On the Joy of Browsing Books and Discovering them

Browsing in bookstores and libraries has always provided me with a great deal of pleasure. Seeing all the titles, lined neatly in their vast array, one gets a sense of awe, but for me never trepidation. Friends have told me that they are usually intimidated by bookstores and large libraries. They say they stand there and look at the vast accumulation of paper, of authors unknown, on every veritable subject and they succumb to a mixture of bewilderment and fear. I on the other hand, revel in this great unknown, this sea of almost limitless possibility. I love to pull the titles off the shelves, to ruffle the pages, to flip through to a random page and read a few lines, and of course to read all the reviews neatly printed across the back covers with their inevitable adulations. "Writes with the clarity of Graham Greene" one might say, or "It is a marvellous book, and essential read" or the usual words of praise: "lyrical", "authentic". "beautiful", "superb", "wonderfully moving", "sublime". I love walking around in bookshelves: I love the sense of mystery that is there - even in large chain stores with stock lists that are inevitably taken off the innumerable bestseller lists.

Then there is the bargains section. Walking to a bargain section is liable to fill me both with immense heartache and child-like delight in equal measure - wasn't that the Ian McEwan that I had purchased in hard back at full price when it first came out lying there now for a mere 5 dollars? God forbid that the book I bought just last month (and not yet read) is now lying there, to be claimed at a mere fraction of the price. It is enough to drive a person crazy I swear. But then, of course there is the delight of finding a set of faber and faber single poetry books including Sasson's War Poems, Plath's Ariel, Eliot's The Waste Land and others, 10 in total and all for a mere 10 bucks. A dollar a pop for poetry - unbeatable, and unbeatably wonderful. Standing there, one feels a warm little glow rising from the pit of your stomach as you find a novel you have always meant to buy but never got round to at a bargain. In that ecstacy of purchasing you suddenly tell yourself that you need yet another World War II history, or indeed a book on geography - after all for 5 dollars how can you not buy it? You tell yourself that you will regret it forever, that if you leave it and come back it will all be gone and you will be beside yourself with disappoint and so you succumb - and not to reluctantly either.

A still greater pleasure is to find something totally random and wonderful off of some shelf. Something obscure and unique, yet delightful at the same time. In this day and age, when I counted a total of 5 people no less reading the Da Vinci Code on one flight I took - a large number considering the small fraction of the people who were actually reading at all - the joy at finding a rare gem amidst the detrius is magnified fivefold. I remember just randomly looking at the travel section in Blackwell's when I found a delightful little parody of mountain climbing and expeditions - something that had only recently come back into print. Then there is how you can just randomly root around library shelves - in my case the Oxford Union library - and pulling a book off a shelf and reading a few lines suddenly decide why not and borrow it, despite never having heard of the author. It was a even greater pleasure to find out on returning the book, that the librarian herself had read and enjoyed it, and that it was she who had personally requested its purchase from the library. For, in conlusion, and I might hasten to add, the only greater pleasure than finding a great book, and reading it, is of course, sharing the joy of the book with others, and shamelessly recommending it to all who will listen.