Like most of my peers I had no one at home who would read to me. My next vivid memory is in school, sometime in 2nd or 3rd grade( this would seem quite late in current standards, but English wasn’t our first language and not many of us had parents who had the time or energy to read to us), our teacher introduced us to a limited collection of early chapter books that would be circulated in class. It took many re-reads to actually comprehend these books.Īmar Chitra Katha and Tinkle comics were part of my staple diet. Sometime later my dad got me the abridged versions of Tom Sawyer and Journey to the Center of the Earth – Europe and America with a landscape and mannerisms different from what was known to me. Then came the Aesop’s fables, which I didn’t particularly enjoy reading because each story would always have a moral attached. These books introduced me into the world of mythology, comics, jokes, non-fiction and I would wait eagerly for next monthly issue. My earliest memory of reading is the Bal Vihar magazine by Chinmaya Mission ( apart from the usual alphabet primers, of course). Nevertheless, it makes me wistful and nostalgic to jot down the books that made me a reader.
This journey will look typical to someone from a middle class Indian family during the 90s and 2000s. Recently, I read this memoir by Lucy Mangan named Bookworm: A Memoir of Childhood Reading and yearned to pen down a post about my reading journey too.
Lucy Mangan, Bookworm: A Memoir of Childhood Reading I read wherever I could, whenever I could, for as long as I could. I read omnivorously but not well and certainly without a thought for posterity.
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