Sonam Kapoor's love for reading often finds her up all night, tucked in with her favourite paperback

Swaying in her Chanel ensemble, Sonam Kapoor hardly comes across as a bookworm. But even as a child, while most girls her age were drawn to dolls and toys, this sartorialist preferred a nice story book. She remembers, "Be it a trip to the dentist, getting an injection or even coming home with a good report card, my reward always had to be a book. I didn't care much for anything else."

Sonam's first books were those that her mother read out to her, sitting by her bedside. The idea was to lull her to sleep with tales like The Princess and the Pea, Sleeping Beauty and The Magic Porridge Pot. "Once my mum would put me to bed promising to complete the story the next day, I would get very restless. I couldn't wait to discover how the story ended. That is how I inculcated the habit of reading, clutching my story book under the bedcovers, reading with a flashlight when my mum thought I was asleep," she says happily.

Soon came the Enid Blytons, the Nancy Drews and then the Jane Austens. If Sonam liked a book, she would obsessively source all the literature credited to the author. Another obsession was to acquire every book in paperback as well as its hardbound version. This meant that a huge stack of books piled up at home but that she didn't mind.

She clearly remembers an incident from her teens when her reading frenzy led to a rather sticky situation. "I only discovered the Harry Potter series in my tenth standard. I dived right into it, often reading non-stop through the day and night. It was the morning after one such readathon when I was to appear for a Chemistry exam. Spending my night with the third edition of Harry Potter didn't help much and I fared poorly. My mother still believes that it was a tough paper or that I didn't follow the subject. But she will know better once this piece is out," Sonam cheekily admits.

Charmed by classics like Wuthering Heights, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Pride and Prejudice, Sonam rarely agrees with onscreen versions of her favourite novels, "I don't think most books can be justifiably translated on screen. The film versions can't convey the right emotion, fuel your imagination or allow you to visualise every line, they way books do," she says.

While movies like the Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings series failed to outshine their print versions for Sonam, Coppola's celluloid adaptation of The Godfather actually took the book up a notch or two. She is also excited to learn that her all-time favourite Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera has been adapted for the screen. She is yet to see it, but fears it will fail to illustrate the fine words woven by the author.