Short answer: it’s because I grew up poor in a 3rd world country and the idea of “too many books” was like a distant dream.
Long answer…my parents were practical readers: engineering and software textbooks comprised of about 80% of the reading material in our house (two whole bookcases took up an entire wall of the living room, which was roughly about as wide as the couch you can see in the picture there). I think my mom may have read Sidney Sheldon books in her youth, but that was it. I was the only one who really loved stories in my family.
My parents couldn’t afford to buy “new releases” or anything like that. I’ll sometimes get second hand books, but those were a bit expensive too, even at only about $3-4 each. There wasn’t a used bookstore in the mall we went to (which was also where we did groceries), so I’d just wander around the book aisle, mentally keeping track of book prices in the off chance my parents might offer to buy me one. I think I always got a limit of 100 or 200 pesos (depending on whether a parent is jobless or not). The majority of kids’ books were around the 500 peso range, all the way up to the thousands for newly released hardcovers. Too expensive for entertainment.
The only books that usually fell under those parameters were classic novels (or, to be precise, classic kids’ abridged novels). So that was the bulk of my reading material. Over the years, I was able to gather Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women and its sequels, as well as LM Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables series. I was also a fan of Jack London’s books and I had The Call of the Wild and White Fang in my little collection, along with Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Lots of classics, lots of animal novels. These were often massively discounted.
And I re-read these because I didn’t have anything else, and they call the security guard if you stay too long in one aisle or open up the plastic wrapping in most of the newer novels (yes they cover most of that shit). Ever been eight years old and yelled out of a bookstore because you were reading too long? I grew to just love digesting prose and going through them over and over again.
My dad once told me about what a library was. They had them in Manila–I just wasn’t sure where or how you were supposed to get a subscription. Even if it didn’t cost money (I’m sure it did, though), just getting to places could get very expensive if you didn’t have a car. Which we didn’t, so that wasn’t an option.
When we got to Canada and I got my first library card I was like:
And basically chewed through the animal fantasy, classics, and then later, fantasy aisles like there was no tomorrow.
But that’s a story for another day.
