Like writing, reading is a protest against the insufficiencies of life. Mario Vargas Llosa
I have always loved books . Not casually , not occasionally ; but with something close to devotion . Since my tender age , books have had a strange pull on me . Not just intellectual , not just aesthetic , almost spiritual . There was something in the weight of them , the silence they carried , the promise that somewhere inside, a sentence might change the way I see the world . I didn’t just read books. I felt them… As I grew older , this attachment turned into something more deliberate . I began to build my own library, in fact I built libraries wherever I settle . Wherever I went, I carried that impulse with me . When life was unstable, books were constant . When I became more sedentary , they began to accumulate , quietly at first , then insistently . Shelves filled up . Then , new shelves appeared . And then, corners of rooms started to transform . But what I remember most is not just the books themselves . I remember how each one arrived . I can almost recall: * The first time ...