A Story of Words

A Quick update on where I am in The Wise Man's Fear by Patrick Rothfuss, the second of The Kingkiller Chronicle.  The sequel to The Name of The Wind is equally brilliant, losing none of the first book charm to the second book doom that so many sequels of even the best variety often fall victim too.  I don't want to post spoilers, but the plot dost thicken, and I despise Ambrose viciously.  I'm on page 244 out of 1107, so I have a long trek ahead of me, but I look forward to all of it greatly.

It's hard to say where my story of books began.  Not with pictures, or even really being very good at reading, actually I needed special help in elementary school because I wasn't at grade level.  But I think the story begins with my sister.  Now, growing up, the main knowledge I had of my sister was that she had brown hair, glasses, wore really cool T-shirts, called me a bra when I was three (she said brat, I heard wrong) she loved to read, and wanted to be a writer.  Now, being the idolizing little sister that I was at the age of seven, I too wanted to have brown hair, glasses, really cool T-shirts, call people bras, love reading and be a writer, unless only one person can be a writer in which case I would just turn into a blob, this remains frighteningly accurate.

There weren't a huge number of children's books I can really remember loving.  Most of them seemed contrived, overly simple, and well, boring.  I remember reading picture books and simply not caring about all of the random children learning moral tales from the peanut butter the spilled.  Now, there were exceptions, I was a connoisseur of profound children's literature such as When You Give A Mouse A Cookie and The Very Hungry Caterpillar which I think we can all agree both hold more literary merit than The Scarlet Letter so I have no shame, I would still rather read either of those a million times that stare at one sentence Nathaniel Hawthorne stroked his mammoth of an ego while writing.  But I loved The Death Gate Cycle by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman and Dominic Deegan: Oracle for Hire by Mooki with a sincere passion that stays with me today.

Both of these series my sister began reading  to me in about the first or second grade, and they were my greatest loves.  I would love nothing more than to simply spend hours listening to the story of Haplo, an anti-hero if I've ever seen one and his dog, or rather the dog, while I sat on the floor wrapped in blankets simply staring at the plywood patterns of the bookshelves in her room, or coloring in squares of graph paper with markers.  Or reading a comic with sometimes poor art but a brilliant story about a grumpy seer who falls in love with a powerful yet suicidal sorceress named Luna with tusks that never let her feel beautiful.  These are bizarre stories, but they taught me more than diction, I learned to be a person from them, I learned to empathize with types of people that would never be a character in The Box Car Children or The Magic Tree House.  In a time where I was made of painful shyness and a weak will, stories and books at least began teaching me to love and admire and seek the personal strength I was lacking.

My story of books, no words, continues.  With a love for stories so profound I sometimes feel I am little but that love.  Grateful is too weak a word for what I feel towards my sister for not seeing a little curly-haired girl  and thinking "child", but seeing her sister instead and thinking "person", and upon thinking this, gave me the greatest food any person needs.  "Give a girl a book, and she'll read for a day.  Teach her to love words, and she'll have a passion for a lifetime."  Thanks is by no means enough, but I thank her none the less.