Finding a book to talk about for the final post on my reading tales [and My Friend Alexa] has been hard. I contemplated between choosing Macbeth and Harry Potter but the problem with both those choices was there isn’t just a memory attached to these books. There’s an entire yarn, tangled, sometimes with each other because I read these two in the formative years of my life, and untangling that yarn feels like doing the books a disservice. There are so many threads that just talking about one would be incomplete.
Should I tell you that I still remember lines from the soliloquy of Act I Scene 9 of Macbeth because we had to memorize and recite them in front of the entire class in class twelfth? Or that at seventeen I threw a tantrum since my parents refused to buy me HP 6 because it was too expensive.
No, it just wouldn’t do because it wouldn’t be enough.
So I thought I’ll be selfish and talk about a series: The Dark Tower by Stephen King because it was this series that led me to write, finish and self-publish a novella called The Gunslinger. But I have kinda already talked about it in a previous post and that is the best memory I have around the books.
I also thought, briefly, that I’d talk about how Reading Tales as a category on my blog was languishing because I hadn’t realized that I had stopped reading entirely. Until 2019-20 that is when I forced myself to course correct. But I have talked about that too.
Then, I thought back to my first reading experience and the image that popped into my head was of a dusty library, me in my sports uniform, a wee baby of eight, being interrogated by my class teacher about the book I had issued for the weekend. In her defense, she was only trying to figure out if I had actually read the book. But what she didn’t realize was that experience kinda put me off reading for a while.
The fateful book that was in discussion at the time was Noddy.
I had read the first few chapters of the book. But lines like “the bell in Noddy’s hat clinked” made me realize that perhaps I had picked up a book a little too juvenile for me. And when my teacher asked me what I had read, instead of repeating these words to her, I just shook my head and accepted my punishment. I mean she wouldn’t believe me if I told her that Noddy was speaking to his hat, would she?
Sometime later, my house became flooded with Noddy books – this time for my sister – because they were bright picture books and she was after all only three.
Unlike me, she loved Noddy and his quirkiness and bouts of anger and remorse. So I forgot about my enmity with Noddy and read them out to her, making up my own stories for her entertainment. Because it wasn’t enough that I read out stories for her, I had to enact them in front of her too. It’s no wonder I have become a writer and she’s my first audience, even now.
If the trajectory of this post surprised you, let me tell you, I was not prepared for it either! Oh well, books are like that. They find you and hug the crap out of you.
I’m taking my blog to the next level with Blogchatter’s My Friend Alexa. This is the last in the series of bookish memories. To read the previous tales, click here.
tales of Suchita 
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