My Golden Years

I have read a number of books in my short time in this “’Verse”. I even got into a lot of trouble for reading some of them, but some of them got me out of trouble so I guess the balance was fair enough.

I’ll always be glad for every book that managed to grab my attention for long enough to read it from cover to cover that’s not an easy task I tell you. I enjoy being thoroughly entertained when I read and to do that, a book must engage all of my senses.

Some books leave you gasping for air. They grip you and wave such spells around you. You find them so immersing that by the time you come up for air and step out of the rabbit hole you fell into, reality seems quite dull in comparison.

Has that ever happened to you? It happened to me again and again growing up. I couldn’t get enough of books. I was lost to the world for years, as I escaped into the adventures George of the Famous Five, Tom Sawyer, Jane Eyre’s Little women, Greek mythology, Shakespeare, the works!

Then at age nine or ten I discovered the sexy men and sultry and feisty women that lived in the Romance books universe. Imagine my delight! I have two older sisters and two older brothers who were reading years ahead of me so I was able to leap frog up to over a decade to the “grown up” side of reading.

I discovered my first Romance hero by mistake. He lived within the pages of a book my sister forgot to take with her to school one day. I had been ill and had to stay at home. All three daughters in my family had to share one large room, but we had personal wardrobes even if it was just one large wardrobe that had been divided into three parts by my father.

My sisters had locks on their wardrobe doors; I wasn’t allowed that privilege yet (I was told that I was too young to have that kind of privacy) but their locks weren’t a problem for me. George from Famous Five had taught me how to pick locks if I had to.

So that day my eldest sister didn’t take the book to school. I had been bored, listless and needed another fix of escapism. I picked the lock on my sister’s wardrobe and there, on a pile of clothes was a book waiting to be read! I still remember the book’s title.  ”throw wide the door emilie loring (“Publisher: Bantam Books (1965) ).

Needless to say, I was hooked on romance since that book for quite some time. Lock picking became an art I needed to perfect, and I learned how to riffle through my sisters’ things and leave everything just the way they were before I “broke in”. They suspected something was amiss, but they never caught me at it. They just blamed each other.

My head swirled and my heart soared or exploded with the heroines in the books. I was captive under the spell of well-crafted stories told by male and female writers from parts of the world I had never visited and people who didn’t even know I existed.

That was how my golden years were spent, living within the pages of books, constantly searching for the next book fix.

These days I spend a considerable amount of time walking trough rows of books at bookshops looking for books that can do that for me again. Sometimes I find a good one. Most times I just touch the books and pass. I don’t read romance any more. Certainly not Mills and Boon.  Actually I can’t stand Romance books anymore. I find that I just cant. The women are too dumb; the men are just too annoying. I find that curious; the fact that the women and men I read of back then were so real to me, and I got so caught up in the stories whereas now I cant stomach that type of schmaltziness

Maybe I’m the one who got cynical and jaded, but I still wonder if the writers just write to meet deadlines now instead of for the sheer pleasure of writing to touch another person?

So, you might have guessed, I’ll be talking about books, reading and writing here every week. Come back again, and do leave comments…

pHisayo