For the Love of Books

I love books.  I love the look of them, the feel of them, I love their smell.  I love the excitement I feel when I crack open the first page and the adventures that await me within those pages.   I love the shiny, glossy book jacket and reading those tantalizing, teasing words on the jacket.

Needless to say, I do not own an e-reader.  I have no use for one.   I love books.  Real.  Books.

I learned to read and developed a love of reading at a Very young age.  I could read long before I started school.

Whenever the family would take a trip I was always reading the billboards aloud to everyone on the car.  Loudly of course!  🙂

The first time I met my grandparents, on my mother’s side, I drug my Grandpa over to the couch and sat him down and read to him.  I was very proud of the fact that I could read.  I think I was about 3 years old.

My mother raised 4 of us kids mostly by herself.  She didn’t have an education to speak of, so money was tight, always.

But when I opened a book, I was transported to another place and time.  It was a fantastic way for me to entertain myself.

I would walk to the library in the summertime and bring back an armload of books every few days.  During the summer, I averaged reading about a book a day.

No matter what you read, you learn something.  I kept a dictionary handy when I was reading.  If I came across a word that I could not figure out the meaning by the context of the sentence or paragraph, I would look it up.

I still love to read, but don’t take the time to do it as much anymore.

I think my life has been much more fruitful and accomplished because of my love of reading and my learning along the way.

I used to read everything from Shakespeare to Poe to Sci-Fi to love stories.   I love biographies.  I love learning about people like Abe Lincoln, or my favorite artists.

My 2 older brothers always had comic books in the house, which I read.  But those comics would spark my interest in people like Sherlock Holmes or Isaac Asimov.  So my taste in books has varied widely.

I have some old books that I have packed around with me for years that I just cannot part with.  One is a favorite from the 1970’s, which is beautifully illustrated about the life of Gnomes.  Another is a book, also from the 70’s called “Shut Up and Eat Your Shoe Shoes!”  It’s a hilarious true story about a couple that homesteads in Alaska.  I also have some rare, old Tarzan books that I may pass down to my eldest grandson some day.

These books evoke wonderful memories of a simpler time for me.

I still have a stack of books on my night stand that are gathering dust.  Maybe it’s time to crack open one of them and make a new friend….