I overheard a conversation between a customer and a book seller at a book fair, changing my very idea that those who buy books are avid readers. A middle-aged woman ordered the sales boy at a stall to show her books that must not exceed 10 inches in length and seven inches in breadth; the thickness of the entire set should be within 20 inches.
She just dismissed the boy when he asked for the names of the books and the authors. Bringing out a six-inch scale from her bag, she said that she needed the books only to fill a space dedicated to books in her beautiful teak showcase.
The honest confession may disappoint a good many book lovers. But the hard truth lies in the question whether most book buyers are actual readers at all. I have come across people who buy the latest books but are poor readers. They travel hundreds of miles to College Street in Kolkata and even attend the Kolkata Book Fair every year only to buy books. If they are asked about the contents of the books they have bought, they look dumbfounded.
They want to show themselves as voracious readers which they are not. I am acquainted with a high school teacher who is regarded by his friends and colleagues as a book worm. Actually, he buys a huge number of books and lends them to some genuine readers on condition that they should underline the portions they deem interesting and of course, relate the subject matters of the books. The teacher just commits the underlined portions to memory and vomits them wherever he finds opportunities.
On the contrary, there are some avid readers who are extremely reluctant to buy books, though they have the money. They borrow books from others only to finish them in one go. Some of them, though gifted with a marvellous memory to remember minute details of hundreds of books they have read in their life, pretend to be forgetful of returning the books to their owners. Despite their unquestionable honesty in everyday life, they hardly feel a guilty conscience for not returning the books.
Mitchell Stephens, a journalism professor at New York University, in his essay “The Death of Reading” in Los Angeles Times Magazine, lamented how the lack of the reading habit has enveloped our life. Even books attaining the fame of “number one best seller” may be a poor read.
The renowned theoretical physicist and cosmologist Stephen Hawkins’s A Brief History of Time has sold more than 10 million copies. Surprisingly, the book is often dubbed “the most unread book of all time”. The Hawking Index (HI), a mock mathematical measure on how far people will, on an average, read through a book before giving up, was invented by American mathematician Jordan Ellenberg. According to HI, A Brief History of Time, has been read only by 6.6%. However, Hillary Clinton’s Hard Choices tops the list of the most unread books scoring 1.9%.
I cannot restrain from referring to an avid reader who runs a tea stall sparsely visited by customers. Most of his time is passed by reading classic Bengali novels stacked in one corner of his stall with tea-making materials. The reading habit does not depend merely on educational qualifications, profession or status.
