Hangovers of the Bibliotherapic Kind

Authors can be the best and the worst. They can make you feel. Sometimes, you find a book that refuses to get out of your head and you know that your life has just changed and will never be the same ever again. I love and hate it when a book does that to me. I love the hangover that a brilliant book leaves in my mind and I hate the fact that I can never read the book for the first time ever again, that it will never surprise me at the end of paragraph 67, when the murder case is about to get really heated or the French chef whose cooking is paramount to the well being of your newspaper is about to give notice for the umpteenth time

But what about the books you come back to? The books whose spines are worn out and whose paperback jackets have been stained with fingerprints so many times that you can quite literally read them with your eyes closed? 

Picture a cafe in Paris. Hemingway sitting and drinking beer and writing a story that was until a moment ago writing itself and now is being written. Now think of that English paper you couldn't finish which asked you about Hemingway. Suddenly you are an undergraduate again and the working world is far away and you wish to fly into a book and get lost in it, while the outside world can go jump off a cliff for all you care

I have recently become a reader again and the part of my day that I look forward to the most is when I sit with a good book and read one chapter and then another and then another. The world (as stated above) jumps off a cliff and for those stolen moments I make memories or I read someone else's memories or walk around in someone else's imagination. A book is my portal into the mind of someone else. What will I find there? 

Will Somerset Maugham's The Moon and Sixpence teach me about genius? Will Isabelle Allende's My Invented Country show me a picture of Chile which will remind me how much I love Kolkata? Or will it fall to Hemingway's A Moveable Feast which will remind me that it's very important to visit Paris once before I die? 

I look back at all the times books have given me hangovers and taken me by the hand and transported me to cities and locations in time or kingdoms with dragons and knights in them and I shed tears of joy, and anger and frustration and melancholy. From a rickety bed in India, my imagination enters a cafe in Paris or a restaurant in London or a bar on the highway in America which smells of smoke and stale whiskey drunk straight from the bottle...and I'm safe again. No matter how my day has been, I have a book

That's a good thing to come home to. You see, in all my years on this Earth, books have been there by my side while humans have come and gone. I guess that's why a book is dear to me and most of my friends are fictional or in love with people who don't exist

So the next time the world gets too much for me, I'll pick up a book...and I'll lose myself

Again and again and again

The Bilge Master