October 9/2010/ Bangkok
It is raining outside. Millions of crystal drops of water kept falling from the vast gray surface above. From my small, tiled balcony, everything outside looks very gloomy. Staying inside a small cosy room is the best choice for my quiet Saturday. This kind of weather is great for "Romances".
Aha, now I get your attention( I keep my fingers cross). Let me be honest with you, my precious readers. My "Romances" is not worth a second for those who are already with your beloved boyfriend/girlfriend/couple. You who fit in such category can stop following this story this minute . No hard feeling from me. I promise.
For those who prefer to continue, I will later give you a list of romances. This list is for anyone who love reading romances, from medieval to futuristic and from street - to royal-living. I truly love romances. I have hundreds of romances on my book shelves. Some are stacked on the floor. I used to count to know how many romances I have. My last count was more than 500 books. That was more than 5 years ago and my gathering and buying still continues.
Reading romances is for fun. That's my first expectation. Generally, why read it if you don't find any entertainment in the stories. They are novels, not research or textbooks for your reports or sources for your PhD course in finance or physics. But I realized later that as I am not an English native speaker/user, romances did help me improve and understand English beyond textbooks or English classes. I thank my "romances" for that.
At my early days with romances, I bought a paperback romance with no more than 200 pages, including its covers and advertisement pages. It was a used book with traumatized look as I can see from its very worn covers and brown , mold-mixed paper. That ugly look didn't scare me at all ( for you can get it at 10 baht ( around 35 penny) with complete details of the story while you have to spend at least 200 baht for a new print).
That introduced a romance-less junior highschool student like me to a new world and that partly shaped my view, my understanding, my knowledge about people and the world beyond my small world.
At the beginning with that liitle book, it was not totally fun as I previously expected. I lost count for how many times I had to open my student dictionary to find the meanings of so many words I never heard or learned from my English class. Some words did not even appear in my dictionary. The grammar used in that novel was not exactly like that my English teachers taught me or what I read from textbooks. There were some incomplete sentences, some short phrases, and others strange forms . Those were real pains for a 12 years old Thai girl whose English was known only from her a few hours English classes weekly at a public school.
However, those difficulties were not influential enough to beat me out from my eagerness. I wanted to know how the story went, how the hero and the heroin met and fell in love with each other, and how all obstacles they encountered (most were actually quite senseless, but luckily I didn't realize at that time).
Those plots were absolutely tempting and they help me keep on reading with great efforts. The more I read those paperback, the easier I could understand unfamiliar vocabularies. I didn't have to open my dictionary as often as I first read. My imagination also got clearer , following each line the authors painted in their work. I felt what each character felt and even thought about how to get them out from the problems they faced.
Romances showed me that this world is different. The culture, the values, the tradition narrated in those books are not always like what I have been taught or believed in my society. Those books were products of the authors and the countries foreign to me, my culture, my beliefs and my background. Some values were actually opposite to mine or could be forbidden in my society. But they were well accepted and practiced in other societies. I also saw each character's thought and actions and witnessed how humans could be really good or truly bad to one another. All ideas did not suddenly pop up in my head like when we switched on a light bulb. It took years to absorb and gradually shaped my views that emerged in my tiny brain.
I am not smart and reading romances do not make me become genius. But those romances, most with non-sense plots, gave me a great deal of knowledge. Besides, my speed of reading was improved. I noticed that I finished reading texts in my textbooks faster than most of my friends and got key information better. I can spend hours reading with no agitation or restlessness. Time, people and surroundings faded while I was reading. My mind focused on the stories I read.
Romances didn't make me daydream to be like heroins in the stories. I became better aware that I would never copy some of their ideas and actions. Instead, I took them as examples to remind what I should do if I were in some similar, but more realistic, situations, such as I would be more careful with my belongings and my safety if I traveled by myself. I wish for no troubles in my real world. It was not worth to put myself at risk since there was no prince charming or millionnaire available in reality.
That was my "Romances".
There are more of romances, but I will tell you later in my next chapters.
So, Let's Get "Romances".
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