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BOOKS... Ruskin calls books, "King's Treasure" --- treasure filled not with gold or sliiver or precious stones, but with riches much more valuable than these --- Knowledge. Poor indeed is the man who does not read, and empty is his life. BEST COMPANION OF A MAN, IF YOU KNOW READING: A good book and a shady nook is all that I want. When a good books is giving me delight of its company presence of human companions seems an intrusion. I strongly believe that there is no loneliness for those who have learnt to take pleasure in the company of the great men who live for us through their books. I find Shakespeare, Milton, Shelley and Keats to be my most faithful of friends, always at my side to comfort and cheer me up, to take me out of my wilderness into a freer and wiser world. My friend may change, die or idle but my books are always patiently waiting to talk to me. They never cross, peevish or unwilling to converse, as my friends sometimes are. A REFUGE: Sometimes life appears to me like a self-imposed prison where I feel trapped and unable to find any meaning for the conflict and contradictions of my life. John Stuart Mill, an eminent Philosopher once fell a victim to such a sense so intensely that he was about to commit suicide. But the poetry of William Wordsworth comes to his rescue at that critical hours and served as a healing balm to his soul in distress. Many times books offer me an escape from all the ugliness and contradiction of this worlds and take me to a world of ideal beauty and truth and goodness, where I can find refuge from all that has pained and worried me. The world! It is a wilderness ; Where tears are hung on every tree. (T. Wood) CHOICE OF MY BOOKS: Whenever I browse in a public library, I struck with the long stupendous rows of shelves, packed with books while the jackets of latest arrival in the show case of a respectable bookshop perplex me the endless diversity of subjects on which people of all nations think and write. Indeed books on all manners of topics under the sun are brought out with so much rapidity that neither can I keep pace with my authors nor can libraries find room for them. Being the reader for all those years I learned a valuable lesson that all books are not alike. There are good books, there are bad books and there are even dangerous and worthless books. I always tried to choice a rational book out of the pile. It makes sense too, there are so many great books out there to be read that I have no time to read cheap or trashy books. It's almost like choosing a friend, wisely and carefully. Ruskin says in his Sesame & Liles. "You might read all the books in the British Muscum and remain an utterly illiterate, uneducated person, but if you read ten pages of a good book with real accuracy, you are evermore in some measure an educated person. The entire difference between education and non-education consist in this accuracy." The masterpieces destined to remain masterpieces are built to last. I always preferred them on second-rate literature. There are so many harmful novel written by men of licentious characters, who have given to wine and women. They write such books for money. The readers might lose morals by the influence of the ignoble characters drawn up by the writer in his book. Bacon once said, "Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested." The method I use for selecting a book is to examine the subject matter. As regards drama, novel, stories and poetry, I only chose books written by standard writer of good reputation.
NOVELS : De Quincey, a famous English critic, distinguish the literature of Knowledge to literature of Power, beautifully. He said, "The function of first is to teach, the function of second, an oar or a sail through affections, pleasure and sympathy." A book of Botany or Zoology is a book of Knowledge. With the passing years the older scientist are superseded by their successors. While Milton's "Lost Paradise" and Shakespeare's "Hamlet" are literature of power and always read by pleasure and profit. Interesting novels like Hutchinson's "If Winter Comes" and thrilling travel books like Smythe's "The Kangchenjunga Adventure" are conveyance. While "Man and Superman" a comedy by George Bernard Shaw and Masefield's "The Tragedy of Nan" are full of inspiration. In my recommendation it would be a pity to miss Jane Austen's "Pride and Prejudice" for the sake of Anthony Hope's "Prisoner of Zenda" and "Rupert of Hentazen." Detective fiction like "Sherlocks Holmes" by Canon Doyle appeals my temperaments while a piece of serious literary criticism like Coleridge's "Lectures on Shakespeare" or Bradley's "Shakespearean Tragedy" have same effect on me. I find modern books are as influential as are the modern cloths. All of them are not to be rated as trashy or cheap. They are the part of the very air we breath and the task of reading them is somehow easier, though they are mostly not considered to be so fine from a literary point of view. From modern fiction writers I like Danielle Steel, Sidney Sheldon, Robin Crook. I find Sidney Sheldon pretty absorbing and fascinating. I read quite a number of his novels like "Rage of the Angles" or "Sand of Times." Every now and then I remind myself that reading only books of fiction is like eating nothing but cakes and cookies. As one need a plain, wholesome food for the body. At that time I bring myself into serious reading. HISTORY: "The Wall Has Two Sides --- A portrait of China Today" by Felix Greene is a good book to understand the present day trends in a rapidly developing country. Gibbon's brilliant and picturesque account of "The Decline and Fall of The Roman Empire" can be my second recommendation. POETRY: I love the writings of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Byron and Keats --- The greater romantics of England in the nineteenth Century --- with Victor Hugo and Lamartine, Goethe and Schiller of the continent and seeks to find out the deeper and broader principles of literary evolution. If you have lost a friend whom you have loved dearly, you may take up, "In Memoriam" which Tennyson wrote on the death of his friend, Hallam, and be assured of both heaven and the soul's immortality. At one place he said, " 'Tis better to have loved and lost ; Than never to have loved at all " Emily Bronte, John Pope, William Blake and the great patriotic poet of Ireland W. B. Yeats are worth reading and even some times, rereading. The zest that you add to your reading makes you to crave for more, whether it's Homer's epics or Wordsworth's lyrics. OTHERS: If the problem of death and immortality interests you, you may turn to Plato's "Phaedo" or Sir. Oliver Lodge's "The Edge of the Unknown." I never let my mind to built boundaries in case of books, I read as ancient writers as Plato or as modern as Bertrand Russell. If the baffling behavior of money and the perplexing problems of banking and foreign trade have a greater attraction for you, then I recommend you might read with profit the discussion of eminent economists like Marshall and Bagehot, Bastable and Witthers. If Italian conquest of Abyssinia, Israel's brutality over Palestine or The unwarrantable Japanese attack on China fills your mind with despair and tempts you to take a low view of human nature, you may retire into solitude with a volume of essays by Emerson or Carlyle. FOUR GREAT BOOKS: "All Books," says Ruskin, "are divisible into two classes, the book of hour, and the book of all time. There are good books for hour and ones for all time; bad books for the hour, and bad ones for all time." "The Meditation" of Marcus Aureatius, St. Augustine's "Confession," Thomas A Kempis's "Imitation of Christ" and "Les Miserable" by Victor Hugo are great, great books in Ruskin's sense of praise, and without a shadow of doubt they are masterpieces. Each of these inspired thinkers seems to say to his readers. "This is the best of me; for the rest, I ate and drink and slept, loved and hated like others, but this I saw and knew, if anything of mine, is worth your money." Each of these books are founded on intimate vital experience, on the soul's experiments with truth. You must read them if you ever want to read. AUTHORS: Emerson said, "Talent alone can't make a writer. There must be a man behind the book." Shakespeare was born in the 19th Century he was the son of an English farmer in the county town of England. The boy was placed in a grammar school. But due to the hard position of his father, he was compelled to leave school. He wasn't a trained scholar but he was a wider reader then most of those who get degrees from school and college. When Shakespeare come to age the name of drama was almost unknown to the English society. He joined the English Theatre as a call-boy. But soon after his dramatic genius raised him to such a position that Queen Elizabeth also could not restrain herself from enjoying the play and acting of Shakespeare. Despite being immensely talented
he appeared to
be a normal human being, famous for running away on the day of his marriage. His
works like Merchants of Venice,
Julius Caesar,
Hamlet,
King of Errors are my
favorites and everlasting.
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