Memories

I went to my parents house the other day and started looking around my old room. While I was there I started looking through my old books, books I read when I was a teenager and wanted nothing more than to read fantasy and enter other worlds. I looked past the wonders of Paul Stewart's The Edge Chronicles, glanced over bad books I had reviewed on Bookgeeks.com, longed to read the Penguin Classics I had bought with the intention of reading, flicked through Harry Potter and Darren Shan and many other wonderful writers. And as I looked through them I remembered where I was at the time, what my life was like. 

I remember reading Darren Shan's Cirque Du Freak when I was holiday in Turkey with my parents. It was a slim novel and I read it in two days, immediately wanting to read the next novel. I picked up Perry Moore's Hero and recalled how I had stayed in my attic office, sprawled out on my sister's futon - I remember rearranging the office that day - and allowing the sun to come through the skylight as I spent the entire day reading it from cover to cover. 


Books - as you write them and read them - are like memory capsules. The minute you pick them up you are thrown into the memories that come with them. Inside the pages and the lines and the words are parts of your life and times you would want to forget or want to relive. While I was in the attic, surrounded by boxes of my papers and old notebooks I picked up a 'novel', for want of a better word, I wrote when I was fifteen. It was a post-apocalyptic novel entitled Shifter that I wrote when I was fifteen - influenced, mainly, by Steven Gould's Jumper. I remember writing it around the same time my prom was coming up and I was banging on the keyboard on a winter's night. I remember beginning the story around the same time my mother was calling me for dinner - which was annoying - and still writing it when I was introduced to The End of Mr. Y and The Gargoyle which my mum brought home from work with her one evening as I was writing said novel.


It's a wonderful thing to be able to open a book and not read the words but merely glance over them, see the black blur and recall the events of your life and the memories that are stored within the page.