#265
Well, would you look at that. I said at the end of Part 2 that I was already thinking about Part 3 — and voilà, here I am, having followed that train of thought all the way to its next station. This one is about the books that were simply always there, the ones that came with the territory of growing up, the poetry that snuck past my defenses, and the ones that found me before I knew I was looking.
The Childhood Shelf — Amar Chitra Katha, Tales of Vishnu & APJ Abdul Kalam
Before I knew what reading for pleasure meant, these were just the books that lived in the house. Amar Chitra Katha comic books — vivid, colorful, mythology and history squeezed into panels I could read in one sitting — introduced me to gods, warriors, and stories that felt both ancient and urgent. Tales of Vishnu followed, deepening the same thread. And honestly? The stories that stuck most weren't the heroic ones. They were the ones where Gods made very human mistakes. Bhasmasura — granted the power to turn anything to ash with a touch, immediately tries to use it on Shiva himself. The very god who gave him the power. Ego overtaking wisdom the millisecond the gift arrives — a phenomenon as old as time and as human as it gets. Vishnu steps in as Mohini, the enchantress, distracts Bhasmasura into imitating her dance moves, gets him to touch his own head, and — well. Problem solved. The lesson? Sometimes the most elegant solution to unchecked ego isn't confrontation. It's misdirection. And then there was the APJ Abdul Kalam biography — a boy from Rameswaram who looked up at birds and decided he wanted to make things fly. I read that one in school and didn't fully understand why it stayed with me. Now I do. Some books don't teach you what to think. They quietly show you what's possible.
A Treasure Trove of Short Stories — and the Tolstoy That Lives Rent-Free
Long before I had a Goodreads account or a reading goal or any opinion whatsoever about literary devices, there was A Treasure Trove of Short Stories — the ICSE school anthology that arrived as a textbook and stayed as a permanent resident of my memory. R.K. Narayan's An Astrologer's Day opened the whole book — and opened my vocabulary too, because somewhere in that first chapter I encountered the word paraphernalia for the first time, and it went straight into my all-time favorites list, alongside mellifluous, kumquat, and lexicography. Jerome K. Jerome's A Fishy Story had me in stitches, and also taught me what plaster of Paris was, which I consider a bonus education. Rabindranath Tagore's The Postmaster had me sobbing for little Ratan — waiting, hoping, being left behind. I felt so sad for her. And W.W. Jacobs' The Monkey's Paw sends chills down my spine to this date, even though I know what's coming. My favorite however, was Tolstoy's How Much Land Does a Man Require? Read it in tenth grade as part of the English Literature curriculum and kept rereading and retelling this gem to anyone who'd listen. Then lived a few years in corporate, watched people sacrifice everything for the next rung, and suddenly Pahom — the peasant who keeps running to claim more land until he collapses and dies, needing only six feet in the end — felt less like a parable and more like a memo I'd received personally. Some stories are seeds. You don't know they've taken root until years later when you're standing somewhere completely different and thinking: oh hello, Pahom. I understand you now.
Poetry — Joy Harjo, Golden Lyre, & The Ones I Keep to Myself
Before Joy Harjo and Ada Limón, before anthologies with striking cover art, there was The Golden Lyre — a poetry and short stories collection that showed up in school like it owned the place, got assigned, and somehow never left. It was my first real encounter with poetry as a craft rather than just rhyming words on a page — where I learned what allegory and allusion actually meant. Two poems from that era that I still resonate with: Kipling's If—"If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you" — which is basically the most elegant way anyone has ever said: I'm not calling you an idiot, I'm just asking if you can keep your composure when everyone around you has lost theirs entirely (then you're on your way to becoming a true gentleman). And Dickinson's Because I could not stop for Death — where Death arrives not as a horror but as a courteous gentleman caller, "He kindly stopped for me", taking her on an unhurried carriage ride through the stages of life toward eternity. Personification at its best — I understood what a literary device could do for the first time reading that poem. Joy Harjo's Catching the Light followed years later, deepening the same thread — poetry rooted in land, memory, and Native American experience, precise and unhurried in equal measure. And then there are the poems I've written myself — at least fifty over the past ten years, sitting in notes apps and notebooks, shared with almost nobody. Poetry, I've learned, doesn't need an audience to be real. Sometimes it just needs to exist. (See also: Rick Rubin. He would agree.) Joy Harjo says it best: "Remember, the entrance door to the sanctuary is inside you." Honorable mention: Taylor Swift, whose lyrics are so metaphor-laden that you'll easily find viral videos on "Who said it: Taylor Swift or Shakespeare?" quizzes that people can't quite crack. Coincidence? I think not.
The Happy Accidents — Books That Found Me First
These are the ones with no origin story. No recommendation, no algorithm, no carefully curated list. Just a cover, a title, a random Tuesday. Jeanette Winterson's Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? — picked up on a whim, finished in a day, quietly life-altering. Genzaburo Yoshino's How Do You Live? — slim, deceptively simple, the kind of book that asks you one question and then lets you sit with it for weeks. Coming-of-age but for adults alike. Fredrik Backman's And Every Morning the Way Home Gets Longer and Longer — technically a novella, barely 100 pages, and somehow the most devastating thing I read all year. (Yes, more Backman. I contain multitudes.) And finally, Richard Feynman's What Do You Care What Other People Think? — exactly what the doctor ordered. The title alone is a full therapy session. Implementation? Joyfully, optimistically, stubbornly a work in progress. The unplanned ones, the stumbled-upon ones, the picked-up-for-no-reason ones — they have a way of arriving at exactly the right moment, saying exactly the right thing. The books you didn't plan for are sometimes the ones that stay the longest.
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