Proud to be a Book Lover!

Have you ever flown on a broomstick while chasing a flying ball the size of a walnut? Or witness an albino monk, murder the curator of the Louvre? Went below the 20,000 leagues under the sea and watch Capt. Nemo guide the Nautilus under an iceberg? I have! In my imagination. That’s why I love books so much. It gave me adventures, well beyond that I can imagine. I remember the first book that I had ever read. It was a story of amateur detectives, “The Hardy Boys”. A friend of my mom gave us a complete set of Hardy Boys books when I was in high school. She was recommending the books to me and told me that she rather see me read books than watch T.V. all day. I at first declined, I mean who would want to stare at pages with no pictures in them. I was a kid, so T.V. and comic books rule in my world.

Then one day it was raining hard on a Saturday morning, there were no cable T.V. back then so your a slave of the local channels and watch whatever whats on at that time. So there I was bored, restless, bored, disappointed at the weather and did I mention bored? I went to my room and so the Hardy Boys Collection neatly stacked in one corner of our room like soldiers waiting to dispersed. I decided to try one since I don’t have anything to do, and besides “How bad can it be? I thought. I can always take a nap, if it’s really boring. It wasn’t the book was “Hardy boys and the Tower Treasure” book 1 of the set. Before long I finished the book and read the next book in the series. I spent my weekends and some free time in school reading the Hardy Boys until I finished all the books in the series. I was starting on the Nancy Drew set a day after I read the last Hardy story. After the Hardy’s and Nancy Drew, I started reading some of my Reader’s Digest magazines. I can’t believe that I got hook on it too. That was the first time in my life that I wasn’t reading fiction. Reader’s Digest has everything in it, both fiction and Non-fiction. I was so immersed on reading that there are times that I forget to eat dinner, because the book got my attention.

Today, I still collect books, I actually have the complete works of John Grisham and J.k. Rowling, I completed Dan Brown last year. My recent project is to complete and read all the works of Michael Crichton. I even started on some biographies of some well known Americans like Jim Lovell of the Apollo 8 and 13, Marcia Clark the prosecute on the O.J. Simpson case and many more.

I’m trying my best to teach my son the value of books and I’m happy to say the he likes reading books too…. from time to time. And my only wish is that he gets the chance to see the things that I had seen through my imaginations because of book.