When I was a spring chicken one of my relations bought me an illustrated children's bible, and even though I wasn't fully able to make out the longer words, I did get the gist of most of the chapters.

I loved it, though not for its content, but for the illustrations which were lavishly stylised and appealing to a young mind.

I cherished that dog eared book, until one day I couldn't find it and my mom said she couldn't find it either, so that was, sadly, that.

It was one of those hardback, thousandth reprint classics. Call Of The Wild by Jack London. Luckily for my wildly hard to control attention span at the time was sated by a few illustrations peppered in to keep it at bay. It was bought at a Borders in a strip mall in the middle of nowhere, Tracy. I cracked it open about two hours after the mall closed, still sitting in one of the atria of the mall, where my parents were getting their hair done by a friend at a Regis salon. There were these giant black crickets that ventured out from any place you wouldn't expect something to crawl out of. The front cover was beautifully painted, with hues of red and blue from the sky to the snowy ground. At the time, I thought it was the longest book ever written, since it was over 100 pages.

I was so enthralled with it that I read it in class, and my teacher sent a note home with me, saying that I read too much. My dad gave me a whipping, and my mom just smiled at me and bought me another science fiction book. Thus began my foray into the wonderful world of aliens and wizards. (The book my mom gave me, and got me addicted to, was Animorphs. She would by me the next book whenever I did something good.)