I must have been 10 when my mother found me in our library – which was also my brothers’ bedroom, but with bookshelves – reading one of my father’s prized Rabindranath Tagore books, Shesher Kobita (The Last Poem). “Give me that,” she said. “It’s not age appropriate.”
The book, written by my father’s hero, the Indian poet, writer, playwright, composer, philosopher and Bengali social reformer Tagore, and published in 1928, is gloriously set in the hill station Shillong in northeastern India and tells the story of a man who falls in love with a woman who is promised to someone else.
There is such longing and yearning in this book; it is filled with unrequited love and passion, and a heroine who is complex and unexpectedly modern in her thinking and expectations.
Labanya refuses to live within the narrow confines of the role she is expected to play.
“Oh, let her read the book,” my lovely dad said, winking at me. “It can’t hurt that Tagore’s an early feminist.”
“Too much S-E-X,” my mother mouthed as she replaced the book, slotting it in among the 40 or more Tagore volumes in our home library.
Libraries. I love libraries. My love for them started young, from my mother, really, who, as well as being a history and biology teacher, was also a school librarian. I can see her now in the gentle half-light of my high school library, her glasses perched on the end of her nose, which was buried in a book.
Medicine, teachers and entertainment
Books, she’d say, are medicine. And teachers. And entertainment. That’s where you’ll find adventure and fun, sadness and happiness and laughter and tears and knowledge and ugliness and beauty.
As small children, we were read to every night, allowed to choose from the book stack that sat next to the bed. Over and over again, I asked for The Forsaken Merman, a poem by Matthew Arnold about a merman whose human wife, lured to the surface by church bells at Easter, has abandoned him and their children to return to her life on Earth. She never returns to the sea.
Night after night the poem, with its feelings of grief, loss and rejection (“How could she leave her children?” I asked my mother. “Will you ever leave me?”) always left me weepy and wretched, yet still I insisted on being read the pitiful tale.
When we were older, there being no television, we four children climbed into my parents’ bed after dinner and my dad would read to us, memorably Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, which, he’d say, was so much more than the story of a struggle between an old man and the enormous marlin he set out to catch.
Persistence, patience and courage were characteristics that my father thought essential in human nature.
Poetry books dominated our shelves. And, of course, acres of space was devoted to William Shakespeare, whose sonnets my parents could, and did, to our consternation, recite, often at the dinner table with guests!
Hence my love of lyrical literature, something my nonfiction-reading ex-husband found to be a fault. He judged people by their reading habits on arrival at their homes.
Scathing and ashamed
If there were no visible books, he’d mutter that he would not be back. If there were books, Francois would, on a scan of the titles, determine whether they were dinner party worthy, or peripheral “maybe” friends. Of me, he was both scathing and ashamed: she reads novels, he disparagingly told his friends.
Francois once told people at a dinner party surrounded by people I barely knew that he’d found me reading the “trashy pulp fiction” The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo – the book that put Swedish author Stieg Larsson firmly on bestseller lists everywhere.
I valiantly held my own and continued, under cover of darkness, to pursue my passion for novels, the new contraband.
Books. I love the smell of them. The crisp crunch of opening a new volume, the cover, the first words on the page, the mood you’re in as you sit down to begin a new adventure…
I have a comfortable reading chair that I am having reupholstered, so worn are the arms of it. I have a bright light with a curved stem that hangs low over the chair, illuminating the pages. Even so, these days I choose books according to the font size as much as the title.
I recently visited my doctor to enquire after my cognitive health. I’ve been finding it harder to remember things, going shopping for milk and arriving home carrying a bagful of groceries with everything but milk. After asking if I’d ever left my keys in the fridge (no), she assured me my brain was just fine.
Digital dementia
Digital dementia, it’s being called – memory problems that are the result of excessive use of smartphones, computers and tablets, with symptoms like mine that include forgetfulness, difficulty concentrating and decreased ability to focus.
We don’t really need to remember anything any more. Dr Debbie asked if I remember my childhood home phone number. Of course. Ladysmith, area code 0361, number 22554.
Did I remember my favourite cousin’s cellphone number? No, why would I need to? I literally call up her name and hit dial.
That, apparently, is the problem.
So too with books. Research has found that we remember and relate to the story less on Kindle than we do with hard copy paper books in our hands.
International mental health e-magazine Psychology Today records research that suggests that comprehension is six to eight times better with physical books than e-readers. Apparently, physical books help readers absorb and recall content more effectively because turning pages as we read creates an “index” in the brain, mapping what we read visually to a particular page. Anyway, it has been found that most people prefer print books to e-readers.
And so I am surprised to find myself considering a Kindle. I’m moving house, and the thought of taking a room full of dusty books – which I will not read again – seems silly.
I’ve already tossed the crime- and thriller-writing Swedes, Norwegians and Scotts (Stieg Larsson, Jo Nesbo, Ian Rankin). I’m done with that genre.
I’ve kept my best-loved books: my travel books and cookbooks, my South African, African and Indian authors. Everything by Elizabeth Strout.
Cold, lifeless Kindle
But a cold, lifeless Kindle?
It will mean not having to repeatedly ask that a favourite book, grudgingly lent to an insistent friend, be returned.
I tell myself that it will not put an end to my regular bookshop visits, scouring shelves, dipping into new titles, reading dust jackets. I will still visit second-hand bookshops with their musty smell, and equally musty booksellers. I will still sit on faded velvet chairs or threadbare tapestry sofas and read Don Quixote if the mood takes me.
I will still talk books with booksellers – one of my favourite people is a bookseller whose defiant slogan is “We print what we like”.
But giving up books that need pages to turn, pages to fold down to mark where you need to start reading again, that sit invitingly next to the bed… Who am I kidding? I’m never giving up books. DM
This story first appeared in our weekly Daily Maverick 168 newspaper, which is available countrywide for R35.
