Book review: Love Among The Bookshelves by Ruskin Bond

Quote: In time I was to learn that it's the onlooker who sees more of the party than the partygoer; that it's the man on the traffic duty who sees more of the passing show than the man behind the wheel; that the man on the hilltop sees the curvature of the earth better than the man on the plain; that the hovering vultures know who is winning the battle long before the opposing armies; and that, when all the wars are done, a butterfly will still be beautiful.

The first time I found the name of P.G. Woodhouse, was when I read Ruskin Bond; the one who intrigued me about Wuthering Heights even before joining college was Mr. Bond; the one who told me you don't necessarily have to grasp everything Charles Dickens wrote was old Rusty.

Love Among the Bookshelves is part memoir part anthology and part fanboying. The boy in Ruskin Bond never grew old. Here we also get introduced to the authors and poets who made a lasting impact on him as we travel with young Rusty through Dheradun, Jersey, London and finally his home in Landour. I was never going to pick Somerset Maugham, but it was in another novel of Rusty's where he literally geeked about Maugham's realism and I picked up one of the greatest short story writers.

This book is the sweetest way to introduce and seduce a young reader into literature of old. He talks about reading Indian English writers and meeting Mulk Raj Anand years later. I was happy to find how Bond says he outgrew comics, he never infantilizes the genre. He talks about Captain Marvel, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, Batman and he is sad that a superhero who was contemporary to Phantom called Bulletman bit to dust.

Bond also introduces Richard Jefferies, H. E. Bates, whom I have yet to read. Another thing I loved about this tiny book was how the question of immortality in literature comes up. Bond tells short stories if striking and well written can survive for ages as it gets picked for anthologies and collections, hence a short story might have a better shot at immortality than a novel. And I can compare it with Kate Chopin's The Story of an Hour!

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