My Reads: The Best of Me by Nicholas Sparks
The time I realized that I do have this innate zeal for the written, as much as my love for writing, I swore to myself never to box in books written by specific novelists or writers and just focus on the contents, subjects and stories themselves. And I did read without getting to know the minds behind the titles. I praised some books, be disappointed by others and was indifferent to a few for the stories themselves. I did not want to be awed by some specific names after reading their bests only to be drastically disappointed with their few badly written releases. But then, I came to meet THE Mr. Sparks in the form of a 2nd hand (God knows how many hands it had passed through) paperback I picked up for Php 20.00, along with other few finds in a garage sale along Colon Street way back 1997 while killing off boring free hours during freshman college. That book had a printed image of an old colonial house porch overlooking a vast plantation. I read it overnight and I swore after I finished it that it’s going to haunt me for a long time. I guiltily wished that someday, it’d be turned into a movie because I thought the love story I just read deserves to be told to a wider audience knowing only a few heaps would choose to read. I did not know back then that that book was the beginning of a man’s feat on a genre not many writers would choose to dwell on. And yes, the novel was adapted into film many years after (2004) which ultimately became a classic to most women. The Notebook became my first favorite novel by Nicholas Sparks and ended my thoughts, well just most of the time, that I can’t have favorite authors.
