Thanks for the memories - Karen Bush

Books do so many jobs - they educate, entertain, inspire, or offer you a place to escape to when you need it.  They can also be incredibly evocative: pick any title I've read, and it summons up in my mind's eye the time and place when I first read it:

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe: I'm behind the sofa in my great uncle's house in Belfast. It's dim and dusty there, but it's the only private place I can find to read in, where no-one can see me sobbing over Aslan's death.



My Friend Flicka: In my bunk bed, reading (after I was supposed to be asleep) by the dim light filtering in through the glass panel over the top of the bedroom door.



The Hobbit: Sprawled on my stomach on the dining room floor of my grandparents house on a blisteringly hot summer day, and trying to ignore the constant interruptions asking if I wouldn't rather go outside to play. (No! Of course not! Bilbo's trying to beat Gollum at riddles. Go away!)

The Dark is Rising: In bed and fully dressed because it is the warmest place to be - my unheated rented bedroom is so cold in the depths of a snowy winter that there is ice on the inside of the windows.

The White Dragon: It's 3am in the morning, in my stable-converted-into-a-bedroom at the riding school I work at, and I have to get up in four hours time to muck out, but I'm at a crucial point so I really can't turn out the light just yet ...






A Prayer for Owen Meany: Curled up on the sofa, three quarters of the way through and finding it impossible to put down, even though I have a bucket load of work to get done. And as for getting dinner ready, well, maybe my partner won't mind a takeaway. Again.

As well as adventure and information, each book gives me a link with my past, better than photographs even, as they bring back such vividly detailed memories of scents, sounds and feelings as well as of time and place.

Bookmarks it seems, aren't just devices used to keep your place in your current reading matter: they can literally be the books themselves, marking the pages of your life. And of course, this applies just as much to when writing a book as reading it ... 

What are your abiding book memories?

Every short story tells a story ... I remember the sweat and the tears which went into each and every one of the tales in The Great Rosette Robbery and other stories ... available HERE