When birthday comes and it’s time for gifts, I want nothing but books. Birthday has become an excuse to buy new novels, to experience new story with the new year of my life. Only a week left for my birthday, and here I am in a bookstore to buy myself birthday gifts on behalf of Mom and Granny. You know, one of the biggest problems with me is, whenever I enter a bookstore I am so confused about which book to buy, which book to select, which to reject. There are those vampire fictions which I haven’t read yet and, being a vampire fanatic, I am getting impatient to read them. Then there are romance novels of which I received pretty good reviews. Again there are quite many Sidney Sheldon thrillers which I have been planning to read lately. So many choices, but I could take only a few. I wish I owned this bookstore, or any bookstore; this thing always plays around in my psyche. Since I can make limited choice, its better I pick up some random books, browse through them a little bit and if I like them, I take them. Some books give me good vibes that I am going to enjoy reading them. Some seemed weird. One of them was Chetan Bhagat’s “Half Girlfriend”. At least the titles of his previous novels were sensible. Half Girlfriend, seriously? From when did we start having half and full girlfriends? Social activists say youngsters, by trying to ape the west, are defiling the Indian society and culture. This man alone, by writing such nonsense, is defiling it even more. Next I pick up Agatha Christie’s “The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding”, how can a Christmas pudding become adventurous? I open the book and I find this line, “Don’t eat none of the plum pudding. One who wishes you well.” What did the poor plum pudding do? Why so much torture on it? Then I pick up Nora Roberts’ “True Betrayals”. The title sounds contradicting but after reading the back cover, I get the good vibe. So I include it in my shopping cart. After spending about two hours (or maybe two-and-a-half) I finally decide on taking “True Betrayals” and “When Only Love Remains” by one of my favourite authors Durjoy Datta.
