How My Reading Habits Evolved
Most of us grew up reading some samples of what was considered good literature as part of our prescribed syllabus at school. Tom Brown's School Days was one of the books I recall from that list. I believe Charles Dickens was also on the list. Thankfully Shakespeare was not. At the time, I despised history because it seemed like an exercise in memorizing weird names and meaningless dates. But that changed later in life. During weekends and summer holidays, I occasionally had the option to choose what to read. I mostly dabbled in what I could grab from my father's bookshelves. I was primarily attracted to non-fiction. For example, books on chess and The Way Things Work , which I would endlessly page through and must have read many times over. No teenager can resist going through raunchy titles like Tropic of Cancer , which I borrowed from father's bookshelves for the sole purpose of finding hot passages. When I actually read the book la...