SEC-S15W3: My Favorite Book

^{"Who Killed Marilyn Monroe, my favorite book, designed with Canva}

BOOKS!

You can either hate them or you can love them.

I must say that I never thought I would say that I hate a book. January 2024, and it was a first for me.
If you have covered books with decifix (self-adhesive cover) before, I am sure you will know what I am talking about. You know those “peel and stick” covering.

My stepson had 32 textbooks, scribblers, and files I had to cover this year for school. It was a total shocker for me. I had them all packed out on the dining room table. Each morning I had to pass them to get to the kitchen, and each morning I was hoping to see the task completed, but it did not happen. No fairies are living in this house.

Eventually, I had to give in. I sat myself in front of the table and started. First the scribblers, then the files, and eventually the textbooks. Although it was not only a daunting but also a tiring task, I smiled when I only had one more to cover.

Then it all went wrong. It might have been remarkably easy to cut and apply, but, heaven knows, there was no brilliant end result. Those bubbling spots would just not go away, despite my best attempts. Remarkably, after a long battle, I got it off with the book still intact.

It was time for my second approach. Again, I just could not get it on smoothly. In the end, red in the face, I had to admit defeat. I just got up and walked away, thinking, I hate books!

My mom used to say that there were two things I could do before I started to walk. One was dancing, and the other was reading.
Growing up, she knew too well that if she didn’t see or hear me, I would be in my room reading. What would I read? Anything. Yip, whatever I could lay my hands on, from comics to recipe books, the Bible, Mills & Boons, historical fiction, and the list goes on.

One parent’s night, when my daughter was in junior phase, the teacher showed me what she wrote in her book when she had to make a sentence with the word “reading.”
I cannot remember the exact words, but it was something like, “My mother loves reading so much that she even reads the labels on the shampoo bottles.”

I love reading! I definitely love books more than I hate them.

Now, on to my favorite book of the hundreds of books I have.

I once had to attend a business meeting in Durban, one of the big cities in South Africa. It is only a 50-minute flight from Johannesburg, with the result that I flew in and out the same day.
After the meeting, walking to the rental car, I walked past a bookstore that had a huge sale. I just had to pop in and started browsing through all the books. I was so scared that I was going to miss my flight that I eventually just grabbed some books. Some? No, it was a lot of books. I even had to shop for a bag to pack all the books in, as the shopping bags from the store were way too small.

When I got home that evening, the first thing I did was have a look at all the books I had grabbed. There was this one book, “Who Killed Marilyn Monroe?” that caught my attention.
Heaven knows it was not the kind of book I would normally buy. The last thing I wanted to read about was who killed Marilyn.

As I read them one by one, poor “Marilyn” was always left behind in the bag until the day that I had no more books to read. And then poor Marilyn changed her status from “not to read” to “my most loved book.”

Marilyn Monroe, Clark Gable, Humphrey Bogart, and Errol Flynn were not the names of the famous movie stars, but the names of donkeys! Best of all, Marilyn Monroe was the name of a male donkey. Poor Marilyn was killed, and the help of PI Grace Smith was called upon to help solve the murder.
The owner of the donkeys lived in a seaside town where he used the donkeys to give the children free rides, putting smiles on their faces.

It is a light-reading book written in a surprisingly facetious manner, and believe me, it's a book you don’t want to put down until you’ve read the last word.

You can put the award-winning “Long Walk to Freedom,” the autobiography of Nelson Mandela, which I have read twice, next to Marilyn, and I will still pick it.

Marilyn is still neatly packed away and I cannot wait to bring her "home" once we've finished our building.

I have learned a valuable lesson in life from reading this book, and that is to never judge a book by its cover. Words that are so true when it also comes to us as humans. Don’t judge people; get to know them, and then you judge. You will be surprised!

I’m lucky; I wrote a book, “How you can do it too” that was successfully published and made available in all the major bookstores in South Africa.

Subsequently, I wrote five more books. Books that will never be published as my laptop with my external backup drive were stolen out of my car years ago. An episode that left me defeated more than how I felt when I battled covering that textbook.

In fact, it happened on October 10, 2012, and after all these years, I still have the SMS stored on my phone.

Will I write a book again? I don’t think so, but who knows? I might just start writing when I have more time on hand.

What will I write about? Africa! I would love to travel to all the countries in Africa and then write an informative traveler’s guide for each one. Yes, adventure it will be.

I might just call it “A Guide Not to Kill Africa, Edition 1: South Africa”

The end!

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