When I decided to overhaul my blog about a couple of weeks ago, I made the decision to follow Marvin's advice and write about the things I like the most. Which is mainly movies, tv series, manga, anime and books.
This turned out to be a good thing, because if I relied purely on my random thoughts, I wouldn't be able to write anything, seeing as how I possess the memory of a fish. Good ideas would be forgotten once I come across something else that interests me. Or I just simply forget them. I have been known to lose my train of thought in the middle of a conversation.
What turned out to be the biggest challenge is figuring out which book to write about first.
Among all of the interests that I listed above, reading books is probably the oldest and most enduring of them all. It started with Archie comics courtesy of my cousins, who we used to live with before. My mom started getting new ones for me every time she accompanied my aunt for grocery shopping at Landmark in Makati. It was my mom who would cover them in plastic and number each one with a marker. Though I would forgo numbering my books (which is too obsessive compulsive, even for me), wrapping them in plastic to preserve their covers was a habit I would keep to this day.
A few years later, my reading material became the Sweet Valley series (Twins, High, Universtity, etc.). This was the time when I found others who read the same material I did, and the borrowing back and forth of books occurred (some of which I never got back). A cousin of mine and some classmates recommended and lent me romance novels. After reading a few titles, I decided that it wasn't the genre for me. I understood how they would find the more adult content fascinating, since no one really talked about THAT topic, but I found the stories repetitive regardless if they were different authors or time period or plotlines. It all just melded in my brain as one book with sex in it.
During my last couple of years in high school, I started reading general fiction titles, mostly by Sydney Sheldon and Danielle Steel. At this point, there weren't many among my peers who read and if they did, we would be reading the same thing. It wasn't until college when this would all change.
It was in college that I met my closest group of friends, and for a long time I was the only girl in the group who wasn't the girlfriend of one of them. This didn't bother me, since my friends weren't the testosterone-laden type who focused on muscles and girl-chasing. They were geeks. And proudly so.
And it was from these boys that I learned about fantasy, sci-fi, video games, comics, gadgets, etc.. Now men (or I'd like to think that they've become men), they are still interested in the same things, which are still central to many of our conversations. It wasn't until I started working that I found that I became one of them, when during a conversation, my co-workers looked blankly at me when I told them I had a Playstation and loved playing RPG.
Among all the different things to geek out on, it was anything related to reading that I gravitated towards to. At some point before I left college, my love affair with the fantasy genre started. There were three books that made me a fan. The first was David Eddings' "The Pawn of Prophecy" from the "The Belgariad" series, which was lent to me by a friend. The remaining two were books I bought to give as gifts to the same friend on separate occasions. They were Neil Gaiman's "American Gods" and Robert Jordan's "The Eye of the World" from the "Wheel of Time" series.
"The Belgariad", and later "The Mallorean", by David Eddings would be the first two series that I would read from the genre, and would be what piqued my curiousity. "American Gods" would introduce me to the wonderful mind of Neil Gaiman and his incomparable ability to meld fantasy in contemporary settings, giving me the deliciously terrifying nightmares about what lurks beyond what we consider mundane. Yet, it was "The Wheel of Time" that would cement my addiction for fantasy fiction.
By the time I started working, there were already nine books in the series by fantasy master Robert Jordan. I rewarded myself with my own copy of the first book "The Eye of the World" with my first paycheck. I bought the rest of the series with the next eight paychecks that I received from my rather small-paying job. Purchasing books would eventually become my number one vice, sometimes spending half of my salary on a book shopping spree.
Some people might think that there are better things to purchase with hard-earned money, especially with the ease of finding e-book copies online. Yet, I never find the same satisfaction with reading from a computer screen, compared to the feel of the pages in my hands. And nothing beats wandering in a book store for hours, trying to find the book that you've always wanted to read or discovering a new treasure among the lined shelves. There is also a sense of joy from re-reading a book, like welcoming an old friend and discovering something new about him.
Through the years, I collected a list of favorites starting with the three titles I've listed above. And it was a nice surprise that I ended up reading and loving works from different authors and in different genres, some of them even categorized for younger audiences. Notable titles include "His Dark Materials" trilogy by Philip Pullman; "Dune" by Frank Herbert; the "Harry Potter" series by J.K. Rowling; "The Reader" by Bernhard Schlink; "The Silence of the Lambs" by Thomas Harris; "The Lions of Al-Rassan" by Guy Gavriel Kay; "To Kill a Mockingbird" by Harper Lee; the many books of Roald Dahl; and many, many, many more, that if I write them, this blog post would be twice its length.
So, here I am, being long-winded about my history and love of books, and still unsure which actual book I should write about. I think I should go and check my collection and re-read some of my favorites to find out which would be the final choice.
And yes, I'm just making an excuse to read again. :)
Happy reading!!Labels: Books, Musings, Reading List
A few years later, my reading material became the Sweet Valley series (Twins, High, Universtity, etc.). This was the time when I found others who read the same material I did, and the borrowing back and forth of books occurred (some of which I never got back). A cousin of mine and some classmates recommended and lent me romance novels. After reading a few titles, I decided that it wasn't the genre for me. I understood how they would find the more adult content fascinating, since no one really talked about THAT topic, but I found the stories repetitive regardless if they were different authors or time period or plotlines. It all just melded in my brain as one book with sex in it.
