I'm sure you probably expect me to write about my first boyfriend, or more appropriately, my husband.... although Jason changed my life and my heart in ways I never could have imagined, I will get to him in a later post.
My first love? Well, that's easy. Books.
I will read anything. anything. Or I will at least give it a go. For instance, I once read The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon.... it's a Stephen King novel. I read and read, waiting (hoping) on it to get better... it never did. I'm assuming it was one of those books that he must roll out on occasion to keep his publishers happy in between his major hits like Dream Catcher and The Green Mile. People buy these books, because hey! it's Stephen King so it has to be good, right? W.R.O.N.G. I was actually mad when I finished that book. Mad, not because it was over, but because I'd wasted my time on it. From what I understand the book was full of metaphors about survival and yada yada.... it was lost on this girl however. But I'm by no means trying to deter you from reading it, in fact, please do, then maybe you can clue me in on something I must have missed. My point is, is I will read anything. Food labels, receipts, good books, bad books, magazines, etc...
I don't know exactly when I caught on to reading, or what my first book was, but I know that every time I open the cover of a book, I am about to leave my world, and enter one entirely different. Every book I read I start off the same way. I read the blurb on the back, the information about the author if it's available, the book dedication, and then I jump on in.
One of my favorite parts of a book is that book dedication. Most of them are really simple. "To John".... yawn. But sometimes they are more.
One of my favorites is in The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, by C.S. Lewis
"To Lucy Barfield My Dear Lucy, I wrote this story for you, but when I began it I had not realized that girls grow quicker than books. As a result you are already too old for fairy tales, and by the time it is printed and bound you will be older still. But some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again. You can then take it down from some upper shelf, dust it, and tell me what you think of it. I shall probably be too deaf to hear, and too old to understand, a word you say, but I shall still be your affectionate Godfather, C.S. Lewis "
Um, how awesome is that?
And that taking it down from the shelf, and dusting it off part? Yeah, that's my favorite. Discovering a book I had forgotten about, opening it up and "revisiting" friends I had long ago met, and put to the back of my mind. I love that part.
Almost every book I own, is dog eared from my going back to them time and time again.
That being said, books are almost sacred to me. There's a scene in the movie The Day After Tomorrow, where the characters are in the library burning the books for heat (cringe!), and one character was holding/protecting the New York Public Library's copy of the Gutenberg Bible. When questioned about it, he says, "as far as I'm concerned, the written word is mankind's greatest achievement." Um, "true dat." If you have access to books, you have access to the world outside your own front door. Between a front and back cover are entire worlds so different from your own as to be almost beyond imagining.
If I don't have a book on the night stand I feel lost and sad. Jason could give me a book every birthday, anniversary, and Christmas of my life, and I would be A-OK with that. hint. hint.
Give me a new book and I am a happy girl...
Give me an afternoon in a bookstore, and I step through the doors and it's like the past, present, and future are swirling all around me, and I can barely contain myself. I have had to hold myself back on multiple occasions from doing a little jig.
I googled "book lady" to find a cutesy, representative picture of somebody who loves books as much as I do and this was the first picture that popped up....
Good Lord, please let that not be a foreshadowing of things to come... If I start wearing ribbon spools as earrings (among other things), I believe Jas will put me out.
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