Books never really made my boat float (despite being made from trees) and the only books that I can remember ever reading as a child were ‘Around the World in Eighty Days’ and ‘Coral Island’ which I must admit had to read to me as my bedtime stories. And no, I won’t tell you what age I was at the time! While I may not have read much, English was always the subject that I excelled in partly due to my mother being from England (Kent to be exact) and she was always going around promoting the proper use of English. To this day she still refuses to talk to me whenever I fail to “dot the I’s” - even when speaking! So now that I think I’ve established the fact that books were never on my menu, I’ll suddenly hit you with a Dream Team-esque plot twist and admit that recently I haven’t been able to get enough of anything black and printed on paper! (cue the music that goes “Duh - Duh - DuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuHHHHH”)
It all started with the Christmas sales when our local Book Store, The Book Centre, had a big Sale section full of interesting looking books (but most importantly, cheap). Thanks to me having plenty of cash left over from Christmas I couldn’t stop myself from picking up a book, and another and, sure what the hell, another! Questions were raised over whether or not I’d ever be able to get through these books which could not be summarised under any particular genre - unless cheap is a book category these days!
The problem didn’t manifest itself for a while though. Like a tumour, it lurked underneath the surface for a while, waited until I was weak and then struck with no remorse! Wait a minute though! When was I weak? I’m glad you asked, may I add that you look ravishing today (but not you Jes :p ). Well about 8 weeks a go, my mother took the foolish decision of taking away my PC in order to make me study more. This made me extremely vulnerable! All of sudden my usual 6-11 slot was cruelly taken away from me and I urgently needed to find something else to occupy myself with. Then one night as I was staring into space wondering what the hell I could do (because I sure as hell wasn’t going to study) my eyes caught sight of “Catch 22″ a novel by Joseph Hellard that I had bought a few weeks earlier but like all other books I had bought since Christmas it had been thrown onto my shelf. At least it wasn’t a puppy anyway!
I decided that I may as well give it a try. Either that or watch more re-runs of The Simpsons on my barely tuned in 14″ TV which would have had me squinting at every moment trying to make out what was going on and squinting just isn’t on in this day and age. A proposed motion to have a 32″ Widescreen Plasma TV bought for my room was quickly shot down though so Catch-22 it would have to be! I was a bit sceptical at first over whether or not I would enjoy it as it did seem to be a bit heavy going. But all that changed once I actually began to read it. I am now convinced that Catch-22 is one of the best books ever written although coming from Adam “I’ve only ever read 10 books” Murphy, it doesn’t mean that much! My only advice to you is to buy the book. You really won’t regret it and the rewarding feeling you get once you finish it is well worth all those Math’s and History classes I dossed off so I could read it!
While I was still recovering from the rather satisfying high from reading Catch-22, I was told about a little known shop down the arse end of the Quay called The Book Stop where you can get second hand classics for around €3. “Hmmm” I thought to myself, “that’s cheap”. I like cheap. That lunchtime I was down there browsing through their vast collection of books and spent around €30 which wouldn’t have been so bad if it wasn’t for the 30 something books that were already on my to-do list! The next day I went down there again. And the next. Uh-oh!
Throughout my life I’ve always had an obessive personality and every now and again I would obsess over a certain thing, be it food, bands, sports or friends. After a while I’d get bored and just add whatever the thing was to my “been there, done that” list. On some occassions I even got the t-shirt! The PC is, I think, the only exception to that. It seems to be a continuous obsession and once that was taken away from me I desperately had to latch on to something. I latched onto books. I’ll admit that books are a better obsession to have than some of my previous ones such as McDonalds Chesseburgers and pissing in the sink (it was just so easy). My mother gives word that my PC will be coming back tomorrow and I wonder whether or not I’ll keep up reading considering my mother of all obsessions will have returned!
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