I hate shopping but there is one place that I could be wandering around for hours – bookstores. I usually pick up many books, look through colourful and attractive covers, glimpse inside the book and skim through. Once I am in the bookstore, I get lost for hours – here they all are: exciting, mysterious, dramatic, scientific worlds poking out of each book, luring you in, colliding in a small space of a bookstore…
When I was a kid, my parents and me used to share a house with my grandparents. My parents occupied the second floor of the house with a rather disorderly attic full of boxes with books! That was my father’s collection – you could find anything in there: cheap detective stories, world classics, Paulo Coelho, even some fraction of non-fiction books. My father was an avid reader – whenever he was writing his essays at school, he would get A+ for content (and D for grammar but that’s another story). All his interests in literature were stored there, in the little disorganized attic of my grandparents’ house.
For me, as for 9-year-old, it was one of the grand adventures of the weekend to get to my father’s attic and dig through his books box, marvelling at the book covers, looking and typefaces and fonts and judging from that which book should I grab next.
Once the book was chosen, I would go on my parent’s verandah with a few pillows and blankets to get lost in the new exciting story. Their verandah was covered with vines that protected you from the sun. Some sun rays though, always managed to get through and fall on the pages of my books – playing with letters, glittering, shimmering, somehow connecting the story on paper to reality you are in.
I would often read for hours – sometimes I would read until my eyes would hurt. Did it ever happen to you that you would read for so long that next day your eyes feel like a sore muscle? Oh well, I wish you discover a passion so strong for something.
I have long moved away from my grandparents’ house, the attic with all the books was destroyed in the fire and the vines all cut down. But yet, here I am – staring into the windows of the bookstore, wandering through the rows of the bookshelves, searching for glitter in the books.
Kat's Thoughts 