Books, Books, Books

Lately, I've been doing all of my reading on ebooks. In the last three months or so I've been able to finish some seven or eight books. Most of my reading I did on coffee breaks or at night before going to sleep. Breaks are convenient for guerilla reading - LOL. And since I have the eBooks on my phone, I need not keep the lights on at night and it doesn't bother my sleeping wife.

So far, I've read mostly spy novels. Actually it's more of a nostalgia trip rather than straightforward interest. See when I was in high-school, I started reading novels. Mostly it was old books from my sister's Hardy Boys collection and Stephen King Novels borrowed from a dear old friend. For a time, I was even fixated on George Stark, a character in The Dark Half. But then as I read on, my imagination got the better of me. I had to get away from the scary stuff so I had to stop reading them. Pet Sematary actually gave me a couple of weeks worth of nightmares.

During my college years, things took on complications. I had 2 sets of friends, one group around my age and another 10-15 years older than I was. It was from the younger set that I got the cutting edge and 'literary' stuff. I was not uncommon to have copies of Tolkien, the Philippine Collegian, Rolling Stone Magazine, literary reviews and post-grad journals strewn about in the desks of our office. I kept a desk at the school paper, a convenient tambayan. That office really was more of a collective fast-moving informal library than anything else.

From the older guys I got influenced into trying spy and suspense novels. The same kind of books my father read. Me and my father were going through a difficult time back then and having a neutral common interest helped my bridge differences. He favored Robert Ludlum most of all. My older friends on the other hand exposed me to other writers like John Le Carre, Sidney Sheldon, Mario Puzo, Michael Crichton, Tom Clancy and James Clavell.

Fast-forward to the future some ten odd years after I left college and here I am pre-occupied mostly with work, the kids and chores. I barely find time to blog any more and it makes me feel like I'm loosing something. My mind needs to churn, not with random worries, but with good reads to stir the imagination. So it's either I create content or consume it. With the limitations I have on time, I chose to read instead of write. eBooks were perfect because I could load them into my phone and read anywhere. So for the last few months I've managed to read the The Bourne Trilogy (The Bourne Identity, The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum). I've also managed to read the first three books of the Covert One Series: The Hades Factor, The Cassandra Compact and The Paris Option. I'm all set to read the last three books of both series but I think I need a break from the spy stuff, as I tweeted yesterday. So I picked up a book I bought a couple of weeks ago. I completely forgot about it, but found it on our bookshelf this morning. I'm going to start reading The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho today. This is going to be one sweet read :-)