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| To-be read books, all second-hand |
MY love affair with
books did not start until I was 13. I was a first year student of a private
school in the poblacion (Sta. Maria, Ilocos Sur), and it was my first
time to see a real library. I was from the barrio and I could just count with
my fingers the books that I had read, and suddenly I was in a place surrounded
by an impressive collection of books, a wide variety of titles, stacked up
neatly in series of shelves and glass cabinets.
I knew right then
what I really wanted to do, and that was to read. Soon, I was in the library
devouring fantastic stories, children’s fiction, anthologies, encyclopedias,
adventures and history, to the point that I had been forgetting to review for
exams and submit my school projects.
I become a
compulsive reader. I would spend most of my vacant time in the library. There
were just too many books to read. That started my most dearly cherished
ambition to live in a big house with my own private library. I even had this
secret wish to stay in prison surrounded by lots of books to read, just like
the young lawyer in Anton Chekhov’s “The Bet,” who spent, because of a crazy
bet, 15 years of solitary confinement reading books, from novels with a
complicated love plot, sensational stories, to volumes on languages,
philosophy, history, and religion, thus educating himself.
