The Reading Jinx

The much dreaded Reading Jinx is one that occasionally afflicts bibliophiles. Sometimes, it even happens without your meaning it to happen. From reading every day, you read every other day, then it trickles down to once a week and before you know it, you haven’t read anything new for a month now. Imagine that! While pondering over the cause and mulling over it might yet lead to you ending up with a satisfactory explanation, I would suggest you take it to understand that you are currently in disfavour with the Reading Gods and think no more about it.

Now, recovering from this jinx though, is the next best thing to receiving an unlimited supply of books your entire life. Few joys can match that of reading a book after a long time and if it happens to be a good book, then boy!, you have been blessed.

When I spied ‘The Collectors’ by David Baldacci in my friend’s latest book haul, I was sorely tempted to give it a miss. One, I had read too many of his works and they were getting predictable and two, I wanted to break my reading jinx with a challenging book, one that demanded every teeny bit of my attention and perseverance.
But alas! These matters are not in a bibliophile’s hands. So I found myself seated in the bus, on a cold rainy morning, reading the book. Paying nil attention to co-travellers and narrowly forgetting to get off at the stop..These things are bound to happen when you have pages of print in your hands.

Two days of this routine and I was done with the book. It is quite an enjoyable book, one that I’m sure Baldacci fans will love. Racketeering, a beautiful thief and a few good men form the crux of the story. It wasn’t a story that would stick with me nor was it one I would easily dismiss.

My reading jinx had been broken, in the most normal of ways.