I love to read. Reading to me is the best thing in the entire world. Whenever I pick up a book, I know whether I’m gonna like it within reading the first page. If after the first page I continue, I’m hooked. I swear I won’t put that book down until it’s done. I won’t feel like my life is complete until I have read the last word. It’s a quality that only I possess in my immediate family. My brothers find it a chore to read more than a paragraph and if it doesn’t have pictures, forget it. My mother makes me read and then summarize it for her so she doesn’t have to do it. My father doesn’t make the effort to pick up a book because he can’t make himself sit still long enough to read it. I am the only ‘nerd’ in the family.
I can get addicted to a book so badly that I basically blur everything around me. The TV can be on, the radio, family can be talking around me, people can be walking by me, the ambulance could be passing by, and none of this do I notice. I swear it’s like I’m absorbed into the book. This is the main reason why, in the past three years, I haven’t been able to sit down and read a book in peace. With my daughter, I can’t exactly tune her out. Even if I really wanted too, she wouldn’t allow it. She’d make damn sure her presence would be acknowledged. So I haven't read comfortably in over three years but I've managed to steal a couple of moments here and there and read a book or two.
This passion of mine was planted when I was a little girl. My mother would make a huge effort to read us The Golden Books. Even though she didn’t like to read, she would make sure to sit my brothers and me together and read us a book a night. We had dozens of little books. At the time, I didn’t give much importance as to what she was reading us, I just knew that I liked having that moment of being embraced by my mother and having my brothers around. When I finally figured out the whole reading thing by myself, I was set loose on a journey of a lifetime. Anything and everything I could read, I read. My brothers would make fun of me because I read ‘for fun’. This opinion was shared by a couple of other family members and friends. To them, I was wasting my time. To me, this was the life. In elementary school it was all about Goosebumps and R. L. Stine novels. When I got to high school, I started devouring romance novels. It wasn’t so much that I was looking for love or that I thought love actually existed, it was more the quality of the books. The way the characters were described and depicted; for some reason, I found it absolutely enthralling. By the time I started college, I had given up reading romance novels and had gone on to other genres, but I had accumulated over 200 romance novels. I had held on to them all these years until this past Christmas when I donated them all to Goodwill. Believe me, it still hurts to think I did that. I should’ve held on to them…oh well.
Anyways, during my fling with romance novels, I read the classics, Pride and Prejudice, The Awakening, Moby Dick, Ethan Frome, Tale of Two Cities, The Bell Jar, and on and on. I even mixed them up with a bit of Anne Rice; vampires are a fascination so you best believe I read the Twilight series…more than once (told you I was a nerd). That is until one day, I ran across a book my father had bought back in his heyday, The Shining. At first look, I thought maybe not. It was a rather large book. After the first page, I was done for. This is when my love affair with Stephen King began. I was so fascinated with his stories, how he managed to take average cities and pound them with the worst imaginable evil was beyond awesome to me. He was a genius. While living here in Laredo, I had only bought a couple of his books at what was then B. Dalton’s (I miss having a bookstore around). They were kinda expensive, well worth it, but nonetheless pricey. A couple of years later, I moved to Idaho and found my own heaven on earth: thrift stores. Now, I know Laredo has some thrift stores but they are nothing in comparison to the ones up North. The items found in these stores are in good condition and most are still in working order. Some of the things found there would be good for at least another five years by Laredo standards (in no way insulting our amazing city, but it’s true). Well this is where I came to find hardcover King novels for a dollar and paperbacks for fifty cents…I thanked God for whoever had come up with the thrift store idea. There I went, thrift store after thrift store, looking for novels and I ended up with a collection of some thirty books. They were my prized possessions; my life’s purpose had been gladly served. Unfortunately, yes there is always an unfortunately, when I moved to the Valley, these books were not going to be travelling with me. They were sold, each and every one of them. Yes, I think a piece of me died that day. It kills me just to relive it. I hated the man that bought them all…they were going for a dollar a piece. I hope he’s treating them well. Since that traumatizing experience, I’ve since recovered a bit and am slowly starting to build my tiny collection again. This time, I’m not letting go of any…I don’t care the price I’d have to pay.
Sometimes I’ll go to the Goodwill and buy fifteen dollars worth of books, not necessarily because I know or heard of the book, but because it was there at the time that I went. When I look for books, it’s not because I have something in mind, basically I can find interest in anything…except science and math, please don’t go there. A couple of months ago, I was in Austin for some work thing and made my co-workers take me to Barnes and Noble. I was there for an hour and a half and ended up spending 80 dollars on books. My co-workers were frustrated and annoyed and couldn’t understand how anyone could spend so much time at a bookstore…I gladly could’ve been there all day. Besides, I’ll do anything to make my tiny library grow. The big difference now is that my ‘grown-up’ collection is mixed in with Elmo, Cookie Monster, and My First Prayer Book amongst other child friendly books. My daughter is exhibiting the same symptoms of being a 'read-aholic', which is just fine with me.
Books to me have been my way of understanding the world. I’ve read books on how to take each day at a time, how to date four men at one time, why Marilyn Manson is so weird, where my fear of trolls was born, what to expect during a pregnancy, where to bury pets when I want them to come back to life, and how a bar can have a profound effect on a fatherless boy. Therefore, this Christmas I am asking for the best gift in the whole entire world: a Kindle, 3G, Wi-Fi, e-reader. I want this gift like Ralphie wanted his Red Ryder BB gun. Sure, there’s something about having the actual book in your hands but I’d be more than happy to carry around hundreds of books in this tiny gadget. I could pick and choose anything I wanted at any time. Yes, Santa Claus, this is what I want. I’ll leave you extra cookies and chocolate milk instead of plain ol’ milk. Pretty please. Oh, and if you can throw some of that peace, love and prosperity for all human kind...that'd be great. I can't be all that selfish.
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