Amar Ekushey Grantha Mela 2024 begins on the first day of February and continues throughout the month. Bangla Academy organises literary and cultural events during the book fair.
Books allow us to see through the eyes of others. Five thousand years ago, writing was invented to write lists. Umberto Eco said, ‘The list is the origin of culture.’ The writing system was devised in Mesopotamia to record lists of livestock on clay tablets. The culture of writing different lists is sill prevalent. But book writing is more than that. The earliest fictional story was written four thousand years ago, known as Epic of Gilgamesh. People read this book because they want to broaden their experience of the world and also to find out about someone else’s experience, thoughts and feelings.

Nowadays, writers connect with their readers in different ways and readers want to enter the minds of the authors. For example, John Milton’s Paradise Lost excites our deepest emotion. In Marry Shelley’s Frankenstein, the monster learns about western civilisation. In Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther teaches the monster about domestic society. In Search of Lost Times, Marcel Proust reconnects its reader through different moments of memories such as ‘the noise of water in the pipes’, ‘the noise of a spoon against a plate’ and ‘he wipes his mouth with a napkin.’ Writing takes different shapes and forms to attract readers. One of the forms is very short stories. Hemingway is said to have bet ten dollars during lunch at a hotel in New York so that he could tell a satisfying short story in just six words. He wrote on a napkin: ‘For sale, baby shoes, never worn.’ Flash fiction, as known such a very short story becomes popular to connect with its reader.

For me book is a game board set by its author. I step inside and play that game. I spot the rhythms inside, observe how vowel and consonants play each other, how verb emerges for play, I hear the echoes, I connect, I follow the thread, I hear the word, I cry, I smile and, in that way, I feel that I am not alone with a book. Sometime, I come across a book that is not answering my question that I have in my mind. This reminds me about Philosopher Wittgenstein, who wrote in his book Tractatus Logico Philosophicus that ‘what can be said at all can be said clearly; and whatever cannot be said must be left to silence.’ That ‘silence’ gives me another perspective of a particular book.

Reading a book allows us to look at the same world through different eyes. Milo Beckman rightly mentioned that reading The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson, he has never walked through New York City in the same way. Think about popular science book. It is, as science writer Richard Dawkins puts it, ‘science is the poetry of reality. It provokes and simultaneously soothes our existential terror of deep time and intergalactic space, our bafflement in the face of evolved complexity-Darwinian life…’. In order to differentiate fiction with non-fiction, Dawkins suggests that ‘fiction is stories about events that never happened to people who never lived. Non-fiction is everything else.’

Book is not just for reading; enjoyment can come from possessing. In his book ‘Meeting with Remarkable Manuscripts’ Christopher de Hamel wrote, ‘you don’t have to read to enjoy a book. For seven or eight hundred years many bibliophiles have collected books for the delight of possession.’ Sometime readers need to browse and not to dwell just on a particular volume of book. That may be the case for thirty-seven volumes of book on Natural History written by Pliny the Elder.

Hence, with book we are never alone. An author wants to enter the mind of the reader and a reader wants to enter the mind of the author. But we can enjoy it in a thousand wonderful ways that do not necessarily include reading. They can be held in the hand, touch it, smell it, examine it, open it, close it, admire it, show it, share it with a friend, compare it, talk about it, remove dust from it, shelve it, rediscover it, exhibit it and may be at some stages auction it or share it with old bookshop, donate it to charity as a proud donor of such possession. But despite all the useful reasons for owning a book, we can read it as well and interacting with it and note down some of the fragments from it. Such act of reading allows us to navigate a territory on another level and give us a feeling that we are never alone with books.
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The writer is a UK based academic, columnist and author