Before joining Bookworm, I always thought that food, clothing and shelter are the basic needs of people. But I realise I was quite wrong. Before my time here, I have been in the company of people who spoke about T.V and its contents, Face Book and the posts on FB and all sorts of entertainment media stuff. I myself – love movies.
But a strange feeling ran down my spine when I began to be with the bookworm people. I had people around me who spoke about books, books and more about books. This introduced me to the fourth necessity of humans that is “reading”. There were words like illustrator, folk tales, fiction, point of view, nonfiction, booktalks, implicit content, representation, relevance of text flying above my head. I had heard them before but could barely understand the actual meaning of it all. For me books were meant to be just stories and information and on the side of life and it’s basic needs.
For bookworms, a 3 hour movie becomes a book, the author is the story writer, publisher is the producer, the hero is the main character in the story, support actors and actresses are the support characters and much more. Their media is the book and they can discuss this, argue about it, talk about it for hours. Books were like living beings for bookworms. They have a book doctor too. I was the strange one !
I wondered how people could read and remember so much, Like really?? If asked, they could have listed a 100 authors just like that. Importance to reading was so much that I was shocked and bothered whether I was in the wrong place.
The strange feeling never left me.
It was a different experience to be a part of Bookworm with people, no no not people they were “book addicts”! They insisted me to read too, and yes I did try to read. I started with a few small picture books that people suggested, and was sad! I did not like any of them. They were sad too !
Then I chose another set of books, tried them too…Found myself not liking them too… Everybody in Bookworm was trying hard to suggest something I would like, but in vain. I started choosing books from random shelves as I did not know how to choose a book for myself and felt that I must find something to talk about like the others.
Every meeting we would discuss about my reading, there was no progress. I tried funny books, did not work. I tried small stories, did not work. I was feeling odd internally, was trying to figure out why am I not liking any book when others do.
All this still bothers me and my journey still continues in my trying to find something that I will really like, to find a author I would love reading more about and a day when I will talk about books like the bookworms at Bookworm !