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"......but suddenly the unpleasant feeling of lateness was replaced in Fydor's soul by a distinct and somehow outrageously joyful decision not to appear at all for the lesson - to get off at the next stop and return home to his half-read book, to his unworldly cares, to the blissful mist in which his real life floated, to the complex, happy, devout work which had occupied him for about a year already. He knew that today he would receive the payment for several lessons, knew that otherwise he would have to smoke and eat again on credit, but he was quite reconciled to this for the sake of that energetic idleness (everything is here, in this combination), for the sake of the lofty truancy he was allowing himself. And he was allowing it not for the first time. Shy and exacting, living always uphill, spending all his strength in pursuit of the immumerable beings that flashed inside him, as if at dawn in a mythological grove, he could no linger force himself to mix with people either for money or for pleasure, and therefore he was poor and solitary. "

- Vladimir Nabokov (The Gift)

In my journey through books I always glimpsed flashes of myself in the characters. In The Gift, I came across this passage that exactly summerises my life and the lives of several thousand souls like me that lived down the ages and will continue to haunt the forgotten corners of the earth till the end of time.

How many times have I broken away from the 'acceptable' course of daily activities to hide away among the pages of a delightful book or to hold my pen feverishly between my ink-stained fingers and scratch across a page. How many job offers, how many invitations to go shopping, eating, movies I'd given up, how many things I've postponed, people I've forgotten to call because I was lost in wonder at the drama unfolding around me, between the folds of a book.

Oh the bliss, the bliss of swimming, sinking, floating in that abyss, caring nothing, dreaming everything, reading deep into the night, watching the pre-dawn sky trickle into my eyes. The numbing yet sensual joy of floating through the mundanity, of languishing at the office waiting, just waiting for the clock to strike 5.30 to rush out into the arms of magic waiting for me out there. And the inspiration a single book can spawn - the number of things to be made, flavours to be tasted, verses to be recited in soft whispers over and over again, rains to be drenched in, sunsets to be seen, blue-grey starry nights to be touched staining my face with their inky shadows, and the ideas, the stories the countless ones waiting to be captured, tended, fondled, loved and eventually written down.

Reading a book is like hiking to the mountains, each bend opening a new vista of ideas, histories, a new ways of thinking. And this book, despite its complexities, and meanderings, opened to me a new way to accept the way I am and inspired me to continue this madcap path that I've taken.