Joys of reading

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!