Writing books like reading them is tastier when done frequently and consistently. Reading and writing books are exercises. The more you engage with them, the easier and more enjoyable they get. The less so, the more dreaded they appear. I often jump, shake and dance to their tunes. The tunes, wonders, and melodies of a book aren’t things to be told about, they are beauties to behold and experience. I can’t count the times I have read something so sweet only to be drawn into animated dancing. Very energetic, and sweat-inducing dancing like one jumping to the drums that accompany Kigezi songs.
It baffles those who watch you and do not understand the inherent music in books. But those who understand will simply ask to be read the extract that got you dancing like the Jamaicans we watch in music videos.
I love conversing with books. I love underlining them here and shading them there. Sometimes I double underline phrases and paragraphs whose oratory or intellectual pregnancy stands towering like the Washington monument of DC. Other times I mark, in different colours, juxtaposing symbols and images: pages with episodes to remember forever.
Books are food for the heart, mind, and soul. They accompany you to dreamland, even on an empty stomach. They make you forget about eating, or when you should be eating because there is no better food for the mind than books.
When the mind is well fed, the stomach will rarely revolt. Some books smell so sweet, and are food indeed, such that apart from reading them, you want to keep smelling them right close to your nose.
There is more to books. They are a university. There is hardly any information on any subject that you can’t mine from their soil. And, like an ocean, you will draw all the intellectual water from them but they will never run dry or appear to lose anything: you pluck the knowledge without plucking the pages.
Like a good teacher, a book will never tire of you. You are always welcome. Like with a star lover, with books, you are always satisfied.
Books can make you wet, especially, if you read on wet subjects or read in the company of the one you dreamt about the previous night.
And of course, books are gold. Read them well. It will migrate from the loaded pages to your eager pocket, mobile or bank account. Rich guys continue romancing the sensitive parts of books long after school. The poor ones don’t even know how to tickle them. Their books retain their virginity.
But even if books don’t get you rich with money, they will enrich your life with a career. Amazon, booksellers, authors, teachers, and others will confirm this: books are loyal allies even to materially wealthy royals.
The wings of books spread out into all skies including the spiritual. Not only are thousands of books about heaven, but the road to heaven is also paved with books. The bible, for instance, is a passport to heaven.
The magnanimity of books lends itself even to those who don’t read them. Simply get one or two of them to impress him or her (the customer or the friend). Some officers have mastered the trick. They know that piling books upon the shelf to treat the eyes of the client can fortify one’s credentials.
It doesn’t matter your intentions, there will always be a book for you. Whatever your taste, there is a book for your appetite. There is simply no music that books do not play. Simply appear, hold, listen, dance, then squeeze! – you will be happy, and possibly wet.
Greatness relishes the company of books. It milks wisdom, energy, and life from the udder of books. Books are milky and meaty not just with business ideas or overflowing with torrents of inspiration, but they also serve the hot and saucy dishes of romance, poetry, and entertainment.
Some are great doctors prescribing medicine not just to the illness of the body but also to the ailments of the heart. Some books resemble that nurse with a radiating smile and tender touch that relieves you of pain without the intervention of a tired, formal and mean-looking physician.
Some are caves. Secure and secluded. They buffer you from the noises, distractions, and bruises of a rowdy and perturbing world.
Not once. Not twice but on innumerable occasions, books have served as the healthy and sterilized syringes that inject us with the quinine of idealism to neutralize the malaria of countless hurdles. We can never thank them enough.
I have seen toddlers open books. The mad hold them upside down. I have seen those, who, in perusing books, are subdued at the foothills of their climb: books reading sleeping people. Even cockroaches read the abandoned ones! So insanely beautiful are books that the mad, the asleep the illiterate, even cockroaches, intuitively tell that books are answers.
They are right. Is there a question in life to which books are not an answer? Ignorance, poverty, and diseases are the general ones but books answer more questions. Boredom, stress, anger, loneliness…all dissolve in its clear waters.
Like a ripe mango or a pineapple from Uganda, it is seldom justice to recount their sweetness. The best speech about a book is to hand you one, then, your tongue will drum to you best about the sweetness, beauty, and melody of books. It is through reading that the magic of books comes home. Books are the music of life, and the precious notes for your intellect, finances, spirit, and body.