National Book Lover's Day

Photo c/o mayracuevas.com

Today, I'm celebrating one of my favorite days of the year.  I totally love books: reading, touching, smelling them---gives me a natural high, a sense of freedom and adventure.  According to Google's advanced algorithms, nearly 130 million books have been published in all of modern history.  Such is the wonder of modern technology that we can now measure, predict, analyze, decipher, and collate data in quantum numbers.

I haven't gotten the habit of reading with e-books. I still go for the old-fashioned way of going to the library to borrow books or purchasing them from the bookshops. I'm sure I'll get to that someday soon.  I was a Literature major in college but I didn't like doing book reviews.  It was more about exploring and discovering life through reading.  Reading was and still is for pleasure.  There is something about the printed page that just transports me to where I want to be.

In my younger years, when I was still in university, living on a tight budget, I've learned the trick of reading books and magazines without buying them. I would go to different bookstores to continue, until I'll finish reading them. This was the time when the books and magazines didn't have sealed plastic covers.  I really hated it when some of the pages were torn and I had to use my imagination to piece what the the author wrote.

I also was a regular, specially on Saturday afternoons, at the old Thomas Jefferson Cultural Center (TJCC) library along Araneta Avenue in Quezon City, and the old British Council library in Quiapo.  I had a special place in my heart for the one in Quiapo because it was housed in an old building and there were nooks and crannies filled with books and magazines.  I just loved inhaling the air from that library, as well as just absorbing the feeling of being in the midst of history.  When both moved to their new locations: TJCC to Buendia Avenue Extension in Makati and the British Council to New Manila, I still carried on with my weekly or monthly visits.

I'm happy that my wife and three children have acquired the same love for reading books and magazines.  We always joke around that we're great readers, that's why we are also good writers.  But that's another story.