the love affair

I started reading when I was in fifth grade.

Of course I learned how to read earlier on. I used to go through my (as well as my siblings’) textbooks as a kid even before school starts just to read all the stories there, no matter how corny or boring or deep and confusing (like why do they call it short story if it’s almost ten pages long!?!). In my old school, we had three English subjects: Reading, Phonics and Language. I loved Reading even though we had to answer these stupid questions afterwards. To me the point was not to know if you got the details of the story correctly (Who is the main character? Who is the antagonist? What is the moral of the story?) But that you experienced the story. Kind of like an out of body experience where you see through the lives and thoughts of others and live through it, change and grow with those characters in that fleeting moment caught on page.

Anyway, I transferred schools in fifth grade. I was really terribly shy as a kid. The fact that I was usually younger by a year or two than my classmates was probably the reason. Thrown suddenly in an unfamilliar environment with new people, I was scared. I sought solace in the library even during that first day. I think it was the first time ever in my life I went in one, not because I don’t know about libraries or I don’t like it but because I never really had the courage to go alone on my old school and my friends then weren’t really the type to stay still and quiet in a place brimming with books and the occasional promise-this-is-true ghost story.

Well, nothing was stopping me that day. And the library was close to my classroom. I remember I started reading illustrated versions of fairytales always being curious about it after seeing countless English movies with parents reading kids fairy tales before sending them off to sleep. I finished a few childrens book and was almost late to my first class. Then I got hooked.

I remember the time my classes were usually only until noon except for a couple of days for non academics that lasted ‘til around three. I was on school service that comes at noon, 3pm and 5pm. I was usually in the library after classes thinking to myself I’d join the 3pm schedule but would miss that as well. I was irritated that the library closes at 4:30 and the bus won’t come til 5. That’s thirty more minutes I could lounge in the libe!

Well of course I graduated from children’s books. For awhile, I was hooked on Hardy Boys and Sweet Valley short novels but when I was through with all our library had, I resorted to short stories. I had a friend during sixth grade who told me stories she has read and it lead me to sci fi. When I exhausted all short stories resources I’m allowed access to, I started with abridged versions of novels until I was reading the real thing. I remember being able to read Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn first before seeing a cartoon version while wishing there is one for A Connecticut Yankee or that it was made as well as the novel was written. I liked Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women and wished to be as witty or intelligent as Elizabeth Bennet in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice or as capricious and endearing as Emma. I mind was blown with Lewis Carrol’s Alice adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. Blah blah blah blah blah… (You do realize, it’s take forever if I try to recount all my best moments reading here, don’t you?)

The habit never really left me. Probably most of my time at home is torn between reading and sleeping. Looking around my room, I feel exasperated by how much I still haven’t read after stupid binges on book sales but once I open one, you won’t really be able to speak to me until I’m done with that story.

I have no idea why I’m writing this. Oh well…