In my father's bookcase

...There were many books. 

One too many for me to remember and over the years, intermittently, I have been trying to make a mental catalogue of the books my father had collected in his over the years.

My goal is to derive a picture of my father's literary taste, so as to further derive a sense of who he was in terms of his values, likes/dislikes and beliefs.

I and my father were both extremely close and distant at the same time. In middle-class Indian households of the 70s and 80s, daughters and fathers would not be typically close in contemporary American/Western way we define closeness between parents and children.

After all, Indian households are a microcosm of Indian patriarchy, a system that still prevails in India today, and under the aegis of which fathers are in general their daughter's caretakers, not their emotional soul sisters. 

Yet, my father was very close to me as he was to my mother and to his own mother. I mean to say that in a predominantly female household, my father wasn't just a provider and a protector of our collective hayas, but also our emotional soul sisters.

I carry with me till this day, an imprint of my father as a feminist male.

But there was a distance as well between I and my father; not a debilitating distance of any kind, but of a kind produced by the fact that my father spend long hours at work and frequently went on official tours to various parts of India. 

I do not claim to know my father in all his complex humanity. Whatever I know of him isn't enough to me, and now that he is no more, I try to know him from remembering, among other things his literary tastes.

Can we know people from what they read?

I believe we can, unless we are talking of folks who randomly gather books and randomly watch films and theatrical shows and visit art exhibitions, simply for the sake of passing/filling time, overcoming boredom and entertainment.

My father wasn't that kind of a book-collecting fellow at all.

There was a pattern behind his reading: Overall, I can say that my father avoided British fiction (barring an odd copy of T.E. Lawrence's The Seven Pillars of Wisdom and George Orwell's 1984), took to non-British European fiction in English, like the Germans and the French, and he was a voracious reader of American fiction.

In my remembrance of my father's reading taste, I see a predominance of American fiction.

In follow-up blogs, I'll be listing some of the works of American fiction in my father's bookcase, and try to draw some impressions of my father's values from that endeavor.