On reading & words

“A room without books is like a body without a soul.”
— Marcus Tullius Cicero

Since I was a wee child and had not learnt to read books yet, my parents would bring me to the library every sunday and I would pick out books with pretty pictures and sit with said book in lap flipping the pages and gazing at the stories filling up my head and heart.

The weekends became a blur of trips to libraries, running around picking out as many books as my hands could hold on to and getting them home as soon as I could so I could bury myself in the wonderful worlds the words created for me.

On the way to the library, there was a local publisher’s bookshop and I would often look in to note which of them I could borrow from the library. In my heart, I wanted to own them. I wanted to own all of them.

Thus my quest to own all my heart’s words in these wonderful books started.

They have evolved from reading all the books in all the different fiction sections in the library to slowly learning what sort of worlds I preferred and refining my tastes in the genres I chose to lose myself in.

Now, I frequently search for and assess the books (so many!) spilling out of the Young Adult (YA) and Fantasy genres while slowly completing my childhood dream of completing certain authors’ whole collections.

I also go on bookhunting trips to big and small bookstores and often look for bargain sites to get my books.

I feel like I will never finish my quest.. it makes me feel melancholy when I think about this but the pounding of my heart while I try to get there .. is sweet.

So.

This is where I usually hang around, stalking the forums and picking up new titles and worlds and feverishly researching them before they go to my virtual shelves.

I have met fellow word lovers and I am pleased I have.

Books and words.. feed my soul.

Won’t you join me?

my ‘currently-reading’ shelf:

my ‘read’ shelf:

my ‘to-read’ shelf: