Saturday, March 7, 2020

Book Blogger Hop March 6th - March 12th: "344 Questions: The Creative Person's Do-It-Yourself Guide to Insight, Survival, and Artistic Fulfillment" Is a Book by Stefan G. Bucher


Jen at Crazy for Books restarted her weekly Book Blogger Hop to help book bloggers connect with one another, but then couldn't continue, so she handed the hosting responsibilities off to Ramblings of a Coffee Addicted Writer. The only requirements to participate in the Hop are to write and link a post answering the weekly question and then visit other blogs that are also participating to see if you like their blog and would like to follow them.

This week Billy asks: When did you first know you're truly a bookworm? Did you lose sleep over a novel?

I think that the moment I was transformed into a bookworm was when my family moved to Tanzania when I was nine. I was a reader before then - I learned to read early, and I was always interested in books, but when we moved to Tanzania, I was cut off from most other forms of entertainment. There were no television channels, and the radio only broadcast in Swahili, a language of which I could barely speak more than a handful of words. The only thing I was left with was the collection of books my parents provided for me. I had a collection of flip books called the "Companion Library" that included a whole bunch of works of classic literature that were considered suitable for young readers - Call of the Wild, Huckleberry Finn, Tom Sawyer, Little Women, Little Men, Robinson Crusoe, Swiss Family Robinson, Toby Tyler, Heidi, 1,001 Nights, Grimm's Fairy Tales, Gulliver's Travels, and so on. I started at one end of the bookshelf and worked my way to the other. Then I started on the other books that I had available to me such as The Pink Motel and Castaways in Lilliput.

When I was in Tanzania, I read The Hobbit for the first time. I was aware of the story before I read the book: I had seen the Rankin-Bass animated adaptation and I had an album made from that adaptation narrated by John Huston. I had never read the actual book though, so one summer night between my fourth and fifth grade year, I read the book, staying up all night to do so. That was the summer I turned into a serious fantasy and science fiction fan. I also recall staying up into the wee hours of the morning reading Samuel R. Delany's Nova, and reading the Silmarillion during a long plane ride.

In short, moving to Africa turned me into a bookworm.


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