Magic ... frost..

My Wordless Travels

I like to read every single word, every single sentence and halt at the full stop to conjure the complete compact image of all that is in the sentence, take a deep breath and then move on. I like the feel of paper as I turn the pages one by one, slowly, very slowly, carefully, not missing out on any opportunity of sniffing the book more often as I proceed. There is a lifetime of desire there, of words stored and conjured up at that precise moment of magic. I fill them in through my lungs pause and fill more. As my eyes travel through the vacancies of the imagination, I halt to make a previous picture more colorful, dull down another previous one if I find it too bright, and wait for the burst of an unexpected one hiding in the corner waiting to surprise me.
I am slow. I savor words. I feel them on the tip of my tongue, let them travel through my windpipe to settle down into the abyss of my stomach and take a deep breath in to start all over again. There is no pattern to my reading, just a slow simmering of all the sighs and wallows of contentment that seem to fill my every pore as I secure more worlds. Mine is a world of flowers, thorns, dried leaves, dew, twigs and walked over grass.

Reading In Sips and Swallows

For a reader to get truly inspired, he/she should be fascinated by their personal journeys. Every reader has a mood, a path, a curve, or probably infinite other way worldly feelings that mark their own anonymous footprints in the shadowy lanes of books. You do not have to be a book lover to be a reader, you just have to trust the magic of words to place you somewhere beyond your own knowing. To lead you somewhere in those grooves of unexplored understanding. Over the past 2 days, I've flitted away through my reading, not really having the time to read for hours, I have read in those spaces which time has afforded me, those snatches of peace with my book. It could range from moving around on the telephone and glimpsing through a few lines, waiting for a text message and getting lost through the book, glancing down with weary eyes already drooped with sleep and finding a new sense of ease and perfection of flawed being. Those few minutes make up for the further empty hours. That snip of the story hangs there, waiting patiently above by bed for me to arrive so that we can continue our combined journey.

"You cannot pretend to read a book. Your eyes will give you away. So will your breathing. A person entranced by a book simply forgets to breathe... "

Current Read 2: Neil Flambe and The Marco Polo Murders by Kevin Sylvester

My Current Favorite Poem :)

Current Read 1: The Shipping News by Annie Proulx

Blog of the Week:1

I've decided that every worthy reader who shares his world with other readers deserves all the promotion I can give him/her in my own way. So every week I have decided to post at least 3 such wonderful journeys of such readers that inspire me to read more.

The first one today has been an unexpected stumble-upon blog which I've seriously loved exploring. I feel every awesome blog should be delved and revered through a complete archive wandering. I'm still going through this one but it has given me some of the best words of wisdom and some of the cutest book images. Check this blog out, whose writer is a 14year old and a fabulous reader at that. :)

Blog Name: Books and Ghosts
Blog Link:http://booksandghosts.tumblr.com

Reading Bradbury:

Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury, was a revelation. The language, the sheer beauty and magic that Bradbury creates with his words just left me stunned. It was like discovering a whole side of writing an amazing story, an aspect of the language which only those few, amazing writers can tap into and make it flow like an on-the-spot magically built overflowing fountain of energy. I discovered in Bradbury the passion of life that touches a few people who make out of it something that everyone else in the world can enjoy and probably treasure but most importantly, would want to remember all their lives.

There are a very few books which make its page numbers shadow on your memory. Bradbury makes you want to etch them down on your minds, sometimes in your skin.

" The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies." - Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury.

Current Read: Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

My New Home: The American Center Library, Mumbai

This is what I messaged my boyfriend today as I left the library:

ME: My library.. I never really visited it you know.. just went there twice a month for my books.. but ever since the past 2 weeks I just go there to read almost 3 times a week and be there... Go through all these amazing books... Find new titles... New authors.. Realize I want to read so much... I love exploring these hidden books kept randomly around... I've become attached to the place... the people.. I look forward everyday to be with myself and a book... Just so quiet and peaceful... Never realized until today that I'm a bit possessive about the place too... There were these loads of students who came along for research today by some college and I felt a little upset... Like having so many strangers in my new home... I felt protective about the books there and the unknown hands touching them or handling them... Felt like a child who's too much in love to get hurt..

Readers Of The Underground New York Public Library: A Photoessay

"Read books. Care about things. Get excited. Try not to be too down on yourself. Enjoy the ever present game of knowing."

“I always read. You know how sharks have to keep swimming or they die? I’m like that. If I stop reading, I die.” 
― Patrick Rothfuss

“We become the books we read.” 

― Matthew Kelly

“Come to the book as you would come to an unexplored land. Come without a map. Explore it and draw your own map.” 
― Stephen King, Hearts in Atlantis

“You get a little moody sometimes but I think that's because you like to read. People that like to read are always a little fucked up.”
― Pat Conroy, The Prince of Tides

“Still in my coat and hat, I sank onto the stair to read the letter. (I never read without making sure I am in a secure position. I have been like this ever since the age of seven when, sitting on a high wall and reading The Water Babies, I was so seduced by the descriptions of underwater life that I unconsciously relaxed my muscles. Instead of being held buoyant by the water that so vividly surrounded me in my mind, I plummeted to the ground and knocked myself out. I can still feel the scar under my fringe now. Reading can be dangerous.)” 
― Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale

Reading John Steinback:

I've reached almost 3/4ths of the story of the "Cannery Row" by Steinback and find myself amazed at the simplicity and pull of his writing. He draws on you a soft coil of rope which tightens with every further sentence of his words, liberating you at the same as grounding you further into the hearth of his story. I would like to call them characters, the people who inhabit his story, but I see them as Lives; lives which are not lived and lived at the same time. What I love about reading him is the way he writes his characters. They are so human  with the quality of struggling to be nothing but themselves. Steinback talks about them as if they form a part of who he is, if he was all of them at once. An unprecedented love flows through the most flawed of his fictional people and there is warmth underlining each personality. He talks about them with the fascination of an unknown reader reading a book which he might have written a while back and has completely forgotten about. While I read, I already decided the passages and lines that I would revisit and reread, for his prose has a lullaby-like quality that induces you to get sucked into it.

The biggest gift is the silence in the books ... and the silence in you, after reading them.

Current Read: Poetry 2: What Have You Lost? : Poems selected by Naomi Shibab Nye

 Orange Juice


It was dark
when my father drank
orange juice from the container.
I would hear the creaking
of his footsteps
in the hallway
past my bedroom
and the suction
of the refrigerator door
give way to his private
love of sweets in
the quiet night.

I longed to know
the sweetness
of my father, and
would rise to meet him,
my feet bare
on the cold kitchen floor, and
listen for clues.


-Lisa Ruth Shulman

My Father in the Stacks


For hours in his study he'd disappear
into the private chambers of a story.
Walls within walls, his bookshelves
dwarfed me. His large oak desk
held the family photo, tall, straight stacks,
and the yellow plots of legal pads.
Sometimes he'd pass me a book
if my hands were clean.

I've grown tall like my father
wandering dark hours of the afternoon
in fields of print, rustling pages.
Back at home at the university
where my father teaches, I walk
through the library on the seventh floor,
no call number in mind.
I turn the aisle and he is there.
In the silence of so many books,
we do not what to say.
I forgive our unwritten lives,
the years we haven't read/
We pass each other, my hands are clean.

- David Hassler.

The Bookmark Time! My New Batch of Handmade Bookmarks! .. :)

Making bookmarks is almost as close to my heart as the activity of reading. Its how I feel I am involved in the process of reading and am being able to give the book something of my love in return. I prefer making my own bookmarks and never buy them.What pictures, quote, sentence stays in the pages of the book that I'm reading signifies the amount of respect I feel towards the medium which helps me understand the world of humanity better. While I choose the pattern, decide the papers and the ribbons to go along, I visualize what it would look like when I open the pages of a book each time and find that particular imaginary completed bookmark there. The feel of it, its journey with a book and the many other books who would become its future homes. 

Uncover and Writhe For Me : A Short Story by Mik Pozin

http://thestrangerblog.com/uncover-and-writhe-for-me/ - A must read for every reader.Please read this short story by clicking the link here. :)

If words could could, they would sound like this -- Thank you Mik Pozin for a site of inspiration.

Thursday morning thoughts of a reader..

As I journey through the everyday, I wonder about that immense lot of readers, lying down on their bed, reading a book, lost. I wonder how the pages of their book smell, what stories are they currently living in, what heart breaks and what loves have conquered them. I think all this as I walk down the road, bask in the monsoon sun, smile at the blue-grey sky and continue my pondering. At times I am intimidated by these readers, who read almost for every single our a day, for I feel I stand defeated in front of them. It is then that I have to remind myself that my journey of a reader is not one of duplication of those million more, rather it is a statement of identity, a quest for books which will keep forming me, the right to those words which will have the stain of my thoughts on them and those unseen, almost non-existent finger-prints which brush through each page that my hands shall hold.

I smile then and carry on.