Do life experiences influence what we read?

[This is the abridged version of a comment I made on the post 'The joys of rereading' on Soumya Bhattachrya's 'Page Turner' in HTblogs]

I started reading War and Peace while in college, and it never could hold my interest then. Then I started re-reading it in my late thirties while on tours in different parts of the world. And Eureka, it started talking to me! While the story itself seemed engrossing enough, it told me so much about (a) human nature, timeless; (b) the ‘real’ history of French invasion of Russia; (c) the intrinsic unpredictability and lack of causal relation of events, quite (and surprisingly so) at variance with what history (either personal or national) may tend to portray (this is aligned to the theme of a new book called ‘Black Swan’ by Nassim Nicholas Taleb).

This last one I found to be theme of the tome, on which Tolstoy dwells time & again and most elaborately at the end with a philosophical chapter (I even wrote a piece for our Durga Puja souvenir on the parallels between the ‘War and Peace’ philosophy and our own Gita ‘Karmanyevadhikarastey…’). The point is, my life experiences of twenty years probably prepared the fertile ground for the understanding of the classic.

Apart from re-reading, I also find that even first time reading of classics like Mayor of Casterbridge & Far From the Madding Crowd hold much more meaning when you’ve gained the experience of real life. Ergo, I find it a fruitless exercise for college students to be taught these classics as part of their course (doubtless with the noble objective of imparting good values) when perhaps they don’t have the depth of thought to appreciate such learnings, which can perhaps be brought about only by first-hand experience of life.

Given the time, I’d love to take up again my unfinished reading of Freedom at Midnight, while re-reading the short story collections of O Henry (William Sidney Porter), Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens) and Maxim Gorky.

Oh, and I forgot to add the Bengali ones to my re-reading list: Abol Tabol & Hojoborolo (Sukumar Ray), Feluda & Professor Shanku (Satyajit Ray) and the Kiriti detective novels (Bibhitibhushan?) - sadly, I never read the perhaps more famous Byomkesh Bakshi in print, though I hugely enjoyed the TV serial. Which takes me to my all time favourite - Sherlock Holmes (Arthur Conan Doyle) - that delectable amalgam of the cerebral and the active (I’ve so many collections of Holmes that sometimes I’m half way through one story before I realise I’ve already read it once!).

And talking of Mark Twain, why only the short stories. Besides the Tom Sawyer & Hucklebury Finn series (sadly not so enjoyable as movies as in the novels - another point for not all movies being able to bring out the real idiom) - which are not merely ‘children’s tales’ as many think - I would love to go back to ‘A Connecticut Yanky in King Arthur’s Court’.

Whew! Some list!