As a young person I read from an early age and anyone who joins me on this blog knows that my love was always was and will be Jane Austen. However many years ago I used to purchase books for curiosity and perhaps to make me look slightly more intellectual than the perception of the romantic womans literature lover. So I bought Crime and Punishment and what a long hard slog that reading was. I was still in the family home. My room was pale blue and I spent nigh on two weeks of the long summer break, lounging on my fouton and reading this giant of a book. I went to the park, to town and probably even Mc Donalds in the vain hope that somehow this would improve my intellectual standing in teh eyes of my teenage perception of the world… If I am honest it was probably a dark and depressing and piece of literature that frankly demonstrated to me at an impressionable age that crime is depressing, stays with your conciene and is the stuff Communist literature nightmares are made of…
Never again, but I kept the book and I sill have it, as a badge of intellectualism… no for the sentimental reason, that I cannot part with those childhood memories wrapped on possessions, So many were stolen in England during the horrors that anything I could retain I did. Books were my most precious items and remain so to this day.