once in a while a book comes around that makes readers out of our literature nonsavvy stars a breed normally not known to read not beyond comics anyway though some of the glitterati do carry tomes around hoping to be mistaken for literati but once in a while they do browse the pages of literature if the pages are compelling enough that isin the 1980s it was the jackie collins phenomenon the bitch valley of the dolls and several others were a must have for the actresses of the decade so we would see zeenat neetu and parveen hide away little paperbacks of jackie though parveen did pore over books by ug krishnamoorthy too and zeenat did leaf through the occasional classicrekha on the other hand preferred biographies and autographies especially dwelling on one of sophia loren and even borrowing parts of her life to live out or so said loren watchersvinod khanna and mahesh bhatt were bio readers too reading intense stuff penned by osho and other thinkers in fact vinod used to tell me about the benefits and joys of transcendental meditation even handing me a booklet on the same mahesh was more a ug reader and insisted that i read his stuff unfortunately i still havent got around to it the mighty amitabh bachchan no thanks to his insomnia is given to great sessions of watching movies on his home theatre system and reading profusely his nocturnal reading habits have seen him go through all the great works from shakespeare to wilde to tagore to even contemporary authors ab has been a voracious reader and still devours the newsprint papers and magazine included like there is no tomorrowit was kajol of late who reendorsed the image of the intelligent heroine while juhi chawla with her fort convent education alternated between archie comics and bernard shaw and aishwarya rai pored over the newer bestsellers after having gone through the classics it was kadz who sat on the sets readingonce i did ask her what intellectual tome she was devouring her books were always covered with newspaper she smiled i read mills and boon i dont know if you can call that intellectual but its interesting that burst everyones bubbleit was a book called the celestine prophecy that had caught the fancy of the junta last decade every star wanted to be seen with the paperback if only to endorse their literate imageand when arundhati roy and jhumpa lahiri won those book awards it was the same storyof late its fashionable to be seen with dan browns the da vinci code and its sequels and prequels while shah rukh khan was the first to have read it long before it became a fad to say you had soon everyone from amisha