I Love Books!

Books have always meant so much to me, when I was a child they were my favourite toys. It started with the images and the feelings they gave me, its particularly the darker feelings that I remember. Books like The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett and its mysterious boy locked up in his room ill and crying, The Peppermint Pig by Nina Bawden and the urge for violence that became dominant near the end, The Crystal Prison by Robin Jarvis and its mysteries but also the slightly intense young love between two of the mice(!). More recently, Five Quarters Of The Orange by Joanne Harris almost exactly captured that queer dark mysterious feeling that used to intrigue me so much as a child.
As I have got older, books have moved with me. There have been books for all feelings of my growing up. Judy Blume was there to help me when I started to feel the confusions of just pre-teen changes, even music books were bibles to my actual teenage years. Much as I loved Nirvana and The Doors, Come As You Are by Michael Azerad and No-one Here Gets Out Alive by Daniel Sugerman were almost more important to me. Niall Griffiths and Irvine Welsh were there, among others, to help me through my self-destructive early twenties when nothing about me made sense to myself until my intensity levels settled down.
Now books show me that I can do what I like, like The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand and The Amazing Adventures Of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon. They show me that its most important to be who you are. Books with depth and revelationary clarity like anything by Virginia Woolf, beautiful language that makes my heart ache like Dylan Thomas and Sylvia Plath, a good intense love story like Jane Eyre, Rebecca or again, The Fountainhead.
I've learnt so much from books about patience and writing patiently, detail and how beautiful it makes a story, how important it is to know your characters as absolute real people, that its good to write originally and as myself but not be too proud to learn the tricks of your craft.
I've seen beautiful landscapes like in Forster's A Passage To India, spent cosy twilit afternoons like in Muriel Spark's The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie, learnt how to be yourself at all costs in Jane Eyre, how to be open to any way of life in The Poisonwood Bible.

For me, reading is living, or it helps me to live, encourages me to live and learn and love and what is more important than that?

Image from here