we had given him nothing, and it made me sad

i know people who never read a book more than once.

i am however not one of them.

oh, of course i don’t read any old book again and again; life’s too short for that and there are just too many books to read.

but i do like to read my favourites once every couple of years or so.

not just, as one would think, to re-capture the best moments of the books, to savour every half remembered detail (which is a given) but also, indirectly and in a way, to re-live, to an extent, the person i was when i first read the book, and also (though perhaps not consciously) to see how much i have changed since.

when i read to kill a mockingbird for the first time (my sister made me read it when i was 11), i didn’t fully understand what i was reading, wasn’t entirely sure what rape was, and the mockingbird analogy completely went past my head.

we had just moved to the present house, and had no next door neighbours. when i opened my room windows, i would see blue sky and trees, and not a single soul. it was our 6th or 7th house move, and i had to start over and make friends all over again.

the house was in the middle of nowhere, with a mini rubber tree plantation in front of it, a little river behind that, and the makeshift road leading to it was made of crushed stones and had long grass growing up the middle. it was always pitch black at night (we didn’t get a streetlight – or a next door neighbour - until 12 years later), with a million stars above. and where locking the front gate if we should forget to do it when the sun was still up was always an adventure in itself (the last movie we saw before the move was an american werewolf in london), with the hapless appointee having to sprint the 15 meters or so back to the front door, and perceived safety.

i half imagined the radley place to be just round the corner.

the copy i read was borrowed from the army library; it was a hardcover and had a grey pencilled drawing of jem frozen on the radley back porch with a long shadow with a hat across his path on the cover.

i contemplated stealing it more than once.

i read it on hot lazy afternoons during the school holiday (and in my head it was summer), when it was so quiet you could hear the rubber seeds crack open from their pods, and i used to snap close the book on the annoying biting gnats that would come through my window. i must have caught more than 30.

if i close my eyes i can still remember the smell of that book, the poor gnats, and my childhood.

……………

i first picked up miss smilla’s feeling for snow after my ip final exam in may 1995, in safeway whitechapel (after a very interesting session with my inspirasi hidup c before the exam), but didn’t buy it.

picked it up again august the same year (safeway again, croydon), but still didn’t buy it.

came back home and searched high and low for it, without any luck.. almost a year later, i found it (after another exam) at popular bookstore (which has a special place in my heart; no other bookstore had the harvill press edition as translated by f david at the time, or even since. i found hoeg’s borderliners there too).

i was about 25 when i read that book (and loved it, and still love it, despite the ending), with exam disappointments, and the “real” world of employment just months away.

and now here i am, 11 years on, only one year younger than the protagonist smilla (one of the best female characters written by a man), a 37 year old woman, never married, almost bitter but ultimately a survivor .

where am i going with this? i have no idea.

but some books are not just books to me.

they represent a timeline in my so-called life.

and there’s always a story behind the story.