Ruskin Bond's Confessions of a Book Lover can make anyone fall in love with reading
This year, on his 83rd birthday in May, renowned writer Ruskin Bond launched two new books in Mussoorie. While one of them was a tribute to his father, the other was a tribute to the books he has loved, the writers he has been inspired by and those he holds in high regard. This book, titled Confessions of a Book Lover, takes us into Ruskin Bond's inner world and gives us an insight into his childhood and adolescence, when he developed a close relationship with the world of literature. His earliest encounters with some of his favourite writers have been brought to us in this work, which is a sort of sequel to his earlier Love among the Bookshelves: he gives us a prelude before sharing with us some excerpt or chapter from the writings of the authors whom he has loved all his life.
"These writers were important to me at various stages of my personal and writing life," he says in the book's introduction.
He has often told me that reading has always been a minority pastime. "When I was in school, out of 35 boys in my class, just three or four were readers. Those days, the minority was in hundreds - now it may be in lakhs."
But the confessions made by him about his deep love for books can touch the hearts of even those who have never read a book in their lives! The romance of reading described by him can lure anyone.
By now, most of us know from Bond's writings that he has been a great fan of Charles Dickens, especially his David Copperfield, with which he could identify easily. Here he tells us that Nicholas Nickleby was also a favourite: "full of humour, pathos and memorable scenes". It was in the winter of 1948-49 that Bond, still a schoolboy, discovered Charles Dickens in an old cupboard at Dehra Dun.
When we encounter Bond's experience of reading Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights, we can identify with it completely. It gripped him and he read it through a stormy night when he was a youngster. He read it again this year just to see whether it would hold him in thrall the same way. And he discovered that it did! Emily, "the most gifted of the three Brontë sisters, in her brief tenure on this earth, had put everything into this one sizzling novel and left it behind to haunt posterity" he writes.
However, he does not give us an extract from Wuthering Heights: "You have to take it in one large dose, preferably late at night."
Besides discovering some of Bond's beloved writers, we also get to know quite a bit about his life's journey. He fell ill when he was in England for four years as a young man. While he was at Hampstead General Hospital for a month, a pretty nurse brought him a trolley of books. She was "a beautiful nurse who looked like Jennifer Jones, a film star of that era", we are told. This trolley had, among others, books by William Saroyan who had won a Pulitzer prize for his play, The Time of Your Life.
As a young boy at Shimla's Bishop Cotton School, Bond was made in-charge of the Anderson Library there for his last two years in school. This library contributed greatly to his love for reading and writing. "I would allow myself to be transported to another world through the pages of Somerset Maugham, Hugh Walpole, JB Priestley, PG Wodehouse, JM Barrie, Compton Mackenzie, Dornford Yates and other successful novelists, poets and playwrights of the 1930s and '40s."
Another time that he was brought a trolley of books was when he was down with jaundice in 1949 at school and was taken to Shimla's Ripon Hospital. It was a kind matron who, in a way, introduced Bond to O Henry, Saqi and Barry Pain.
When Bond first visited Bangalore in 1960, he came across Select Bookshop of Mr KBK Rao at MG Road (now it is on Brigade Road). He became friends with Rao and later with his son KKS Murthy who, even now, sends him handwritten lists of books that he thinks would interest the author. The books keep piling up in his room and study at Ivy Cottage!
Bond says in this book that he loves to discover "the unusual, the little-known, the forgotten, and even the eccentric sometimes a little gem turns up or a neglected masterpiece". He gives us extracts from Conrad, HG Wells, William Saroyan and Laurence Sterne, among others, in this work.
He wishes that all these descriptions of his love for reading will inspire readers to "either go back to these fine writers or start hunting for their works on the Internet or on old library shelves".
When young readers find this work of Bond, they will surely understand what it means to be in love with books, what a treasure trove old libraries and bookshops are and how thrilling it is to come across a bookshelf and enjoy every book in solitude and leisure.
These confessions of a book lover can make anyone turn into one!
Also read - Ruskin Bond: Mussoorie, love and the 81-year-old