Would some kind soul please send me some new literature? Just a little bit? I promise I’ll cherish it. Though I’ve collected a pretty intimidating hoard of books since we’ve moved to Pakistan, they’ve all become old. I’ve read everything at least once and a frightening amount of them twice and thrice.

Last week I was so bored I started pulling out things from the shelf of “crap.” Crap would be old Westerns, murder mysteries, fantasy nonsense and junks of the sort that you can read with one eye while calculating binary with the other. Hey man, at 20 rupees a pop, even Terry Brooks cannot be passed by. Makes for an hour of escapism.

But sigh, a brain cannot be fed on crap alone. You can really only read one, two max, before you figure out the plots to them all and have to toss them at Abez’s bed in disgust. That’s when you trudge back to the ‘Wall of Wordage,’ but this time head to the shelf of ‘books what are heavyish.’

Now I’m back to reading Victorian classics. They’re not great, but they’re not particularly bad either. I think their chief charm is in the mental endurance challenge of making it through the deep dark forests of deadwood. That and you get to feel all snooty when you get their esoteric symbolism and archaic English. Plus you get the most bang for you buck with classics, because they’ve got so much going on you discover something new every time you read it.

That’s my long and drawn out reason why I’m reading Pride and Prejudice for the nth time. Dude, it was either that or King Lear, and Shakespeare makes me talk funny for weeks. And yes, with aged romance one does have to justify themselves. There seem to be weird Darcy fans out there who read the book religiously.

So what’d I notice this time around? Abez reminds me of Jane. She’s generous with her good opinions, kind and tolerant, you know, the type that makes the rest of us look bad. She’s been upsetting the curve for years. I guess that would make me like Eliza. But no wait, I’m not half as good natured as she. I’m in between Eliza and Darcy and maybe a pinch of the pedantic Mary for good measure. Whoa, that’s gotta be an ugly mix. No one would ever be writing hardbacks about me.

Egad, suddenly I’m struck by how very weird and spazzy this is. What starts off with finding similarities between yourself and fictional characters ends with you in costume at a Klingon Convention restaging the Great War of 5365. I should quit while I’m ahead and end this with a plea – take pity on a book-starved bookworm. Send any extra literature my way. You know the place - behind the third pillar at the docks after midnight. I’ll be Worf.