In my father’s house, there are many books there. They live in my father’s library. There was Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, Isidore Okpewho’s The Last Duty, Wole Soyinka’s The Interpreters, and many other books by African authors too many to mention. The library also houses foreign authors like John Grisham, Jeffrey Archer, and William Shakespeare.
It was in this glorious space that I developed my love for words. I devoured some of the books at an early age. I honed my reading and writing skills. I didn’t know some of these books would come back to haunt me positively. I just read.
What’s more, my father never tire of filling his library with books. He bought books! He can spend his last penny on books.
In addition to books, my father’s library housed Tell, Newswatch and Time magazines. They were later bound in a red hardback. He loved to recite beautiful lines from Ogaga Ifowodu’s piece or Dele Giwa’s piece. The joy he derived form reciting those lines was beautiful to watch.
Even with the demands of his work, he would still find time in the small hours of the morning for reading some chapters from say a George Orwell’s 1984. This specific reading skill boosted his writing skill and, importantly, propelled his strongest mantra that “a man is not measured by his material possession but by his mental strength.”
The strength of thinking critically, the strength to engage in intellectual conversation, and the strength to carry out arduous mental tasks, my siblings and I developed from the library. My father’s library played its part in building complete beings.
Today, the library grows fat in reasonable proportions. To save the library from collapsing under the weight of books, some of the old magazines were thrown away and it now welcomes more managerial and motivational books. There are many authors in my father’s library, he argues with them and chats with them daily. But today, as I write this, the library might not get more physical books as he now built a digital library carried by Kindle. He buys more digital books.
Nevertheless, I praise my father’s library for the initial gift of exposure and escapism. A house without a library is what? I think every house deserves a library. The advantages outweigh the disadvantages. As I reminisce on my father’s library, I hold these to be fundamental truths: books help and that libraries in a house are as important as food in the house.
I am on twitter @moshoke
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