Favourite bedtimes bestsellers

In my last post, A good bedtime book is like, I wrote about cradlesong nature of the storybooks people love. I also said, it's their indulgence that keeps their sleepy eyes glued to the page, and without it, there is no life. Today I want to expand this indulgence idea.
Indulgence, to some who has experienced it, transpires well, but what they in their heads connect with it maybe different from what I meant by it when I connected it to bedtime books. To others, it simply means nothing; perhaps they don't know what the word means, or they had never experienced that kind of indulgence - the one which is aroused by something like a novel or a storybook.
First of all- indulgence is no thrill. Rather, it's a complimentary to that. The kind of feeling you get as you read a page-turner airport thriller is not indulgence; it's curiosity, and pure adrenaline. Indulgence feels like a slow, steady stream of life - quietly and gentally taking you along.
Characters chatter over coffee-cups for some three chapters, and that thing keeps you actually glued, though you are hell bent to make fun of it once you have read it fully. That's indulgence. Now let's dive into some examples.
Harry Potter, my personal favourite bedtime, is a perfectly normal teenager (except he is a wizard, yes, but his emotions are completely human and matured in timely fashion). In the beginning, except for the searing scar on his forehead, he is not exposed to any larger-than-life problems. The rejection from his aunt's family is nowhere unseen in the real world. He is a brave boy, craving for his lost parents like any other would be, before finding out he is a wizard and he has enemies. But that doesn't end his normal life. He still goes to Hogwarts, studies for seven maddening years - yes, there wasn't any spell that could compress the course content, and for good! If there was one, millions of readers would have lost the sense of normal, slower pace of life that beat within Hogwarts. They would not have known about Harry's friends and foes, their unworldly abilities yet worldly emotions. There were spells that could do Harry's homework, but he still had to attend classes, take notes, and bear punishments! That gave a sense of routine to Harry's life filled with unworldly challenges. That gave the story a meaning for millions of its readers.
Another example that pops to my mind is Rudy Baylor's life in Rainmaker - a bestseller by John Grisham. (Lawsuite thrillers are no favourites of mine, but I read John Grisham simply because his extra-ordinary creation of routine life on pages. Abundant coffee cups and sandwiches!) Rudy Baylor is a law passout who stands amid an uncertain future due to his sudden job loss from a top notch law firm. He is a graduate with not-so-great aspirations and not-so-great credentials. In a rags-to-reaches tale of Black family who lost its son in cancer due to negligence by a big insurance firm, Rudy brings them a staggering 40 million verdict that he himself did not anticipate. But more striking feature of the plotline is how his own life flow: how he struggles for a job like any low-grade student, how he struggles for clients after having secured one, how he starts out his own firm with a seemingly dumb paralegal, how he deals with his equally perplexed love-affair in the middle of all this, and how he also makes justice with his casework - all this not so excellently, but quite diligently. If you read it, it seems like its not leading to any end - all Rudy does is to tumble between things he can't control. And yet the end arrives, a meaningful one, just like good and bad things emerge at any given moment of everyday life.
Take life of Michael Corleon before he assume's his father's position in Godfather. I truly revered Don Vito Corleon's character, I must say. But if somebody asks me what kept me turning the pages, it was Michael - Don's youngest son - without doubt. All he does is follow the course of the events like many of us do. Don is a hero, Michael is a person, though later he transform himself into someone of Don's stature - one of the real motives in Godfather's plot.
There are countless other examples. Frodo's quest in Lord of the Rings - pursuit of a common man. Or take Ken Follet's less celebrated novel Whiteout, where the female protagonist is a system security operator in a biotech lab - a profession with whom hundreds of thousands of security guards can connect to. And it's a tale woven around snowy Christmas nights, a time no one could have missed in their lives. Readers hinged upon these connections.
If you observe, indulgence has normalcy at its root, and normalcy does not necessarily come from Heros. It comes from seemingly normal people who, when faced with abnormal circumstances, follow their minds and hearts, and turn out to be heros. Normalcy also does not stem from extremely challenged people's life. Challenged people arouse sympathy, normal people arouse a sense of belonging. There are more normal people in the world than the challenged ones, and that explains why these "routine" novels became favourite bedtimes and bestsellers.
You feel nothing is happening since some hundred pages, yet for some reason you cannot betray it, because it feels like your life, your routine a precondition under which you live most of your days and do your tasks.
This normalcy falsifies the reader within you, who sometimes expects thrilling twists and dazzling turns. But it justifies a person within you whose struggles are not grand. It connects with inner you.
Perhaps this is something that you want when you say your prayers before you sleep.

A good bedtime book is like...

A long drive stretching several hours with your loved one?
A candle on a warehouse table where you work overnight, just out of your sticky passion?
A puddle in the street where a child plays with his paper boat?
A concert?
A solitary party?
Star-gazing on the terrace?

Perhaps all of the above, and much more. Personal choice. You bet.

Its not the book; its the indulgance. In the hectic life filled with assembled tasks demanding accuracy and ever-reappearing emotional stress, we rarely "indulge". A good book satisfies that need. Indulgence is the sole mental nutrient.

This is easy to experience, but different for everyone, so bit tricky to explain. Buts lets try out. Indulgence is like poking your head into a completely unknown (or maybe remotely familiar) window, shoving it in a heap of quite unseen and unfelt things, and then finally coming into resonance with the surroundings, letting it drag you along.

A good book serves your indulgence well. After a while that you have begun to live with its characters (or content, if you are a nonfiction buff), flipping those pages feels like dragging the glass of water to your mouth when someone hands it to you, without actually registering the event. That's indulgence.

Its pure bliss when you read. Sometimes you love it that it keeps you unsatisfied at the end. Sometimes you hate it for everything that has fallen into its place. No matter what, its a fulfillment. If none of it, you fret about it a minute or two, and catch the sleep. Enter reader's block. Many a times, its a progeny of somebody's patched-up work who suffered a writer's block, and never fully recovered from it.

But that doesn't keep you from picking up a book again. You cannot stop indulging yourself over a longer period of time. Be it Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, or any romantic Victorian work: the literature, the art, with its full force of vicinity to human life, keeps challenging your reader's block until you finally attend to it.

Indulgance is a necessary evil if you call it so. So are wine, women and Internet games.

But without it, believe me, there is no life.

So what's your favourite bedside book?

If life were a computer screen

If only life was like a computer screen that showed radio buttons & checkboxes at every important turn of the age...Then it could be possible to choose...!!!

Well, not to choose, but to know that this is a moment of choice - for making a choice. Many of our larger than life decisions are just "taken" - nobody takes them. Education, jobs, relationships, kids, health, birth & death!

  

It seems that the one who understands life early, that everything we do is an outcome of a known or unknown choice, can turn out to be wiser in life than the one who doesn't get this chance.

Or is it just an illusion?

If you have read Strange Life of Ivan Osokin by P. D. Ouspensky, you will realize that life is like a CD-R that can be played and replayed, but cannot be altered. Unsuccessful struggle of Ivan Osokin to correct his mistakes when given a chance to relive his past proves fruitless. Unless we transcend to a dimension that is higher than the current in our life, life cannot be altered.

Considered driving in a mesh of crowded roads and narrow alleys in a city?
Remember having to make a decision on every turn encountered - when the path is yet to be known?
Is it easier even when a map is aside?

It doesn't really matter whether we know it's a choice. In fact, having chosen the wrong roads on the first trip makes the second one easier, and very justifiably so!

Its a bliss when life doesn't offer you choices too fast. It's a boon that life doesn't offer them also in things that you are often uncapable of deciding for yourself.
It is life's way to put you through the all important journey - and not to the destination.

Most often, it's important to go with the flow. In matters that make difference to us, it's good.
It reserves our energies for things we can make difference into.

And thank life, of course!

Original -- From Concentrate...

It's when you think about the basics in the world - the basics that encompass every purpose and provides every sense of self-fulfillment. It's when you think something original…

When a man acts, he derives things. It's this activity that produces fruits. The consciousness of basics that drives these derivations is dormant at this time. Deriving is a scientific process - observing, analyzing and picking up the most suitable for a material purpose one pursues.

All economic activities in the world are the outcome of such analytical thinking. One goes by steps - observing people's needs, collecting resources and efforts to fulfill them and present them in the most likeable, most suitable way. It all seems to work with an initiative, and still it is entirely, and necessarily, a reproduction of already established patterns. Own, Produce, Make available, Present, Earn, Own, this cycle not only fully defines economic activities but every aspect of human life, and is always perceived as a continuation of activities.

Skills are executed, and executed at their best levels. Needs are satisfied. Success is achieved. A 'feel good' is in the air. But somewhere, something is lacking.

The initiative seems to be our own, but the purpose seems to be borrowed. The process, the implementation, the problems and solutions are all our own, but the idea that drives it seems to be missing. One needs to 'derive' the 'uniqueness' - what is 'original' about one's 'set of activities'. The satisfaction is to be derived from the outer world's opinions. If successful, it would be an achievement.

These achievements are mistaken for fulfillments.

Take a break. Why RED? How GREEN? Are there only three basic colors? Why can't there be a letter that is pronounced different from the existing 26 letters of the alphabet? Rhythms are created on the fly. While one cannot prove duplicity in every new rhythm, as the artist can be proved to be totally unaware of a rhythm similar to what he has created, it is highly unlikely that they are always produced unique. Can't there be a musical note undiscovered yet to ensure this uniqueness? Philosophy says: Love, Truth and Beauty are the three basic psychological needs of an ideal man. Can there be a fourth factor? Or, wouldn't it pay?

Change? Pain?

It's when you think about the basic things in the world - the basics that encompass every purpose and provides every sense of self-fulfillment. It's when you think something original. This change, this pain is no different from the one a woman bears at the time of childbirth. All creation is painful by its very basic nature.

When man thinks, he creates. While the immediate outcome may not produce something tangible, it can produce an ever-lasting understanding. While it is not bound to derive any conclusions, it can drive to ultimate resolutions - resolutions that can be hard to justify to the outer world with 'positive' (read 'convenient') ways. Only he knows what he thinks. And he believes what he thinks, as he knows that he thinks.

Derivations can be the non-trivial part of originality-based thinking. The introduction of the originality does not prevent derivative thinking. Rather, it suppresses the 'reproduction' or 'replica' part of them - thus transforming it into a creative process - the process that is ever yielding in terms of psychological pleasure of a truly higher level. Pleasure can be derived from a set of activities or subtle labor - these pleasures are obtained at the end, and have high dependency on the end-result. Creative pleasures, as a natural outcome of original thinking, are self-fulfilling at every moment of the activity. And hence, only creative pleasures have the power to make a truly happy man in an intellectual society.

Most of the time, as we observe in the society around us, the originality within is sacrificed for worldly problems in the name of priorities and practicalities. And then there are two classes of people: One having the sense of sin, and the other not having it. The later is blessed with the happiness of 'comfortable life'; the former is entitled to a lifetime mediocrity of mind. The notable thing though, is that the former still has a chance to avail all the high level pleasures in life some day - not as a reward of pain resulting from mediocrity, but the reward of courage to escape from 'priorities' and 'practicalities'. The later will forever pass its life in mediocrity and never be aware about it.

Material deprivation, combined with social disapproval, has mostly been the 'problem' with the Original Man. His own definition of happiness is almost conceived as insanity. In some cases it cannot be so, or it may be more so. But nobody knows his internal heights and insights - he has the key to see the world in his own way. He sees the things that nobody can see or imagine. “What if I travel faster than light?” asks an absent-minded physics graduate, and the world is changed forever.

The Original Man has the heart of a mature man combined with the mind of a curious child - and all the unhappiness in this world can be attributed to the reverse of this combination.

The courage to ask Why, the courage to ask What If, and the courage to ask this yourself…the domain of the question can be science, art, life, current value system, or more than one of them. And the world no longer matters.