As the car, driving smoothly over the early morning traffic-free slope of the Ghazipur flyover, cruised up towards the sky, my head went light. The fragrance of the freshly massacred chickens steaming up from the slaughterhouse towards the left and the glorious sight of the first-world skyscrapers of suburban Delhi on the right tantalized the imagination.

The car climbed up, and again reached down back to the earth. But the high-altitude frothiness lingered on.

A Discovery and a Delight

Victoriously turning my new conquest - Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake - upside down, I marveled at my refusal to read her first novel for so long, in anticipation of a more beautiful edition than the more widely available with a dull-cream cover. The quest ended the previous evening when I came across a cheerful purple-colored UK edition of The Namesake in a second-hand book shop in the Paharganj market. Now this book had grown one-night-old and it was with me right on my lap.

However, what made the morning special was not the presence of Jhumpa Lahiri, but that only she was there. My khaki-colored book-bag was otherwise empty. There were no other books - no Shakespeare; no Dickens; not even a Jane Austen. It was as thrilling as walking naked in a busy thoroughfare. 

Too Many Choices; Too Many Dilemmas

This single-book adventure, so new to me, was not pre-planned. The morning had been spent in anguish. I had abruptly shut off Saul Bellow's Collected Short Stories, which I was pursuing after finishing The Shakespeare Wars: Clashing Scholars, Public Fiascos, Palace Coups, a brand new book by the journalist Ron Rosenbaum. In fact my original strategy was to read Saul Bellow while keeping Jane Austen and some Princess Diana trash on the background for occasional mind massages.

Unfortunately, it is a truth universally acknowledged that the best laid plans are usually built on flaky foundations and a determination welded like a red-hot iron could melt like a willing plastic on a hot summer's noon. Suddenly there was an urge to read something on Europe. So, instead of sticking behind Mr. Bellow, I pulled down Tony Judt's hardbound of Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 from the top shelf.

Postwar, plump with 800 pages, demands undiluted concentration from its readers. It was obvious that pleasure could only be extracted if it is pored over as a "primary read". But to complicate matters, Jhumpa Lahiri had spent the night beside me, and after secretly reading its first page I wanted to read her, too. 

Now there was a dilemma - Postwar or The Namesake. Would I be able to do justice by reading them at the same time? Which of these two could be the "primary read" material? 

The Theories of Reading

The restless reader consuming more than one book at a time would not have difficulty in grasping the theories of Primary and Secondary reading. Ideally, a secondary read must always be a re-reading. If it is skipped for more than a day, one is still hopeful to connect to it. In contrast, a "virgin" book usually retain its flavor only if read in a continual thread; else it diffuses in the memory and the attraction and attention is lost unless re-started from the start. Hence a "virgin" must be penetrated only as a Primary read.