When I read I usually skim through descriptions of the surroundings, enough to just get into the mood that the author intended for me. Unless may be it is a description of something catastrophic or an answer to some long building suspense of sorts. Somehow I am not interested in the beauty that the author’s eyes saw or imagined. That I’d rather see with my own eyes. Or maybe I’ve already seen so much of nature’s magic that it’s not what I thirst for. What I do crave for is drama, human emotions, normal, abnormal, exhibited, suppressed, uncontrolled, beyond reason, and yet some so mechanical. What excites me about stories is the characters, how they felt, what they did in response, someone’s knitted brow, a slight frown on someone’s face, desire, longing, lethargy, energy, scorn, words, the littlest touch and what it could lead to... These are what remain in my mind after the last page is read and the book shut for good. Sometimes I mark some of these parts that moved me, in books. Today strangely I found a description marked out in a book I had read some time back. Reading the bit again I figured why this was underlined. Its such a normal yet such a special beginning of a day. And its so small so simple yet so visual you cant help seeing and feeling the air and the dust and the morning around you. Raja Rao in Kanthapura:

“The day dawned over the Ghats, the day rose over the Blue Mountain, and churning through the grey, rapt valleys, swirled up and swam across the whole air. The day rose into the air and with it rose the dust of the morning, and the carts began to creak round the bulging rocks and the coppery peaks, and the sun fell into the river and pierced it to the pebbles, ...”

I’m sure I must have come across more such descriptions that I paused over but there haven’t been too many that didn’t bore me with their length, and that i didn't want to hurry through to get to the characters.