I was recently reading The Gift by Cecelia Ahern during my flight from Bombay to Udaipur. I had lately developed a tendency to skim through novels, without caring about the long and seemingly boring details about a house, person's appearance, inconsequential conversations etc. I read only those parts carefully that were required to get to know the plot, others seemed a waste of time. No wonder, I was ditching midway most of the novels I started.
Maybe the Internet Attention Deficit Disorder had caught me. The compulsive urge to press Ctrl+Tab or to check if your facebook wall has some more updates or to browse aimlessly for some more time; shifting your attention from one thing to another at such a fast pace that nothing really gets registered on your mind.
But reading The Gift was a completely different experience. After a long time, I was actually reading. It is not the story of a novel, but the small details that make reading it such a wonderful experience. Unless, you feel like you have visited a new place, met new people and lived a whole new experience, you haven't completely read a novel. This particular novel begins by saying it is about a person who during the course of this story discovers himself. It ends by saying that particular person was not the protege, but the reader himself!
Maybe the Internet Attention Deficit Disorder had caught me. The compulsive urge to press Ctrl+Tab or to check if your facebook wall has some more updates or to browse aimlessly for some more time; shifting your attention from one thing to another at such a fast pace that nothing really gets registered on your mind.
But reading The Gift was a completely different experience. After a long time, I was actually reading. It is not the story of a novel, but the small details that make reading it such a wonderful experience. Unless, you feel like you have visited a new place, met new people and lived a whole new experience, you haven't completely read a novel. This particular novel begins by saying it is about a person who during the course of this story discovers himself. It ends by saying that particular person was not the protege, but the reader himself!
