Just the word, books, conjures so many sweet and heart-warming sensations. There’s something about books that becomes a part of us and helps us to both understand and express who we are as individuals. There’s something comforting about the familiarity of a childhood story or a favourite novel that puts us back in touch with the narrative of our own lives.
Overlooking my bed are two tall, dark and handsome bookshelves made of some tragically inferior wood. I know, I know: Tolstoy, Hugo, Dostoevsky and Plutarch deserve the finest mahogany or some such incorruptible wood to highlight their intrinsic worth… but for now, the flat-pack ingenuity of Ikea will have to do. In spite of this minor infraction, I take great pleasure in scanning my shelves and gazing with maternal pride at the intriguing titles. But it wasn’t always this way…
In primary school, I hated reading. Yes, it’s true. I always loved the bedtime stories my mum used to read to me, but novels; I hated them. They made us read books with names like, “Journey” and… well… to tell you the truth, I don’t remember the others because I never read more than three pages of any of them. It wasn’t until my final year of primary school that I discovered a novel I could bare to read the whole way through. It was called “Number the Stars” by Lois Lowry and was a World War II story about a little Danish girl whose best friend was Jewish. I couldn’t put it down. A few years later when I read “The Diary of Anne Frank”, I realised that I had just been reading the wrong kind of books.
With time, it became clear that I’m all about non-fiction and classics. You know, autobiographies, histories, social commentaries, philosophies, and literary masterpieces like the plays of Oscar Wilde or Les Misérables (which, by the way, is my favourite book).
I bet you’re wondering why I’m telling you all this. The truth is I am just repining the fact that I am only a few days away from abandoning my fledgling library once more! Given that the airlines only permit a couple dozen kilos for me to squeeze my entire life into, I have some difficult decisions to make about which books I will take! But don’t worry, I have contingency plans. I fully intend to join the most amazing public library I can find in England, and if I can’t find some of the more uncommon books on my ‘To Read List’, I shall be heard on skype, or any communication means necessary, saying: “Hey Mum, do you think you could mail me that pile of books now?”
:P
(Stay tuned for the explanation of what the heck I’m doing once I get back to Europe!)
