Some girls have their handbags and shoes. I, on the other hand, have my books. They just keep on growing and growing in number. In the absence of sufficient bookshelves, I stored most of them in boxes. My wish is that someday when we get a bigger house, I’ll transform one room into a library; a library so big and vast that I’ll be like Belle in Beauty and the Beast when she saw all the enchanted prince’s collection.
I frequented book stores when I was based in the Philippines. I ordered books from Amazon China when I was based in the Middle Kingdom between 2014 and 2015. Spending 2010 in Shanghai as a language and culture student produced a collection of books bought from street vendors, who sold copies of Harry Potter and Chronicles of Narnia in carts.
Now, based in the US, I scour the virtual world of eBay and its long list of book sellers. I am now a proud owner of copies of Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl, William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, among many others. All of them are used books, previously owned by someone of this earth, I supposed.
I loved used books especially when the previous owners wrote notes on some pages. I like to see highlighted lines and dog-eared pages. For some reasons, I feel that these marks make the books alive.
I’m visiting the public library on Saturday to get my library card. Almost eight months of living in the US and it’s going to be my first time to be in a library. That happens when you’re raising three children and you don’t know how to drive. All is not lost though. For I also blog for books. I get free books in exchange for honest reviews. I love it! I just love waiting for the books to arrive and then when they come, I excitedly open the boxes or the envelopes. I smell the books before anything else. They’re my personal drug.
Books are a woman’s bestfriends.
To this woman, I mean.
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T30WC or The 30-minute Writing Challenge is a writing exercise born out of this blogger’s need to maintain a habit of writing. Subjects of each writing challenge is just about anything but should ONLY be written within 30 minutes.