The Half Read Books !

Have you ever lost a book? A book which was half read?

It has happened many times with me. Maybe I cannot take care of the books. But then the fact is they attract me. a lot. I like spending time in the book store, only looking at so many books - novels, fiction, non-fiction, comics, crime, fantasy, historical…all genres attract me.  There are a few books which I ordered online or bought from the store; but never opened them. It just feels good that this or that book is there in my bookshelf.

I have a fickle mind; I lose the grip of something after a while. And that naturally resulted in losing the grip of the plot in the book that I was reading. Not one but many. The reasons are different every other time. Sometimes, I get stuck with the words I don’t know, sometimes, I find some work and get too occupied in it for months and the book is left. Sometimes, the book keeps traveling with me in the back pack which was read only during the beginning of the journey before I made some friends in the trip, or sometimes, I just lose the book somewhere.

A few times I remember that I made a list of all half read books and I decided to complete that list before I purchase any other book. But then…I lost that list after a while.

I started reading when I was 16, to dodge the SSC study time, reading anything other than text-books was of utmost interest. Now I am 25. During this course of time I have had more than 15 half read books in the list I made a year ago.

Slowly I know why!

There is this book called “Illusions” by Richard Bach. I brought it home without asking my uncle from his book shelf when I was 18 or 19. I started reading that book. There was this thing in that book which stayed with me even after I lost that book after reading 60 something pages of that book. The book spoke about the ‘book of messiah’ – a book that messiah refers to as his guide during his services as a messiah.  So the protagonist asks the messiah, ‘how do you know on what page is the solution of your problem?’ to which the messiah answers, ‘open any page and what you read is the solution of your problem. Not only in this guide book but you can take any book and randomly open a page and read what’s written in there, you find an answer to your problem.’ This thing stayed with me for a while because I used to relate to this even after the book was long gone.

Feluda by Satyajit Ray
Stories of My Experiments With the Truth by M.K Gandhi
Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
While the Light lasts by Agatha Christie
A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khalid Hosseini
Dongri to Dubai by Hussain Zaidi
Immortals of Meluha by Amish
Learning film making shot by shot
Few books on Marketing
And the Illusions are few books that were left incomplete because I had lost them somewhere.

A few months before, I found The Agatha Christie book in my closet. I read three stories and I lost it again. Then I found Meluha in the stock of DVDs box. I started off again from a few pages behind to get back in the zone…and completed it.
Feluda has captivated my mind entirely right now.
And when I was working too much but I was having some second thoughts about the decisions I had to take regarding my career, some crucial work related decisions, where I had lost myself in the dilemma of many possibilities…  I found the half read ‘Illusions’.

Going by the logic of Illusions itself – I opened the page where I had left and started reading. By the end of the book I had my answer with me.

That’s when I realized, that you buy that book for a reason. It has its role to play in your life. The book gets lost because maybe you don’t need it at that time…the practical cause could be something as stupid as you forgetting the book somewhere, or because there in something more important for you to do  at that time than reading that book. But it comes back to you to show you your way. It finds you when you need it the most.

And that’s when I knew that it’s a small circle of destiny. You sometimes feel incomplete about some things in life. Many uncertainties and incomplete tracks of events keep our emotions and minds hanging. That’s when the half read book finds you to give you one moment of completion.

Because when you complete a reading a book, you get a closure in some part of your mind.
So never feel bad for a half read novel that you lost – it will find you when you need a closure.