Books and Life

Copy of A good book

How about you? I can’t imagine life without reading and books. Not only do books take us travelling on our own personal magic carpet ride, they show us how to have a better life. Why make repeat the mistakes of those who have gone before us, when learning from their mistakes can save us the pain?

Stories and parables show us the consequences of our actions without sermons and lectures. If we listen and learn, we can improve the quality of our lives immeasurably.  There’s a reason children love stories, and children’s stories often have lessons embedded in them. And there’s a reason why so many of those stories endure, are read and reread, republished and rewritten, updated and made and remade into movies.

Words

Words in your soul

“You’ve got words in your soul”. A lovely way to describe the bibliophile.

One of my earliest memories is of getting some “pocket money”. We didn’t often get pocket money. Probably only three times in all my school years. I was one of seven with only one parent working. We lived 8 miles out of town on a farm. I was somewhere between five and eight years old because we left the farm at the end of grade three.

Anyway, this shilling (yes, it was the olden days before decimal currency) was a lot of money in those days, a veritable fortune! Well, I left the school grounds and went shopping. I spent all pocket money on, ta da, a Little Golden Book called “Out Of My Window”. It began with “Out of my window I can see, my Daddy coming home to me…”

Well, I went back to school and was showing my friends my brand new book, the first one I’d ever bought with ‘my own money’. So, what happened? Someone dropped their paddle pop (icecream) on my book and left a big juicy chocolate mark all over it. I was devastated, to say the least. I may even have shed a tear.

I remember my Mum from the time I could read, going crook on me for reading after lights out. I’d stand up beside the door and read using the light which came through the crack between the door and door jamb. If I’d had a torch it would have been under the blanket with me.

Reading was my escape, my solace, my friend, my way of living a million lives. Boarding school books, The Bobsey Twins, Enid Blyton – I read them all. Well, every book I could get my hands on. Every second day, if not every day, I went to the school library to change my books.

Things change, life goes on but books are a constant. These days I don’t get to read as often as I ‘d like to, but words and story are a big part of my life. Working as a writer and an editor is my dream job and I’d like to thank my clients for helping me make my dreams come true.

Books

Furniture

Some time ago, I read about someone who said that their idea of decorating was working out where to put the next bookcase. I identify completely! Don’t you?

We’ve officially run out of bookcases. Maybe I need one of these bookcases so that my house can be beautifully furnished. Do you think that I can hide behind it and catch up on my reading too? Nothing’s impossible but… sigh.

Words Have Wings

Words have wings

One of the things I love about reading and writing is where it can take you. I love that words have wings. They fly us outside our usual boundaries into the atmosphere, the stratosphere, to new places, some which exist and some which exist only in the imagination of the writer and the reader.

As writers, we can be anyone we want to, experience whatever we can imagine and learn from it as much as we want to extract. We can never imagine where those words will fly, who may read them and what they might do to the lives of others. What a privilege that is!

As readers, we can live more lives than anyone has time for, experience things we never imagined possible, and learn more than we ever expect. As a lifetime learner, I love this. And, it’s all because of words, the most wonderful world of words.