Judging the book by its author

There was a time when one sought out different and life-changing books. Today, everyone seems to be reading the same new books…

How do you do it? Your colleagues, neighbours, family and friends, how do they all do it? “I follow my nose,” says Dan Rhodes, author of Gold, “I am always on the hunt for the next book that's going to rock my world … my favourite thing is still going into a shop and coming out with something I'd never heard of. ” But if you stand in any bookstore, you're unlikely to see many people using their noses, they just head straight for the “new” Salman Rushdie or the “latest” Chetan Bhagat or the “most recent” Shobhaa De or the “new bestseller” from Paulo Coelho: it's a matter of judging every book by its author.

Seeking questions
I remember that in the days when I first began to buy books, almost all the people I knew were looking for one that would somehow alter the way life felt or the way they conducted themselves in life, because we believed that books could change life. Maybe that was the Catcher effect — most of us had read Catcher in the Rye and Salinger's other books in our late teens, at the same time that we were beginning to buy our own books; Salinger undid everything we had believed about writing and heroes and even about reading. So maybe when we searched long and hard in bookstores — reading page after page of the book, not content with what the flaps were saying — we were looking for something that could stand up to Catcher, a book that could make us look at what else life was about.

Full report here Hindu