Reading That Matters

One of my current passions is attempting to locate and buy the books that I had read in my childhood and teenage years in India (and, believe me, there were a lot of them). And one of the books at the top of my list definitely has to be Nikolai Nosov's wonderful The Adventures of Dunno and His Friends. I am pretty sure that the hardcopy of this book is lying around somewhere with my family's belongings back in India. Growing up, I wasn't really into movies or hanging out with friends all that much. About the only things that interested me were weight lifting and books. Today, When I want to relax, I most certainly will pick up one of these books rather than switching on the TV.

I still remember back in high school when I would rent a bicycle and take Nosov's book out with me to the countryside to read it all over again for the umpteenth time in the blazing heat. The books' authors may have drawn parallels to people or stories in real life. For me, even today, all of that is, as a great man recently put it, "irrelevant". Personally, I try not to see superficiality in these stories. Some of the characters may be superficial (Dunno himself comes across as superficial) but its like my mind cannot process emotions, other than laughter, above a certain level when I go through the pages on these books. Delightful! And these stories easily dish out a bag of nostalgia.