It All Began with a Book Fair in 2nd Grade | by WillowFaye | Sep, 2025
I’ve loved books for as long as I can remember. When I was very young, I didn’t quite know what drew me to them — maybe the smell of freshly bought pages, the glossy covers, or the colorful pictures inside. But holding a book always filled me with a quiet joy.
I still remember the very first time I visited a book fair in 2nd grade. It was organized by our school every year, and for me, it felt like stepping into a wonderland. Everywhere I looked, there were books with bright covers — pink, blue, red, white, black, and green. Each one seemed to call me closer.
Of course, I chose the ones with pictures and cartoons. The very first book I bought was Geronimo Stilton. Its cover showed a mouse dressed like a gentleman in trousers and a coat. When I told my parents I wanted to buy “a book with a mouse on the cover,” my father laughed, but he still handed me the money. That day, I proudly walked away with not one but two Geronimo Stilton books — The Way of the Samurai and Valentine’s Day Disaster. The next year at the fair, I bought another Geronimo Stilton book, and by then, my father must have been secretly amused or maybe a little tired of my obsession with “mouse books.”
So the year after that, he decided to surprise me. Instead of cartoon-filled stories, he bought me two very different books — Heidi and Indian Folktales. They had no pictures at all. I was so disappointed that I let them sit untouched on my shelf for more than a year. But one day, out of curiosity, I picked one up. I don’t remember which one it was, but I do remember what I felt — I was captivated. I couldn’t believe that books without colorful covers or illustrations could be so interesting.
That was the turning point. From then on, my hunger for reading only grew. I began borrowing books from the library, reading them through the week, and eagerly returning for more. Slowly, reading became not just a hobby, but a habit woven into my everyday life.
Years passed, and I moved away from my hometown, but the habit never left me. Even today, I continue to collect books from different genres, each one carrying a piece of my journey as a reader. And still, whenever I buy a new one, I feel the same joy I once felt as a little girl clutching her very first “mouse book.”
