My Grandfather's Books

Fancy curtains, fancy paintings, fancy vases, and fancy furniture, all around my grandparent’s house; however, the first thing someone notices when they enter the house is my grandfather in the living room reading a book every single time. He owns a giant 350+ book collection. The first room you see when you enter the house is his office, which walls are filled by books and only books. He owns books about everything, math, science, history, encyclopedias, journals, series, biographies, autobiographies, mystery, romance, health, religion and many more. Some books I can think of are at least 50 years old, others not more than one year old. No matter what, those books have always been there, and it seems that the collection won’t stop growing, since now at the age of 91, reading is my grandfather’s greatest hobby. I will never forget all the Sunday evenings with my cousins in which we played in my grandfather’s office. We used to grab all the books we could, considering many where on a high spot and we couldn’t reach them; however, since we were so small, only a few of them did the job. We used to arrange those books and pretended we were inside a fortress while some of my other cousins in the outside tried to enter, we defended our book fortress throwing books at them. This game lasted secretly a long time, until one day my sister accidentally broke my cousin's nose, so we were never allowed to play that game again. However, that’s not the only use we’ve given to the books, every first Sunday of the month, my grandfather makes us take one book home, and gives us exactly one month to read it and then makes us grab another one. Since we were little my wise grandfather has always thought me and his other grandsons the importance of reading. And he keeps reminding us every time he cans, as I remember, exactly one month ago, in the New Year’s celebration, he sat in the grandsons table and said “I am going to give you the same advice that I have always given to you. Never stop reading, never ever, reading is the most intelligent choice you can make. If I had never read a book I would’ve never found out that in the hand of the woman of the statue of liberty, 6 people can sit down”. My grandfather is a human encyclopedia. He knows about everything. He even knows how many people can sit down in the hand of the statue of liberty! He can talk to you about anything and always have something interesting to say, and whenever you ask, “How do you know so much about everything?” he simply replies, “because I read”.

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