For the love of books

This week I was surprised to be nominated by, writer extraordinaire, Geoff Le Pard in a Five Photos Five Stories challenge. Geoff blogs at TanGental where he shares numerous and beautiful photos of his garden, family, travels and adventures. He writes an eclectic assortment of prose and poetry, memoir and fiction, with content both challenging and humorous. He also posts at the speed of light with at least one post each day. I can understand why the challenge would appeal to Geoff.

I’m not like that. I tend to stick to my routine of two posts each week and write mainly expository text about education with a response to a flash fiction prompt by Charli Mills thrown in. I rarely write explanations of or stories about photos and mostly use photos to support and add interest to the page. Why would Geoff nominate me?

Well it seems Geoff must have known something about me that I didn’t, as I have decided to throw caution to the wind and join in the challenge.

The rules of the Five Photos, Five Stories Challenge are:

1) Post a photo each day for five consecutive days.
2) Attach a story to the photo. It can be fiction, non-fiction, poetry, or a short paragraph. It’s entirely up to the individual.
3) Nominate another blogger to carry on the challenge. Your nominee is free to accept or decline the invitation. This is fun, not a command performance!

For my first photo I have chosen, and you won’t be surprised, books:

These are just a few of my favourites. As you can see I have chosen a range including picture books and chapter books for children and both fiction and non-fiction titles for adults. There are others that should have been there but I could not fit my entire collection into one photo!

Books have always been an important part of my life and I think a love of reading is one of life’s greatest pleasures. My love of books and reading is one of the reasons, if not THE reason I feel so passionately about education and the teaching of literacy. Sharing a learner’s excitement at becoming literate is both an honour and a joy. I have been privileged to share that excitement with many children during my teaching career, and of course with my own two children who both learned to read well before starting school.

I have written about the importance of reading many times before, including here, here, and here.

For this post, and for this photo, I will share ten totally random recollections of books and reading from my younger years.

I remember:

• books as gifts for Christmas and birthdays
• an expedition to the council library, a six-kilometre walk there and back, each Saturday afternoon for an armful of books to read during the week
• being deaf to the world when totally absorbed in a book for hours on end (particularly so when there were jobs to be done)
• the eagerness of wanting to get to the end of a book and the sadness and reaching the last page
• the excitement of finding the next book in a series or by a favourite author
• marvelling at words and phrases for the imagery or feelings they evoked
• enjoying an author’s style and trying to emulate it by writing and writing and writing, and wishing to one day be an author too
• the smell of new books
• tracing the embossed lettering on the hardcover when the jacket was removed
• being fiercely protective of my books and having a great dislike of seeing them torn or marked
• the joy of ownership

And now I nominate the lovely Michelle James who blogs at Book Chat to take up this challenge if she so wishes. Her love of books is at least as great as my own!

 

Thank you for reading. I appreciate your feedback. Please share your thoughts about any aspect of this post.