hours together before the booking office opened. Did I care? Hell no! I seized the chance to lap up Farrukh Dhondy's fictionalized account of Charles Shobhraj's life, The Bikini Murders.
There is no point in stacking books for one's own consumption; books have to be shared. A few years back I donated all my Malayalam books to the residents' association of my colony Santhinagar to set up a library there. I would happily do the same with the English ones if space permitted. Well, not exactly donated, I shared them. I do have an access key to the room like a privileged member. It is not that I am possessive about my books but I want them at my beck and call. Last year when the Amazon fires broke out I grew an interest in a long-pending book, M. P. Veerendra Kumar's Amazonum Kurre Vyakulathakalum, a lovely account of his South American trip for a journalist conference. Reading about the Amazon tribes I recalled how the young historian Manu. S. Pillai had described Queen Umayamma Rani of Attingal as amazon in his book The Ivory Throne. So I looked it up again and found it a perfect term to describe a strong, statuesque, (sexually) athletic warrior woman who called the shots in the land. Some discoveries these!
I have used and loved e-reading. It started with reading about Elon Musk and Steve Jobs and also a rib-ticking book How Sachin Destroyed My Life by cricket comedian Vikram Sathaye on the smartphone during weekly train commutes in '16. It was fun, plus I did not have to worry about proper lighting. I have eagerly waited for the release of books, especially Chetan Bhagat's novels. With a more than passing interest in translation, I possess several Malayalam books and their English translations. There are occasions when I have loved the translation more than the original! I cannot for the life of me read C.V. Raman Pillai's historical novels in Malayalam with their convoluted language style. But BK Menon, GS Iyer and Prema Jayakumar lighten the load for me with their rendering.
The book-buying is majorly complemented by library-going. Trivandrum Public Library is the one I had been to the most. In the 80s the city had a British Library. Books aside, one could sight great writers like Aubrey Menen sitting and reading there. So here's a list of all the new and used books I have acquired for my personal collection over more than three decades. They bring back to me, memories of the place they were bought from - Trivandrum, Kochi, Bangalore, Chennai, Mumbai, Delhi, Boston, San Francisco, New Jersey, Melbourne, and Sydney. In Trivandrum, the main shops are Modern Books Center, DC Books, Mathrubhumi Books, NBS, Higginbotham and Paico. In other cities Gangarams, Landmark, Strand and such. Umpteen are the fairs I have been to at venues like the VJT Hall, YMCA Hall, Kanakakunnu Palace, Putharikkandam ground and Chandrasekharan Nair stadium. This catalog does not include my academic books and assorted journals and magazines. Coming back to where I started, yes, several of these books are remaining to be read while some are half-read. You could say my anti-library!
English books - 1100
List of books in collection - English
Malayalam books - 800
List of books in collection - Malayalam
(30th January 2020)
PS: Of all the stories about legendary book lovers, here is my favorite. The former Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu, C.N. Annadurai was a voracious reader. He went to the US for major surgery. He requested the doctor to delay his surgery by a couple of days as he was reading The Master-Christian by Maria Corelli. The doctor allowed him that and he finished the book. The surgery proved futile and Annadurai breathed his last.
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