073 - How to Eat a Book
Part 1 (Perhaps) | Food Part 2
Eat a book like a fruit, mindful of the season, light and fresh, sour and sweet, eat it for good health, eat it and let your mind grow a garden.
Eat a book like you would a croissant1, bit by bit, let it roll on your tongue, take a break in between, then go right back in because you can’t resist its buttery, flaky goodness, savour its last sentences of absolute beauty, then forget all about it. Have it with a coffee.
Eat a book like a noodle soup; pick the richest words for the freshest characters to swirl and drench in. Slurp every page, let the smoothest of lines carry all its flavour in every bite. Chew every bite a tad longer, eat it slow.
Eat a book like a cake. Eat it after every big meal and in between. Eat it warm on a winter night, eat it chilled on a summer evening. Eat it hot when it is fresh out of the press. Eat it cold and stale after a long hard day.
Eat a spicy book that tingles your neck and makes the hair at the nape of your neck stand. Eat it so that it burns your throat and chest, eat such that you sweat from every pore.
Eat a book as if you found it at a feast2, have big spoonfuls and go for seconds and thirds. Eat it late in to the night.
Eat a book as if it is a Levantine plate, share it around and eat together. Dip it in thoughts and dreams, make do with whatever pages come your way, eat it simple, eat it laden with condiments of notes and prefaces and introductions, and introductions for those introductions, as if they were olives, parsley and sumac.
Eat a book like bread, but not sliced ones, go for the oddly shaped old folksy one, anything but boring, fresh or stale, but a comfort on the tongue and the soul.
Eat a book like a snack, flip through a few pages blind, read but some paragraphs that draw you in in between, then pack it for later, and on a cold sleepless night, raid it for known comforts and unmet surprises.
Eat a book with a knife and fork, slice it into its smallest bits and savour them in tiny indulgent bits or tiny digestible bits or tiny shareable bits, let its size make you salivate at its prospects.
Eat a book with your hand as you would carrots dug deep in some corner of the world, and shake of its dust and grit, clean it tenderly, soak it in sunlight, clean its edges. Eat it lying down with no seasoning.
Eat a book wrapped in leaves, seek its ancient wisdom and trace your roots through its veins.
Eat a book like ice cream on a Sunday noon, eat it fast before it melts, bite into its crunchy end bits and be back again for one soon.
Eat a book like a sandwich; have it in the middle of everything that is coming good.
Eat a book like Kale, eat it even when you don’t want to until you don’t really mind.
Eat a book like breakfast, have it the first thing come morning.
Eat every book like it was the last meal you always craved.
A week or so back, the rains subsided and the sun threatened to bring an endless and hot summer back to the little nook in Kerala where I write this from. There was no respite, and in a state of a heat induced delirium (a tiny one) I pictured the sun dining with the earth on its plate, ready to gobble it. It was fairly vivid, a very cartoon-like vision, in fact, it reminded me of a wall art that I had seen while wandering about in Bombay long back; I took my phone to type the idea out, but strangely I chose to write How to Eat a Book as my heading instead.
I was chuffed. I actually felt that I wrote something that no one’s thought of before. Out of sheer habit, I googled the phrase. My heart sank (a tad) when I found Austin Kleon had a post called just the same from three years ago (naturally). And that there was a children’s book by the same name. Strangely, reading the post and the book’s synopsis had an uplifting effect, and here we are with the seventy third issue of this newsletter as an addition to the very short literary cannon of How to Eat a Book.
Other Daak issues with food:
031 - Writing and Food
017 - MTV, Japan, Pizzas and What Not
In case you skipped the link, here’s the best YouTube video I have seen this year
A book review of The Upstairs Delicatessen by Dwight Garner