Forgotten hobby

Reading is a very favorite hobby of mine which had taken a back-seat for quite sometime now, except my reading the Times of India newspaper daily and reading news articles on ibnlive.in.com. Till a few years back I used to read novels very frequently, mainly from fiction (crime, detective, mystery) genre apart from a couple of biographies also. The part reason for this hobby of mine taking a back-seat are the genres themselves. You need continuous time to read them, as it's very difficult to break in between, at least for me.

But very recently I got a chance to bring back this hobby of mine to focus. On my journey back to New Delhi from Kolkata on Rajdhani express I had all the time in the world. So I decided to pick up a novel to read on the train from the Howrah station. I choose The Chamber by John Grisham. Genre wise (legal thriller) it was new to me. I did manage to read a substantial part of the novel in the train but finished the remaining part at my home after reach New Delhi. I liked novel and I think I am very soon going to buy some of the other titles by John Grisham. But more than that I very excited that I went back to my hobby after a long while.

Today while browsing the net on Google search (another hobby of mine), I found a nice site which has a good collection of some of the beautiful works. www.readprint.com. It claims to be a free online library with about 8000 online books by 3500 famous authors. Not bad! Though it also carries a strange warning on the homepage - "The surgeon general reports that having these many free online books at your disposal can be highly addictive."!! I do not think the addictive part is bad but surely I would avoid it as already due to my job I sit in front of computers for better half of my day, and if I start reading books online, I am sure my eyes will pop out in revolt. And anyway, I love buying books and preserving them, after reading, in my collection.