Books are magical

This is a Book Week post on Thursday’s theme, which is ‘General Book Love’.

Noble Savage wrote a beautiful post a while back about her daughter’s journey into the world of reading and I know exactly what she means.

I think the reason I worry so much about Rosemary’s reading and how to help her with it and get over the block she has about the school books instead of just letting her take her own time (because I’m sure she will have a breakthrough at some point and be reading avidly by the time she’s in Class 1) is because I desperately want her to share the magical world of books with me. I want to stick my head round her bedroom door and have to remove the book she’s fallen asleep reading from her nose and turn the light off. I want her to walk around the house with her book buried in a book, to be so engrossed in the morning that I have to remind her to eat her breakfast. I want her to run to the library after school on a Friday to stock up on books for the weekend.

Because books are at the centre of who I am. Books have taught me how to programme, taught me about design, taught me languages, taught me how to write (well, that’s debatable), taught me how to deal with emotional and mental stresses, taught me maths, history, geography and much, much more. Books have allowed me to travel the world without leaving my sofa, to taste the flavours of the world, and they’ve helped me explore the world that wasn’t my sofa, when I was somewhere else.

And that’s before you even consider fiction. Without fiction I wouldn’t have been able travel through space and time, exploring planets, galaxies and dimensions far away and diving into the 19th century, the 17th century, the middle ages, the Roman Empire… I wouldn’t have been able to get under the skin of witches and wizards and fairies and elves and hobbits. I wouldn’t have cried as many tears or laughed as many laughs. I wouldn’t have fallen in love with hundreds of heroes and heroines and ached with the pain of deaths and other tragedies.

I wouldn’t have experienced cultures and religions and traditions completely alien to me and immersed myself in them so much they seemed almost familiar. I wouldn’t have solved murders and known fear that stopped my breath. I wouldn’t have known the excitement of cracking the spine of a brand new book by a favourite author, of reading it in one sitting, staying up into the early hours of the night and then I wouldn’t have felt the combined loss and satisfaction of finishing a book, but being desperate for more.

There will be more posts during the day about books and how wonderful they are, so keep an eye out.