Literary Pleasure

I was supposed to do this a long time back, but sometimes I'm just a heap of lazy bones! My apologies for that Mukund! Anyway, here I go...

Total Number of Books I Own: Well, there are only a handful of books that I have bought, but want to improve on this. My dad has a vast collection...the count would be around 200. I haven't read many of them either. I have this rather irksome habit of starting off with a book, but never finishing it. I leave it somewhere around the middle, and the next time I wish to continue with it, wouldn't remember the story and tend to start from scratch! One reason for this could be that I get deeply involved in any book I read, even if it's a simple story. I take in the essence of each sentence and try to retain whatever I've learnt.

Last Book I Bought: Undoubtedly, Harry Potter and The Half Blood Prince. Ironically, I haven't finished this book yet! Perhaps, I am scared that it would end too soon and then would have to wait too long for the final book! Yeah, I am silly at times!

Last Book I Read: The last book I read but haven't done with yet, is Harry Potter VI. The last book I finished was The Alchemist.

Five Books That Mean a Lot to Me: Are these...

1. The Alchemist: Now this is one book that literally transformed my way of thinking. I never knew that the Universe is such a phenomenal force. I have since, felt the Universe coming to my assistance every so often!

2. My Experiments with Truth: This is one of those I only partially read. But whatever I read was excellent. One can learn many things here. One of my favorite lines goes something like this...'Honest confession, coupled with a promise never to repeat the mistake again, and delivered to the one who deserves it, is the purest form of repentance.'

3. Harry Potter series: My love for English and the mesmerising story account for this. Rowling proves that the beauty of a language need not lie in the use of flamboyant words...but in the use of simple ones, strung elegantly. Hats off to her for inculcating in children, the habit of reading.

4. The Bermuda Triangle: Another victim of my incomplete reading. But the mystery of this triangle is chilling. It has first person accounts of people who've experienced the triangle's absurdity. Wish to know what's really going on there.

5. VISA Personal Diary: This one's unpublished!! :) It's a diary Saahil and I maintain, currently in the possession of Saahil, which is full of notes, letters, poems we've dedicated to each other, our thoughts, feelings, things we wanna do in life (would put this up here sometime), pictures, love puzzles and all such stuff; in short, it's got everything related to VISA, one way or the other. It's fast filling up, and we'd soon need to resort to a giant sized diary I suppose!! Compiling and reading the diary is a pleasure we dearly treasure!

I love reading, but the only setback has been lack of time! There are a multitude of books that I wish to read soon...Da Vinci Code, Mien Kempf (to understand what drove this guy to abhor Jews so deeply), Lord of the Rings, Salman Rushdie, Eleven Minutes, Sidney Sheldon, Ayn Rand, Gone with the Wind, Wuthering Heights esp for this excerpt I read somewhere :

'My love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods: time will change it, I'm well aware, as winter changes the trees. My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath: a source of little visible delight, but necessary. Nelly, I AM Heathcliff! He's always, always in my mind: not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being.'

Tag five people and have them do this on their blogs: I would randomly pick friends...hope you people haven't already done it!

Saurabh
Abhinav
Angel (hope she gets time from her busy schedule)
Anat
Rohit