The book shelf – The Hindu

There are many ways to categorise books, but not by genres or by the Dewey Decimal Classification. The real categories are the ones we all encounter but rarely admit to.

There are the books meant simply for flipping. Not quite coffee table books. Those at least pretend to offer something grand, like “Rust: A Photographic Journey” or “The History of Decorative Cushions”. The true flipping book exists for the exact moment you are stuck waiting. It might be a magazine in a dentist’s clinic, or a random glossy travel guide left on the airport seat. Nobody reads these things for content. They are leafed through absently, like a nervous tick. A person will stare at a photo of a smiling family on a beach as if it were an ancient manuscript, then move on without remembering a single word. Sometimes a headline or a strange adjective snags the eye, and they consume one paragraph. It is the literary equivalent of chewing gum. It gives the mouth something to do but provides no nutrition whatsoever.

Then there are the books that live permanently in the infamous to-be-read bundle. These are usually bought by adults once proudly identified as bookworms but now find their attention span has shrunk. They walk into a bookstore and something primal takes over. One hand reaches out for a book, the legs carry them to the cashier, and the other hand fishes out a debit card while the rational brain screams, “You haven’t finished the last 12!” The ritual is always the same: they return home, stack the new recruit onto the tower of unread volumes, and then proceed to scroll on their phone for the next three hours. These people dream, earnestly, of one day owning a bookstore that is also a coffee shop that is also a library, where other people will finally validate their addiction by calling it entrepreneurship.

Decorative books form another category. Centuries ago, aristocrats filled their private libraries with gilded tomes to look sophisticated. Today, people do the same thing. There are homes where the bookshelf is a piece of furniture. The books are lined up by colour or by spine height, chosen not for content but for matching the sofa upholstery. Visitors gasp in admiration, caught between envy and the sudden awareness that they themselves have to choose between a hardcover and an EMI.

Of course, in the age of social media, there are also the books that serve purely as props. These are photographed against pastel cupboards, with fairy lights draped carelessly across them, and a carefully positioned succulent nearby. The book is rotated, angled, filtered but rarely read. A novel can spend its entire life without once being opened, like a model condemned to eternal posing.

Menus, if we’re honest, are books too. People flip through them with the same seriousness as a sacred text, weighing life decisions between Paneer Butter Masala and Chef’s Special Paneer Butter Masala. If you’ve ever been to a restaurant where the menu arrived in leather binding thicker than War and Peace, you know exactly what I mean.

And then there are the borrowed books. The most emotionally charged category of all. They sit on the shelf radiating guilt. Every time you glance at them, you feel a sting of shame for not returning them to the generous friend or the long-forgotten library. You promised you would return it tomorrow, but tomorrow never came, and then the friend moved away. Now the book feels like stolen property. It just stays there, a monument to procrastination and guilt.

Finally, there are the school books with secret lives. Not the textbooks themselves, but the second-hand ones, where past owners have scribbled dialogues, doodles, or moustaches and sunglasses on portraits of freedom fighters. A Sanskrit class, where the verses are already flying over heads, suddenly turns hilarious when a student discovers that in his book the illustration of a king’s court has been converted into a comic strip, complete with dialogue bubbles about the courtiers making plans for a movie. Knowledge may not last, but the doodles of your predecessors live forever.

Whether flipping, stacking, decorating, posing, guilting, or doodling, books live complicated lives. They remind us of who we were, who we thought we would become, and how often we have lied to ourselves about finishing Wuthering Heights. Books collect our stories, page by dusty page.

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