Book reviews, in their conventional meaning, remind me of school. The character sketch, the plot, the protagonist, antagonist, climax…As the characters were dissected to nothing more than emotions and actions their pain became ours, their tears welled up our eyes and their helplessness turned us into insomniacs. I remember Rane of the story “Paribanda”, the character with the tell-tale trousers in “Cop and the Anthem” by O’Henry and his “The last leaf”, Chekov’s “About love” along with Tolstoy’s “The Two Old Men” munching on the loaf of bread, a soldier in “Coup De Grace” and a princess who chooses death to love and is guillotined….as if they were real. Then the reason I liked fiction were many then depending upon the teacher who read stories to us to the ordeal I went through to lay my hands on the book. Now, it’s zeroed down to how much I can relate to it and how much I can’t. It could fall into neither of the categories too but that’s the mediocre effect, not something I would like to discuss here.
Non-fiction is an entirely different issue though. A small piece of news on say Salary Men in Japan and it whets your appetite for more. It’s a complicated matrix of which you never make out enough sense to have the courage to talk about it with conviction (entirely based on my experience) unlike the typical male habit of “expressing opinions” on anything and everything they’ve heard of politics to petrol prices. Sometimes, people state that as a reason for women lagging behind men (not being so opinioned about everything) but I say well, that depends on what kind of noises you like. Empty vessels that make lost of noise, which I think could result in Permanent Threshold Shift of Hearing ( male tea-shops, office canteen politics alike guff) or PTS again resulting from women who at least know the details of what they are speaking about ( whether it be the vegetable they cooked, sari or relatives for that matter! ).
Non-fiction is a good thing; it prevents the Exposure of Ignorance. It results in the freedom from servitude and dependence not only in relation to other nations (if you can get the books in your country!) and individuals (in terms of knowledge) but also from the forces of ignorance and human misery (resulting from the same). {Well, that is infact the third principle of Development according to Todaro and Smith, hehe I just used it to express myself here} That’s the best part of reading Non-fiction. No fiction gets as Real as That!!
Kite Runner
