.once.upon.a.time.

before i loved books, i loved reading.
i grew up with books around. they were all over the house. we had books way older than me. but i never liked them. i grew up believing each house had gazillion issues of reader's digest. i never enjoyed them though until high school. i always enjoyed reading/browsing all sorts of magazines- mod, women's today, nat geo, highlights, arts & crafts mags, local comics, and "song hits".

i once hated a book just because it was the most predictable gift i received. case in point: one christmas-party planning in grade school, our teacher asked us if we wanted to have an exchange-gift system or to have our parents give us gifts. of course, my classmates chose the latter. i hated it because i knew what i was gonna receive. haha. i even saw the gift before it was wrapped. it was a pink activity book with a clown on the cover.

i only loved books when i met sidney sheldon.

for me, reading was synonymous to magazines or, at least, to thin materials. reading was never about books or, at least, those thick ones. the mere image of a thick book bored me. that's why i've always been grateful to sidney sheldon for making me read books.

before i loved short stories, i loved reading.
for a time, i hated reading short stories. i never finished one. the thought of them being short bored me. there even came a time when i only wanted to read thick books.  that's why i've always been grateful to manuel arguilla for making me read short stories again.

before i knew i loved reading, i loved reading.
before i watched fairy tales, i read them first. before i read anything, i read fables first. i was all along reading books with a compilation of short stories for children. how could i forget?! children books were the kind of books i never got tired of browsing. children stories were the kind of stories i never got tired of reading over and over again. it must be because of the drawings because, until now, i still remember them vividly. shame on me i realized this just now. maybe because when i was reading them, i didn't know i was reading. it wasn't a chore. it wasn't a responsibility. it was simply being a child. =)

"My Dear Lucy,
 I wrote this story for you, but when I began it I had not realized that girls grow quicker than books. As a result you are already too old for fairy tales, and by the time it is printed and bound you will be older still. But some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again." - The Chronicles of Narnia | C.S. Lewis

w.t.

my favorite short stories are Hans Christian Andersen's The Little Match Girl, Claire Huchet Bishop's The Five Chinese Brothers, Diane Wolkstein's White Wave: A Chinese Tale, and Kurt Vonnegut's Where I Live and A Walk to Forever.

w.w.t.

my first encounter with food was in Goldilocks; with architecture in There was an Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe and Three Little Pigs; with plants in Jack and the Beanstalk; with animals in The Hare and the Porcupine; and with a fairy tale in Beauty and the Beast.

w.w.w.t.

i need to find a copy of Hermann Hesse's The Complete Fairy Tales of Hermann Hesse soon!