Thursday, February 23, 2012

How My Sanctuary Spells. . .


In 4th grade, a classmate introduced me to book-reading, it was a Nancy Drew  mystery book as I can recall. The nature of my laziness dates back when I was not even born, and on a normal day I could have dumped that thing right-off. But because I have this unfathomably stupid feat of blindly signing up to a hobby I don't even do, I took the challenge and the inconvenience of trading my TV time with reading. The last pages curled a smug satisfaction in the corners of my mouth. Something about that teen novel made half the person that I am today.

There's just an inconceivable amount of novels I have read since that kid moment, but I still hasn't come to the conclusion that I am a geek by nature. It just doesn't fit me quite yet. I think "someone who reads" is a more apt description, although there's this cold knot of panic in my stomach each time I spot an interesting book straight from a shelf or a bookstore, anxious to grab a copy or to head-on reading. As a student before, I despised textbooks with intricate Chemical and Medical symbols and terms, guess that's just a part of the well-trodden-student-trap path I've gone through. There were particular years that I've terrorized an enormous number of stores, trying my luck to look for Anne Perry novels. I have fallen in love with the Victorian era so much that at one point I considered myself a resurrected woman from those ages. Ms. Perry has a very detailed narration on the mayhem and mysteries present during those days and it has played on my imagination very strongly. I've read some Philippa Gregory, the stories on Medieval period about kingship and how royalty conceals the human instinct of each character. And then the number of authors go on, from Gabriel Garcia Marquez, JK Rowling, Stephenie Meyer, John Saul, Stephen King, Sydney Sheldon, Daniel Steel, to the new rising talents of Lauren Kate. Long with these books, I have evolved as a big human fan to these creations. I find myself rather compelled to feed my knowledge, to explore more, to be deeply affected, to react violently on the plot and to curse my way into understanding a writer's style and forte.

Looking back on the young years of my existence as someone fighting my way on top of the food chain, I have found a special sanctuary on burying myself on a novel, digesting every single line, forever in awestruck with each writer's stroke of words. I have dreamed to author a masterpiece, but that was until college burst my bubble and led to the realization that some dreams just don't really come handy. Even my most loved individual on earth could not take me away from reading, it's my private haven, my own world, my very niche that fuels me in every single emotion I could feel. This isn't just a random routine I do, this is what I really am, this is what my biological DNA is made of, this is what my blood is partly consist of.