I'm so excited, and I just can't hide it...

Oh my god! Tomorrow is the day! I can rush to my neighbourhood Borders store and get my hands on the new Harry Potter. For ages the stores have been encouraging people to be “organised wizards” and pre-order. So obviously I was quite easily suckered into that one! I mean, my “organised wizard” brain said, you’re going to buy the freaking book anyway… it does make sense to pre-order so if they do run out (perish the thought), you won’t be left bookless and Harry Potter less and can pass smug glances at all those non-organised ones as you walk out of the store!

Its been so long since I’ve been so excited about a series of books. When I began reading at the wee little age of 4 or 5 I was obsessed with The Famous Five and pretty much all books Enid Blyton.

Once I was finished with all the happy little Enid Blyton adventures books handed down from my Mom and aunts and had been through all the Famous Fives I could possibly find in the neighbourhood library, it was a pretty young detective named Nancy Drew who caught my eye. God, when I think of her now I realise how annoying she and her stupid friends really were but at the age of 8, she was my idol! All I wanted to be when I grew up was a cool “amateur” detective just like her (they kept emphasising the point that she was an amateur detective in all her books)! I still have a HUGE collection of her books in my room in Madras – such a pity my sister never took to reading.

The next obsession was those all-American identical twins Elizabeth and Jessica Wakefield who lived in a sweet little all-American town named Sweet Valley, California. Talk about an introduction to American pop culture! We were introduced to such foreign concepts as prom night, jocks, slam books, I even got the idea of maintaining a journal over a diary from that series. We had our own slam book fever and I know that old slam book of mine is still somewhere in my room in Madras – what a laugh that’ll be to read now! The books were really light and slightly obsessive about boys and fashion and best friends and what not and they suited me just fine my adolescent years.

Since then though, there hasn’t been too much. I really loved the Courtney and Ballantyne sagas of Wilbur Smith but they were too few and far between. Lately I’ve been reacquainting myself with those quirky little detectives Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple, and Lawrence Sander’s sarcastic detective Archy McNally is always good for a laugh and a classic whodunit. But there hasn’t really been a series that I could sink my teeth into and really get lost in since Sweet Valley. Until I met Harry Potter that is.

A few years ago, I read one of the books and enjoyed it but forgot about it later. Two years ago I decided I wanted to see what all this Harry Potter fuss was about so I hinted to S that I wanted to read them all and it would make a very lovely Christmas present and he acquiesced to my wishes and bought them all for me and it took me a few months to get through them all. But I was so hooked. When I finished the last one, I was at such a loss… you know, what now? How long before I get to read the next one? Bloody long I’ve had to wait but now the day is finally here! Since the beginning of June, I read them all again of course… just to remind myself of all the important details before the new one.

Don’t ask my why I’m so addicted. I think it has something to do with how very simple and Enid-Blyton-like it is and at the same time its funny and interesting and has loads of suspense. And the magic… being an overly imaginative child, its so much fun to lose myself in this fantasy world of flying broomsticks and Bertie Botts’ Every Flavoured Beans and unforgivable curses.

The other day I was in Borders because I had run out of books to read at home and I was on my way to the checkout with $65 worth of books when I saw this sign that read “Spend $75 and get the new Harry Potter book for $15”. I immediately ran off to spend $10 more just so I could get the Harry Potter book at half price. Half an hour later I realised that the Borders people were very smart in setting up this $75 minimum… it was almost impossible for me to spend exactly $75 no matter how many combinations I tried… that $9.99 business fucks you up to begin with because it is highly likely you will end up with $74.99 and every book I wanted to buy involved me spending at least $80 which would mean I was achieving a total grand savings of $10! Well, some saving was better than nothing and the bookworm in me convinced me that if I didn’t spend that extra $15 today I’d be spending it two months later anyway (I really need to join a library)!

So I ended up with Ken Kesey’s ‘One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest’, Arthur Golden’s ‘Memoirs of a Geisha’ and Gregory David Robert’s ‘Shantaram’… all books I’ve been meaning to read for a while and haven’t gotten down to. I’m almost finished with 'One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest'… it took a while to really get into the book. It was a bit like reading Trainspotting or watching A Clockwork Orange… the author has a language of his own. But I have liked it so far.

This has been a really long posts about books… I can’t help it if I’m passionate about reading! If this has been boring, TOUGH… books rule over movies and TV any day! And my sage advice for the day is become a reader if you aren’t one already!!

One day I will write a book!