In two weeks, it'll be the six-month anniversary of Lockdown S01E01. Also, six months of chasing the blues away, one book at a time.

Thank you for reading :)

~ Reader-in-Chief

[WANT TO READ MORE IN 2021?

ADD YOURSELF TO THE BIBLIOTHERAPY READERS' LIST]

roamer wanderer nomad vagabond department

“And the earth becomes my throne
I adapt to the unknown
Under wandering stars I've grown
By myself but not alone
I ask no one...

And my ties are severed clean
The less I have, the more I gain
Off the beaten path I reign
Roamer, wanderer!
Nomad, vagabond!!
Call me what you will...” ~ James Hetfield / Lars Ulrich || Metallica

This day last year, was pretty sweet for Alec. Relive his experience immersed in a 'lucky crowd', before the concept became an oxymoron...

Alas! For some of us, only the memory remains...

...of a nightmare in Gurgaon, circa 2011.

Metallica fans riot after first India concert cancelled

Police have charged the gig's organisers for cheating and breach of trust after the show was pulled due to 'technical difficulties'

theguardian.com

Anyway, Hetfield & Co are no longer the unforgiven. S&M2 makes up for everything. Nothing else matters.

S&M2 by Metallica

"Listen to S&M2 by Metallica on any music platform | Free music links by Songwhip

songwhip.com

Also, here's presenting the introductory post from my secondary ScrollStack...

Long Strange Trip

Sabbatical (noun) - also known as gap year; a prolonged hiatus in the career of an individual taken in order to fulfill some dream, e.g. writing a book or travelling extensively.

gapyear.scrollstack.com

...created in order to host tales from a 36-month-long 'gap year' - for your reading (and my writing) pleasure.

Full Disclosure - URL inspired by...

Offices reopen, buddy systems, and real estate advice from an insider

By Kevin J. Delaney

work.scrollstack.com

soviet kid-lit treasury department

Remember this guy?

Maybe you knew him by another name...

It's not your fault if you don't recall Nikolai Nosov's brilliant creation. Probably you weren't even born when the Mites of Flower Town vanished off the face of the earth post the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Nikolai Nosov’s 110th Birthday

Nikolay Nosov's 110th birthday #GoogleDoodle

google.com

“It has been almost three decades since the collapse of the Soviet Union, but its children’s books still fire the imaginations of those who grew up reading [them]. The glossy books, with their touching stories and fascinating illustrations, served as a sort of connection between distant lands sharing a belief system.

The last of them arrived from Moscow in 1991 and gradually disappeared from bookshelves over the last quarter century, save for an odd library or in a bibliophile’s collection.” ~ TA Ameerudheen, Scroll.in

Thanks to my folks, fifteen of these rare literary treasures can still be found in my personal collection...

...and one by one, are being digitally restored for the enjoyment of your kid(s)/ the kid within you.

The Bibliophile's Bedtime Stories: Dunno's Adventures #1 - The Mites of Flower Town

Once upon a time, in a town in fairyland, lived some people called the Mites. They were called the Mites because they were very tiny. The biggest of them was no bigger than a pine cone.

bibliotherapy.scrollstack.com

The Bibliophile's Bedtime Stories: Dunno's Adventures #2 - Dunno Takes Music Lessons

Dunno never could do anything right. He never got beyond reading in syllables, and he could only write printed letters. Some people said his head was empty, but that was not true, because he could not have thought at all if it had been empty. To be sure, he did not think much, but he put his boots on his feet and not on his head, and it takes some thinking to do even that.

bibliotherapy.scrollstack.com

Links to further issues will be updated in The Bibliophile's Guide to Dunno...

The Bibliophile's Guide to Dunno

Once upon a time, there existed a superpower - the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), the largest country in the world. Spread across an area of 22 million square kilometers, it covered one-sixth of the Earth's land surface - equivalent to seven times the size of India.

bibliotherapy.scrollstack.com

And now...

department of delayed responses

“In the last two decades, as we all started carrying smartphones around, it became technologically possible to reach one another instantly. But we never paused to assess the expectations that might come with that possibility and whether we’re on board with them.

We never came to cultural consensus on whether we want to be reached as much as we can be, and whether we want to respond as quickly as we technically can.

And we forgot, maybe, the unique opportunities afforded by ssss-looooo-www corresponding — the time to let thoughts swill; the joy of stepping past legato-style daily updates, into reflective catchups about long spans of living; the chance, even, to miss one another.” ~ Rega Jha

One of the few times when one is reminded that the Times of India isn't all about the ads...

In defence of ssss-low texting

A few years ago, I was dating a man who would take hours — hours! — to respond to my messages. It drove me insane. Naturally, I’d give him hell for it. (I was young...

timesofindia.indiatimes.com

Also, the next time you wish to apologize for a late reply, unless it's an emergency situation, don't!

fryed elementary department

“The pairing of [Stephen] Fry and [Sherlock] Holmes is a bit of a marriage made in heaven. Fry’s Holmes is sharp-witted and mercurial, though not especially idiosyncratic: quite right, as he is merely being reported by dear old Watson.

But Fry’s skill in phrasing and articulation over the whole 72 hours is beyond praise.

How he relishes a sentence like "The conversation, which had roamed in a desultory, spasmodic fashion from golf clubs to the causes of the change in the obliquity of the ecliptic, came round at last to the question of atavism and hereditary aptitudes."

Every consonant in place, every phrase perfectly shaped and filled with sense.” ~ Simon Callow, The New York Times

The Sound of Sherlock: Stephen Fry Voices the Master Sleuth

The noted British actor narrates Arthur Conan Doyle’s tales of a certain obsessive detective.

nytimes.com

If you haven't created an Audible account yet, no better time than now! Treat yourself to 72 hours of Stephen Fry breathing new life into the legendary detective's casefiles.

Listen to an excerpt below...

Exclusive: Stephen Fry on why Sherlock Holmes was the precursor to Marvel and DC

Fry has narrated the complete set of the famed fictional detective's adventures for Audible

independent.co.uk

As a trial offer, Audible gives you at least one credit - which can be redeemed to download any audiobook for free.

Sherlock Holmes: The Definitive Collection

Check out this great listen on Audible.in. Now updated to include Chapter Name Information, so you can easily find your favourite story or novel Winner of Audible's 2017 Members' Choice Award  "...it was reading the Sherlock Holmes stories as a boy that first turned me on to the power o...

audible.in

It doesn't take a Sherlock to figure out that this is the greatest value-for-money deal of all time.

back to school department

“All this trying to be quirky / engaging business to hack the algorithm doesn’t matter, because as organic reach increasingly moves to zero (on every single platform, not just Facebook), the best efforts will come to nought.” - Deepak "Chuck" Gopalakrishnan

Let’s talk about Organic Reach

A comic where I look at the irrelevance and inefficacy of the way a lot of marketing is done on social media platforms.

medium.com

Last weekend, after a gap of ten years, I re-entered a classroom, albeit virtually, to upskill my rudimentary digital marketing know-how...

50 points to Chuck for relevance! And a bonus twenty for this particularly fascinating pre-session read - a prescient article written by Chris Anderson in 2004, now more relevant than ever!!

The Long Tail

Forget squeezing millions from a few megahits at the top of the charts. The future of entertainment is in the millions of niche markets at the shallow end of the bitstream.

wired.com

humans of bibliotherapy department

“Why do I act like this, agreeing when I really disagree, letting people force me to do things I don't want to do?”~ Haruki Murakami, The Strange Library

Join the Murakami Reading Club on Instagram hosted by Nikita the Book Elf and explore his surreal bibliography with a bunch of other cat enthusiasts.

Read Now on Kindle --> September's Reads - The Strange Library || 1Q84 (Book Two)

It certainly helped me cross Kafka off my tsundoku list earlier this strangest of summers...

Come say hi :)

SCROLLSTACK goodreads department

Now browse a list of the 50 most-recently active creators on ScrollStack.com -

ScrollStack Creators

scrollstack.com

“I prefer walking alone to walking with others. That ladybird or the wild rose would escape my attention if I was engaged in a lively conversation with a companion. Not that the ladybird is going to change my life.

But by acknowledging its presence, stopping to admire its beauty, I have done obeisance to the natural scheme of things, of which I am only a small part.

Contemplating that tiny creature, or the flower on which it rests, gives one the hope— better, the certainty—that there is more to life than interest rates, dividends, market forces, and infinite technology.” - Ruskin Bond

Why I Write by Ruskin Bond

I am a fortunate person. For nearly seventy years I have been able to make a living by doing what I enjoy most: writing.

harpercollinsindia.scrollstack.com

“Think about an online marketplace where you go and find short stories listed. Some are independent of franchise context, some belong to a particular series (Byomkesh Bakshi?) and all stories are brand new.

You read excerpts and click on the buy button next to the stories you find interesting. You pay… what? about 10 rupees for a story and it is added to your library.” ~ Vijayendra Mohanty (2013)

Short fiction and micro payments

The music industry was changed forever when mp3 files came to be the default unit of music media. Before the single soundtrack became the fundamental unit in the music market, that position belonged to the record. That is why the sellers were called “record companies” and not “song companies”. Music lovers bought a CD of 10 songs and ended up truly enjoying only one or two of them. They couldn’t choose to buy individual soundtracks unless they illegally ripped songs off a purchased CD. In an ideal world, a record company would have noticed the demand for such a market model and embraced the mp3 format, but it didn’t happen that way.

vimoh.scrollstack.com

“What does Sherlock Holmes do in these stories that he doesn’t in any of the other Holmes stories?
- 'The Adventure of the Blanched Soldier'
- 'The Adventure of the Lion's Mane'” ~ Simple Interest

Crime & Detectives

We recently hosted a live quiz on Crimes and Detectives. (Ever since Covid-19 lockdowns struck, we have been gathering families around the proverbial fireplace and asking questions. It snowballed into a ticketed live-edition quiz continues on alternate Saturdays even today.)

simpleinterest.scrollstack.com

And on that note, signing out. Once again, thank you for reading :)

Until next week...

Name. One book/author/topic on your reading list for 2021. Email. Phone number (optional). That’s all.
Sign up below to READ MORE this year and beyond... :)

Bibliotherapy Readers' List

Want to READ MORE in 2021? Add yourself to the Bibliotherapy Readers' List for exclusive nudges, guided reading meditations and more...

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