The Half-Blood Bookworm

I have to admit something. I am slow reader though I love reading so much. It amazes me on how some people get to finish a Tagalog pocketbook in one seating or less than an hour while I endure it for a week (yes those thin pocketbooks authored by the likes of Gilda Olvidado, Lualhati Bautista and others whose names I have lost in my memory). Worst is if I get hold of an English novel (Sidney Sheldon, Danielle Steele [can’t withstand a chapter]).

I remember in my freshman in college. I borrowed John Grisham’s The Client and The Firm. I finished The Client after a month and The Firm, well I didn’t get to finish it after I reached second semester. Those books cost me frequent travels to the library and familiarized me with the Who’s Who is inside the then humid, dusty and ventilated Tobias Y. Enverga Memorial Library (which after four years was replaced by the highly sophisticated MSEUF Library Complex).

Reading and the habit of reading was embedded by my mother who happens to be a teacher. She used to make it a habit for me to read signs and billboards along highways while travelling back and forth Lucena from Manila. I know it was just a diversion to prevent me from vomiting during that 4-hour bus travel. I remember buses then were not air-conditioned yet and the smell of screeching tires makes my stomach churn and subsequently pukes everything what I have just ingested.

Finishing the Half-Blood Prince

It was of recent time, and yes I mean just this year that I escaped that dilemma of reading so slow-paced as if digesting every letter I meet. Truly J.K. Rowling has not stopped astonishing people with her storytelling. I have proven for a record of a week (for an English novel) that her books are one of those hard-to-put-downs. In between meals, laundry time, afternoon siestas that I can, indeed, finish the book.

Love. Apparate. Sectumsempra. New DA teacher and Magic Minister. Pensieve and recollected memories. More Magic. Treachery. Death. That would very well summarize this hard-to-put-down JK Rowling book. The sixth sequel saw the death of the Hogwarts Headmaster and the creeping victory of the Dark Lord and his minions the Death-Eaters. The novel has poured much of its pages on recollecting old memories in the pensieve and on the identity of the Half Blood Prince who happen to be the same wizard who would cast the Avada Kedavra spell on Dumbledore: Severus Snape. The same wizard Harry’s father has been not so friendly with. After reading it, I find it very interesting to pursue a copy of the Deathly Hollows, the last of Potter's adventure in magical world of Hogwarts.

The half-blood bookworm I maybe but with one of those Potter novels, I can never be a Mud blood no more (with my excuses to Ms Granger). Anyways add to that I have pursued the full volume of the Twilight Saga and the philosophy book Sophie’s World. So wish me luck as I accompany Sophie in her quest to know Socrates, Kierkegaard, Plato, and Sartre; and lovers vampire Edward Cullen and her muggle (hehehe) lover (what was her name again?).