By Gunjan Saini
”Oh please, oh please, we beg, we pray, go throw your TV set away, and in its place you can install a lovely bookshelf on the wall.” – Roald Dahl
I’ve always been a bit of a bookworm since the very beginning, (only because my parents used to preoccupy the sole television in our house when I was younger) which is why, recently, amidst the lockdown, I found myself trying to convince my twelve year old sister to read the now dusty books on my bookshelf. From ‘Diary of a wimpy kid’ to ‘To kill a mockingbird’, from good ol’ Willy Shakes to J. K. Rowling, I’ve got quite a collection if I may say so. For about a week I pursed after my sister to read something instead of fan fictions on Wattpad. Then I gave up.
But of course this prompted me to think about why there is no interest in experiencing the neck stains from staying up all night to finish the book bought yesterday. And I found my answer when the Hunger Games movie marathon started the next day at home.
I asked my sister why she didn’t just read the books instead and she had the audacity to reply, “Who has the time?”. Who has the time? Seriously? During a lockdown when the world is literally wasting time making #DalgonaCoffee? In all seriousness though, movie adaptations are quite literally ruining the charm of reading books.
Personally, I have never been a potterhead and I too, thought it’s be so much easier if I watched one single movie before delving into the fat books everyone loves. I ended up watching the whole series and when I got to reading the books (finally!) I realised it was more or less like reading a 250 page script of the movies I’d just watched. I knew which characters to hate and which to like, as if I was being told to like only strawberries but hate any other fruit without even tasting it. It was like the movies had robbed my mind of any imagination.
In an age where not just movies, but even TV shows are being inspired by books, this is a serious issue. It’s just giving a way out of reading phenomenal works. There’s no doubt that movies are thoroughly entertaining and obsessive but the joy of flipping the crisp, yellowed pages of a new, fat book and the contentment in finishing it is truly unmatched.
Another really interesting excuse my sister had prepared was that she isn’t ‘habitual’ of reading. It’s a funny thing though, you can’t possibly be ‘habitual’ of reading by reading only two books a year. A good start but reading requires perseverance and patience, qualities that do not exist in copious amounts in todays world. But one has to start somewhere, right?
