Booker, God and me

I have finished reading more than 75 books till date, maybe something around 90. But there is a huge number of books I started, bought, or borrowed but never reached their end, for different reasons. One of these books was Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things.

For the first time in my life I had heard the name of Booker prize due to this book. Arundhati Roy had made us all proud when she won the Man Booker Prize for her God of Small Things. Though I still don’t know how a woman got a ‘Man’ Booker Prize, I committed all the three names (prize, lady and book) to my memory which helped me solve at least one question in all the general knowledge quizzes for the next one year, and sometimes even after that.

And then, during my second year of Engineering at Vellore Institute of Technology, I got a chance to read the sacred work. But I committed the blasphemy of leaving the book at some thirty-two pages when this novice reader lost his patience, and after some time I lost the book to my hostel.

After a gap of some three years, during which I had read more than twenty books, I decided to give the book a retry during my training at TCS Trivandrum. This time I started from twenties after some skimming (I couldn’t read all those pages again) and crossed the fifty page mark (Yesss!!!) before reaching the conclusion that:

The book was too good for my standards and I was not yet capable of reading such good literature AND I had learnt nothing in literature in those three years.

OR

The Book and the Booker Prize are over-hyped.

Since I do believe in conspiracy theories and could not think of Booker Prize as over-hyped (though I now think that Nobel Peace Prize IS over-hyped), I decided that it was me who needed to improve. Though, in the meantime I decided not to buy ANY book that was awarded/nominated for a Booker Prize. That is my way of respecting the Booker Winners with the additional benefit of not hurting my self-respect. Believe it or not, I haven’t read a word of The Inheritance of Loss or The White Tiger. Though I hope one day I’ll be good enough to read, understand, and at the same time, enjoy these books.

Amen.

PS: The only exception to my rule of Not reading Booker winner/nominated books was ‘The Reluctant Fundamentalist’ by Mohsin Hamid. A wonderful book that I did enjoy.

Tags: Books