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February 22, 2004
ARTICLES: Summer time is reading time
“I’m a summer reader. I don’t like very heavy stuff. History attracts me yet fiction is what I enjoy the most,” explains Ghazala Rehman. “I will read a book that gets my attention at the very beginning and then I’ll put it down once I’ve finished it,” she adds.
The last book Rehman, the summer reader, read last summer was The No.1 Ladies’ Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith. Set in Botswana, Africa, it is the story about Precious Ramotswe, a young woman who is looking for a career and decides to be a detective. “So the board she puts up in front of her house says, ‘The First Lady Detective’,” says Rehman. “The best thing I liked about this book was the simple way it was written. I could almost see her surroundings in the vast expanse of Africa. Secondly, it was humorous and thirdly, it has four or five different stories of very interesting cases she helped solve through a mixture of cunning and instinct, that range from missing husbands, to wayward daughters, through to imposter parents,” describes Rehman.
A book, to Rehman, is a “friend” she can revisit. “I feel that if I have enjoyed reading a particular book, I will definitely want to go back to it” and the number of revisits for Rehman can be countless. Barchester Towers by Anthony Trollope is one such title that Rehman still remembers years after her school days. “Barchester Towers talks about people who can communicate without speaking. At one point in this book, there is a young woman who is coming down from a plane to meet these people who have the same gift and as she comes down, she is thoroughly excited. Everybody from the group standing below, kind of tells her to calm down,” elaborates Rehman. “Interestingly everybody could feel the way that she is feeling and this is a strange form of communication. It’s not telepathy except they could all feel and pass on to each other their pain and their excitement rather than only their thought processes.” Although Rehman read Barchester Towers as part of the school’s English literature curriculum, she admits, “It was so interesting that I sat at the edge of my chair and read through to the end.”
Another title Rehman has revisited many times over ever since she read it 25 years ago is Emile Zola’s Drunkard. “Set in the times of the French Revolution, the storyline revolves around the life of a couple and how they met and married and the woman is a laundress and at the end, the man dies because he is a drunkard.” Rehman thoroughly enjoyed the vivid descriptions in the book. “I could almost feel the stream and almost see the rosy cheeks of the laundress when she is washing other people’s clothes. The storyline was fantastic and I didn’t want to put it down till I’d read the last page,” adds Rehman. uzaima Fatima Haque
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