Bookworm and proud of it!

I am a lover of books and I absolutely love to read. One of my earliest happy memory was when our grade one class was given the tour of the school library and I saw rows and rows of books, some shelves even shielded from grubby hands behind sheets of plastic. I remember lagging behind the class so I could browse the shelves and touch the spines of those beautiful volumes that were out of my reach until the third grade when we were allowed to get a library card.

And I remember one of the few instances when I got scolded in class. It wasn’t because I was talkative, or “pasaway”. It was because I got caught reading a library book, hidden below my desk, during my English class. I was in third grade.

My love story with the book is ultimately intertwined with school and the people I interact with every day. At kinder school I thrived on picture books and those how-things-work science volumes sold by door to door salesmen; at grade school was my Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys, and Bobsy Twins phase which later evolved into the Mills & Boon and Harlequin romance affair generously sprinkled with literary anthologies along the way. At high school I got heavily involved with Judith McNaught, Brenda Joyce, Iris Johansen, and all those other leading romance novelist. I also got my first taste of fantasy fiction with Robert Silverberg’s Lord Valentine’s Castle and Elizabeth Pope’s Perilous Gard, and got interested in psychology with William Sleator’s House of Stairs (heavy on behaviorism).

I could lose my self in a book. My classmates would all be talking and arguing but I could sit at my corner and never hear a sound.

When I reached college I got a little bit refined and read some classics: Shakespeare, Milton (I tried but never finished Paradise Lost), Edgar Allan Poe (one of my favorite), Jane Austen (before the movie commercialized her works), and other authors I could find in the library. I would max out my borrowers limit and gorge myself on weekends. Sadly, I never got around to finishing some of them because there were also text books that needed reading.

Trivia: I once heard it bandied about that there was a copy of the Kama Sutra in the reserved section of our library. This was in first year while taking a World History class. Our professor disabused us of the idea that the classic tract was only good for lewd drawings on sexual positions. Of course I had to find out if indeed we had a copy. I looked up the card catalogue and lo and behold it was indeed part of the collection. I surreptitiously traced the books at the reserved section but it was no longer there. *Think: Nicolas Cage at the Library of Congress looking for the President’s Book.*

Anyway, back to my timeline. It was also in college that I started buying books. I would carefully save my holiday “earnings” and splurge on second hand book shops. There was this nice shop at Gaisano City once. I remember it because that’s where I bought my three-in-one copy of Anne MacCaffrey’s Harper Hall Trilogy, hard-bound, which was later borrowed and never returned by a dorm-mate (I want to hunt him down still, “Kuya Niel Puga, give ‘em back!” huhuhuh). It was also where I found - and didn’t buy - Frank Herbert’s God Emperor of Dune (which is so hard to find now) and a paperback copy of Perilous Gard. Those were losses I suffer up to this day.

When I got work, and steady income, I gradually built up my SF collection. Sometimes I’d buy books I wouldn’t read. With work-related stress weighing on me, sometimes I’d much rather sleep than read. I’d occasionally read the romance novels my aunt gave me for pasalubong though: Nora Roberts! But it was also through my aunt that I discovered Neil Gaiman and Sharon Shinn, two of my favored authors to this day. My older brother introduced me to Orson Scott Card and William Gibson. Pol introduced me to Pol Medina and I heard about Bob Ong from my barkada.

I found that my family and friends were becoming my trusted sources of reading materials as my professional endeavor limited my time from browsing book shops. I’d visit May, a high school barkada, and come home with a huge bag full of cook books and contemporary novels; I’d visit my grandparents for the holidays and come home with books from my aunt. I’d swap books with my siblings and friends, never minding who owned which books and sometimes forgetting who borrowed my Neil Gaiman (Rolan are you reading this??). From my working sphere I was exposed to Stephen Covey and Don Miguel Ruiz and of course Mel, my source for Sandman and other comic books. And now that I’m back at school, my classmates have let me borrow their copies of Mitch Albom.

My love and respect for books have grown through out every phase of my life. Now, I’m trying to share that passion with my friends. But it’s so hard to find people who have the same interest. Most people nowadays are reliant on ebooks and soft copies, dvds, and internet downloads for entertainment. They’re quiet useful, I admit, but still nothing beats handling an old and yellowing “volume of forgotten lore”. And it’s so much harder to find people who are generous with their treasures.

If you’re within my vicinity and have the same passion with books as I do, please let me know and I’ll gladly share my library with you. We can discuss and share thoughts on what we’ve read, reread, rated, hated, loved, and treasured. Who knows, we’ll be able to create our very own Bookworm Haven right here in our own corner of the blogosphere.

(^_~)