For The Longest Time

Since I can remember I have had my nose in a book; learning to sound out the letters phonetically while my mother tried to hide her agitation after the fourth time I'd read the sentence just to get it right, falling in love with The Secret Garden as I tried to read along with my nan over her shoulder, wishing I was a wizard more and more with each page I delicately turned so as not to destroy them as I was so prone to do and now - devouring psychological police thrillers one day and coffee table fashion volumes the next.

I am a lover of literature. I fall in love with characters, with illustrations beneath words and with particular stories. Occasionally I fall in love with an author such as Fitzgerald, Chris Carter or John Green but that is becoming more and more rare as time goes by. I fell in love with Chuck Palahniuk the first time I read Fight Club and progressed more and more into his stories and words. I fell in love with J.K Rowling but more specifically, Harry Potter and it's such a fantastical concept to crave words but I do. I crave them like an addiction seeking out poems, prose, blog posts, articles, novels, tweets and occasionally I become so engaged that I fall like I do into a book and when I come out the other side I search for more to devour.

I enjoy the process of reading. For me it's sitting near an open window, even in winter, with a blanket, a mug of something warm and sweet and I just let myself go. Boyfriend has many a time come downstairs in search of me at 3am to find me so engrossed in something that I haven't even noticed him leaning in the doorway and he simply leaves without saying a word because, he gets it. He understands that I don't break my concentration from the story because at those quiet times, those stories are my reality. I'll often dream of characters I've read in books and wake up in awe of the fact that creations that came from someone else's mind has the ability to affect me in such a profound way. Characters have taught me about myself, life lessons and where I want to go; I hope that doesn't ever stop.

My love of reading has filtered down to my children who are quite often pulling on my skirt to sit on my lap and have me recite The Gruffalo which I can now do with my eyes closed. This is good. This means I don't have to focus and instead I can make it into performance art with individual voices for each character and suspense within the rhymes. We read every night and Layla reminds me that one day she will inherit all of my books and I won't have to read them to her because she'll be able to read them all by herself and go on adventures like I always said I had. The library of children's books is never-ending but we've come across some real gems that are huge hits by Julia Donaldson such as What The Ladybird Heard and The Princess and the Wizard that take pride of place on their centre book shelf.

One day they'll progress to Through The Looking Glass and I wonder if they'll be as terrified by The Jabberwocky as I was. They'll become Elizabeth Bennet even if just for a moment as they will romanticise the story of Romeo & Juliet even if it's not a tale to be romanticised. Maybe they'll have their own ways of reading - a ritual, as such - or maybe they'll grow to shun books in favour for something else that's exciting and new in the way my niece has now she has discovered films. Maybe they'll come back or maybe it'll never ever go away. There are so many possibilities and sometimes I forget they are individuals who will acquire their own tastes despite their mother. Boyfriend reads very slowly and rarely finishes a book preferring to read science magazines and fantasy books every now and again. They could turn out very similarly or not at all.

The biggest thing books have taught me is that while there are endings, you can revisit the stories again and again much alike memories. Nostalgia is a large theme in a lot of books and nostalgia is what keeps me hunting for more stories, desperate to reignite that feeling that sparked when I was a child sat on an overstuffed pillow next to my nan, sticky fingers on her shoulder as I was scanning The Secret Garden over her shoulder.