About 2 weeks back I bought the complete set of Malory Towers series for my 6 year old daughter. She does not read it as most of the words are too tough for her, but I read out to her before she goes to bed. This took me back to time when life was so simple, carefree, and tension free. Book have always kept me company then.

I started with comics and slowly moved on to the others (still carrying along the earlier love). One of my all time favorite writers was Enid Blyton as a kid. I must have read almost all her books, but that did not stop me from venturing into other types of reading as well. I should say I enjoyed reading all types of books and the best part of this exercise was that it boosted my creative thinking!

Comics: Tinkle, Amar Chitra Katha, Tintin, Astereix, Chacha Chowdery, Indrajal comics (Phantom, Mandrake, Bahadhur, Flash Gorden), Richie Rich etc.

I used to visualize entering Phantoms cave, seeing the treasure, living on the Tree house, riding on his horse and making friends with Devil (his dog).

I still have some about 100-150 of the Indrajal comics which are a little more than 20 years old.

Weeklies/monthlies: Champak and Chandamama etc. (Champak did not interest me much, but Chandamana was a passion specially the Vikramaditya series. )

At School: Famous five, Secret seven, Malory Towers, St. Calres, Hardy boys, Nancy Drew, Archies comics, works of Hans Anderson and Grimms Brothers.

Fiction: Agatha Christie, Erle Stantely Gardner etc.

Thomas hardy: I first read The Mayor of Casterbridge when I was in the 10th and I loved his writing so much that I read most of his other writings: Far From the Madding Crowd, A Pair of Blue Eyes, Return of the Native, The Woodlanders, Tess of the d’Urbervilles, and Jude the Obscure

Assorted: Aesops’s Fables, Panchatantra, Jataka Tales, Cinderalla, stories from Mahabharata and Ramayana, A Secret Garden, Alice in Wonderland, Robin hood, Gullivers travels, Sindabab the sailor, Arabian Nights, Great Expectations, Wuthering Heights, Pride and Prejudice, Little Women, Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, Great Expectations, A Tale of Two Cities, Sherlock Holmes, The taming of the Shrew, A mid summer Night’s dream and a lots more.

Poems
I was also introduced to poetry during my school days. The way my English teacher taught us poems, actually drew me towards poetries. I still remember few lines of some of the poems I read it when I was in either 7th, 8th and the 9th class.

Lucy Gray (The Solitary Child)
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Often I had heard of Lucy Gray
And, when I crossed the wild,
I chanced to see at break of day
The solitary child.

No mate, no comrade Lucy knew;
She dwelt on a wide moor,
The sweetest thing that ever grew
Beside a human door!


The Solitary Reaper ( by William Wordsworth)
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Behold her, single in the field,
Yon solitary Highland Lass!
Reaping and singing by herself;
Stop here, or gently pass!
Alone she cuts and binds the grain,
And sings a melancholy strain;
O listen! for the vale profound
Is overflowing with the sound.

Ozymandias (by Percy Bysshe Shelley)
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I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: ’’Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
’My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.


I think I have got too carried away into the yesteryears (back in time). Let me come back to the present and into adulthood. But don’t you think it is sometimes nice to be a child and think like one-- the world would have been a better place to live in :)

Let me end this with the following poem (anonymous)

Admision Free, Pay at the Door
Pull up a chair and sit on the floor.
One bright day in the middle of the night
Two dead boys got up to fight.
Back to back they faced each other
Drew their swords and shot each other.
A deaf policeman heard all the noise;
Came and shot the two dead boys.
If you don’t believe this lie is true,
Go ask the blind man, he saw it too.

Thanks for the patience ;)