MemberJiraiya

Hello to whoever reads this! Happy Reading to you.

My love of reading sprang when I was 5 years old, and began with Indian comics that an aunt of mine used to sell. She had a dark, large room reserved for storing a lot of comics that were of cheap quality. I carried a wired bulb like a torch to maneuver my way around the piles of books. I often wonder if that setting - climbing loads of iron framing that held the books in the dark, feeling like an explorer - sparked a fierce love of books and of English language in particular.

The juxtaposition of light, darkness, of letters and their pages made an impression on the impressionable child that I was.

The next boost I received to my destiny of becoming a bookworm in this life had roots in my tuition. I remember my tutor, who had a class of packed students in his classroom, reading Beauty and the Beast to us. That was in 1988. I was spellbound by the aestheticism of the entire business. The yellow light of the room when it neared 6 P.M., the voice of the teacher (a very strict but gifted one with a slight tinge of cruelty), all made of me a reader of English books. The same teacher had a very small library of sorts in his garage, and I vividly remember discovering among other books, a very wonderful Fantasy book in French, which only decades later I knew to belonging to the series of C.S. Lewis's Narnia chronicles. The book in question was The Silver Chair.

Living on an isolated island starved me of literary content. I have recollections of staring at amazon.com's offerings in vain, because the books didn't ship to my country, and also I had no inkling of e-books. The latter format came to my aid. Long story short, in 2007, when working as a data entry clerk, I first got myself an internet connection, then bought a Kindle from ebay in 2011. E-books since then, have been my saviour.