AT this age, with a sense of time flying supersonically by, one tends to focus on the essentials of life. in my case these are my faith, my family and my books in precisely that order, so trying to think of an interesting yet meaningful subject for a weekly column, "Books" seemed the obvious choice.

The title is admittedly taken from the BBC weekly programme about films but it seemed to describe precisely what i want to do in this column talk about books. All kinds of books, old books, new books, rare books, books-that-i-enjoy, books-that-i-hate and perhaps even yet-to-be written books. i am sure the Beeb will forgive this mild plagiarism.

So Reader(s), in the plural i hope, you will join me on my armchair travels through time and space to glimpse the unique vision that hundreds of writers have shared vividly, exuberantly, often passionately and sometimes prosaically and boringly with those granted the gift of the written word. i do not want to turn this into a review of books but to invite you to participate in "a melancholy of mine own, compounded of many simples, extracted from many objects," indeed a personal perspective on what has been a lifelong passion -- reading books.

Reading is an activity that most of us engage in throughout our lives, be it the compulsory reading of school texts, quick scans of the newspaper headlines before rushing off to work, wading lugubriously through arid business reports or the other compulsory readings of adulthood. The written word is a constant companion in the lives of more and more people all over the world. But it is not the prosaic reading of everyday necessity that i plan to write about -- no, my column is a paean to reading for pleasure, reading to stretch the mind and gladden the heart, reading to while away rainy monsoon afternoons and cool winter nights, reading for a lifetime of mental engagement and emotional entanglement!

have been an inveterate reader since early childhood and in those early days of discovery each book was a complete world in which i could immerse myself thus shutting out my surroundings.

As Stevenson wrote:

This was the world and i was king: For me the bees came by to sing,

For me the swallows flew.

At that age I agreed passionately with my favourite authors and what the book told me, however fantastical, became true and as tangible as the book itself. Each story, each event took on a physical reality for me and I was the protagonist in imagination and emotion.

However time moved on and I found that, while living the life found in the pages of a book and the words of a favourite author my suffice in child-

hood and even young adulthood, as one grows older one should be able to disassociate oneself from the thoughts and ideas put forward by others, to begin critical discernment and discover the delights of intellectual exploration.

The Turkish writer, Orhan Pamuk wrote in The White Castle "if you have a book in your hand, no matter how complex or difficult to understand the book may be, when you have finished it, you can, if you wish, go back to the beginning, read it again, and thus understand that which is difficult and, with it, understand life as well."

Thus reading and writing, for there must be the latter for us to be able to do the former, have become inextricably a part of civilization. From the earliest time people have felt the urge to express themselves in writing, to leave behind tangible proof of their existence in the stone tablets or papyrus rolls or parchment scroll or paper pages that we readers recognise as "books" today.

The Greek poet Martial said two thousand years ago,

Homer on parchment pages!

The Iliad and all the adventures

Of Ulysses, foe of Priam's kingdom! All locked within a piece of skin Folded into several little sheets!

There is an acute sense of anticipation and delight in first picking up the "several little sheets" of a new book new, of course only in the sense of unread. One is set to embark upon a marvelous adventure beset with fresh and intriguing new delights and the keenness of anticipation which can only be spoilt by the boredom or incomprehensibility of the writing. Alas most modern fiction falls into one or the other of the latter categories simply because it has become fashionable to be elliptical and to forget the plot for chapters at a time. For fiction my motto is like Alice's "start from the beginning and go on until the end," but sadly the splendid art of Dickens and Goldsmith, Austen and Bronte, Steinbeck and Hemingway, finds its home only in the pen of a Seth or and Atwood and eludes many of their other contemporaries.

A book that has enthralled me recently is A History of Reading by Alberto Manguel (pub: Vintage Canada). Although it was first published in 1996 i had never heard of it until i came upon it by chance in a Toronto bookstore. A first glance told me that it was going to be a veritable treasure trove. How right my instincts were! Everyone who enjoys reading and is fascinated by arcane but interesting facts, as i am, will find this book captivating.

Manguel says that, "the history of reading is the history of each of its readers. Like the act of reading itself a history of reading jumps forward to our time to me, to my experience as a reader -- and then goes back to a different page in a distant country or time." But the danger of this immersion into the world of books is the inescapable fact that "you cannot embark on life that one-off coach ride, once again when it is over" and reading can only be a second hand experience however enjoyable it may be.

Perhaps to that extent those who are incorrigible bookworms live life vicariously and physical fullfilment pales in the face of intellectual enjoyment. To quote Diane Ackerman,

"The heart has a curfew. We can tell folk where and how we were,

But we cannot tell them who. What a pantomime our lives."

Yasmeen Murshed is a full- time bookworn and a parttime educationist. She is also the founderof Scholastica School.