reading machine

just yeaterday some of my classmates (oh, i'd say about a dozen of them) commented on the new book i was reading, john grisham's the testament which only a few hours earlier has been mary higgins clark's the second time around. I guess they were quite astonished that i could read so fast whereas they, according to them, would take a whole week to finish a 250-paged paperback. I remember them looking at me like i was some weird book-addict and even went as far as calling me a "reading machine".

i'm not really compelled to explain myself, now am i? but just as well, i will do just that in this post. I started reading at just about the same age many people began reading- age six in first grade. back then reading of course was a bunch of syllabicated words such as ba-by, pa-il, e-le-phant and so on and so forth. My mama, i'm proud to say was a very educated woman, a liscensed chemical engineer, as was my papa- a mechanical engineer employed at the Naval Calibration Laboratory of the US. They had taught me to read through educational tapes that my papa would rent along with his regular bunch of naked gun and disney movies. i asked my mom some time ago about it and she said they figured that since i would eventually be hooked to the television set, then they might as well have me learn from it as well. then we had a house rule that i was allowed to watch tv during weekdays only until 5 in the afternoon and the evenings were devoted to home work. During the nights when there was no homework to be done, they would have me sit at the other end of the dining table reading a one-hundred short stories children's book that they had bought for me while they played poker with my uncles and cousin. once in a while i would come to a word that i'd mispronounce and my papa would correct it on cue. of course there were nights when i would rather have watched television and i'd intentionally drag on my reading and keep mispronouncing words so that my mom would end up reading most of the story to me. then i would let my head droop low and make them see that i was sleepy.haha, next thing i knew theye were waving me off to head on upstairs so i could get to bed.

i remember there was a mall in guam where they offered goody bags to students who made straight As (five As were good enough) and made these very special- looking certificates which had your name printed on them after you've shown your report card. My mom took me there a lot. its the case of the stimulus-response-reinforcement theory. then later on they had a booth that gave other goodies to kids who have read more than a hundred stories. i got a certificate from them too. it felt good for some odd reason. then one day there was a book fair in school and the librarian kept suggesting that if indeed we had plans of exchanging our old books for new ones, we should get those that were authored by judy blume. so i took home are you there god? it's me margaret and superfudge. they were a cool read considering that i was 8 and some of the characters in the books were about the same age.

later on i outgrew judy blume's characters and moved on to ann m. martin's the baby sitters club. i began with one of the mystery selections and when my mom saw that i had finished the book in a day's reading, she took me to a second-hand bookstore in tammuning, guam where the collection of babay sitter's club books sold for 30cents a piece. that was the day i took home about 40 of them and started checking the checklists that were on the covers of the books. how old was i, you ask? 10 years old.

i am proid to say though that i was never a fan of sweet valley high. hmph! all those girls did was chase after boys anyway.. ventually the book list grew and i got to know so many authors i wish i had kept an inventory of them. But i do remember that some of my favorites have been paulo choelo, nicholas sparks, james patterson, mary higgins clark, agatha christie, sidney sheldon, joanne kathleen rowling, amy tan, pearl buck, emily bronte, max lucado, rick warren, and oh i go bonkers trying to remember.

sure i read some romance pocketbooks some time or another, but whenever i do, it just means that i couldn't find anything better to do at that time. i'm fond of judith mcnaught because she like to do lords and not so typical ladies of the court who make fun of the ton. daniel steel i have never really got to read. there a are a lot of harlequin romances that i have read as a teenager , again for the lack of better material, since my maiden aunt had a whole bookshelf of them at the old house. in the past, i have also been through some of those very thin tagalog novels that tell of nothing but probinciana girls meeting rich manilenos having less than modest affairs from cover to cover. blechh..

you ask, have i ever been out to do anything but? why yes of course, but it just always come in handy to have a paper back inside my bag to read when im travelling from home to school and back, or waiting for a prof, or if there isn't anything interesting on tv. besides, i find a sense of connectedness to the characters i read. of course that doesn't mean that i find myself in their shoes but rather that i feel for them.

there are times too that i would not bother to finish a book because it is dragging on with no sense of direction. a separate peace is a book i own that sits on my rack half read, dostoyevski's crime and punishment has been read only up to the fourth page beacuse i cannot seem to remember the right names. there are too many vs and ks.

i relish though the page turners that i have spent reading until two in the morning. sigh! as you well know, harry potter is one of them. . hehe..

anyway i think my love for reading has become somewhat contagious inside the classroom. lui once said that i formed a sidney sheldon cult because all of a sudden, four or five other people were interested in sheldon. later on we moved on to sparks. just last week, we read the wedding. then when i read shopaholic they became interested with it too. joann read 1984 because i told her that's where incubus took the idea for the music vidio of megalomaniac (tedious read though!), then there was of mice and men, and now i'm about to pass on grisham.

i think the reason i'm trying to go through as many books as i can this semester is because in a few months i wouldn't have access to good library anymore... sigh... its so sad... so now i have to go to check out kyoko mori's shizuko's daughter.. tata!