Have been reading books since I ages - can’t remember myself not in the process of reading one!
Over the years, there have been many favorites, but some I cannot forget for the emotions they stirred in me. Some of them brought me sheer joy, others managed to frighten, elate or sadden. Come to think of it, I might end up listing a lot more than 5 books here!
Starting at a very young age, I loved a book called **Heidi by Joanna Spyri**. It is originally a German book. It tells the story of an orphaned girl who has no one to turn to except a busy aunt and a gruff grandfather. The aunt cannot take care of her because she has to find a new job, so she takes the little Heidi to the Swiss Alps to her Grandfather. The Grandfather is unhappy with the world at large and has gone to live atop the mountains, away from the village to which he is connected to.
The story is about how the little girl wins the affections of the grumpy old man enough for him to start believing in humanity again.
Heidi is also taken away from her grandfather back to the plains to be a companion to a paralyzed girl. The interactions between the girls, the joie de vivre that Heidi brings into the life of that girl, and her subsequent cure because Heidi and her grandpa are the other threads of the story.
The two treads are delightfully interwoven to create a book that can leave you smiling at the end. Read it, even if you are grown up.
The next book I want to write about is **The Fountainhead by Ayn R@nd**. Sujata (afrank) has already written about it beautifully and passionately in https://mouthshut.com/readreview/61543-1.html but I would like to add that one can never grow tired of this book. It’s a masterpiece, and very powerfully written. It can evoke so many emotions in the readers as one reads it again and again. And I am certain you will not stop reading it once, if you are a lover of great literature.
**Sons and Lovers by DH Lawrence **is another classic that greatly impressed me. Largely autobiographical in nature, the books describes in great detail childhood of the protagonist, his relationship with his mother and subsequently his girlfriend. The effects of the mother-son relationship on the sexuality of the protagonist are beautifully described. And yes – it certainly is not as sexually explicit as the author’s later works like “Lady Chatterly’s Lover”.
**The Goal by Eliyahu M Goldratt** - I started reading this book at about 8 in the evening. And didn’t stop until I had finished it at three in the morning. It is the kind of book that exhilarates no end – you know the things it says there, yet you don’t. The author explains his theory of constraints as a story about a project manager in a manufacturing concern. You might say the theory is a very stylized scientific name for saying “a chain is as strong as its weakest link” – but you learn this in a very interesting way. The book also encourages you to always look at the big picture and not be constrained by the results of your own job alone. If every employee looks at the end results – the output would be much better. As a project manager, this book taught me a lot of things that I knew (!) and many that I didn’t.
I certainly could not complete the list without a mention of the book by arguably one of the best exponent of the Queen’s tongue – Wodehouse. **Leave it to PSmith by P G Wodehouse **(“The p is silent, as in phthisis, psychic, and ptarmigan’’) is one of his most famous titles and has all the ingredients of the type of books Wodehouse later became famous for. I can never forget the lines in which the hero says something to “bring a blush of shame to the cheek of modesty”!! Or when wooing his lady love, he calls himself an acquired taste, much like olives! Or when he described his initial love life, PSmith says he flitted from flower to flower, always sipping but never drinking deep!! (Forgive me, ye Wodehouse lovers, if I have misquoted, for I recite from memory a book that I read well nigh 10 years ago!)
I know I am going beyond the prescribed limit of five books, but book I cannot do without mentioning is **“The Prophet” by Kahlil Gibran**. What can one say about the depth of feelings his simple words portray. For the uninitiated, one paragraph that will tell you what I am talking about the one on children. He says
*Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.
You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of to-morrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the Archer’s hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable.
*
The other honorable mentions that I have left out of the list are
**“My Cousin Rachel” and “The Frenchman’s Creek” By Daphne du Maurier
“Far from the Madding Crowd” by Thomas Hardy
“Room on the Roof” by Ruskin Bond **
And almost all the Enid Blyton books – the “Mallory Towers”, the “Famous Five”, the “Secret Sevens” and the “Adventurous Four”