The Lemon Law of Reading

There’s a new show on Star World called ‘How I Met Your Mother’. It features something called the ‘Lemon Law’. The Lemon Law allows you to bail on any date in the first five minutes, no questions asked.*

I use the same principle in terms of books. If the first page and a half of a book isn’t riveting enough for me, I simply don’t read it further. If I do, I invariably end up regretting it. And I usually don’t pick up books by authors who have disappointed me so. As a result, I now never read anything by Somerset Maughm, Khalil Gibran, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and a whole lot of others, including P.G.Wodehouse. Yes, I can see a bunch of you getting up in outrage at this exclusion of the granddaddy of Brit smirk-fiction. But I can’t help it. Jeeves and Co. just don’t do it for me.

Archer, the eternal Anglophile, has taken this slight personally and gifted me a Wodehouse from the Blandings series. Will this make me join the ranks of the faithful? Only time will tell. For now, I’ll settle for the contentment that comes with having a new book to read in the rains.

*Realised to my utter dejection the other day, that I don’t know even 10 interesting men. ‘Interesting man’ meaning someone with whom I can have a 10-minute conversation without feeling like stabbing myself repeatedly in the head with a pencil.