Growing up, my mother would repeat time and time again the same mantra: “Books are our best friends.” I used to spend hours touching the books she kept on the lower shelves, so it made sense that she wanted me to believe that. It would be far more frustrating having to deal with a toddler who destroyed the books she collected than simply transforming me into a fellow bookworm. So, this introduction will very much be a representation of who I am through the books I read.
My mother would take me to bookstores and let me pick whatever books caught my attention. At ten, I developed a weird obsession with Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and a thirst for tragedy and love stories. I devoured the pages of Margaret George’s The Memoirs of Cleopatra, Susan Vreeland’s The Passion of Artemisia, and Carolly Erickson’s The Hidden Diary of Marie Antoinette. I was a historical fiction devotee, who only cared about stories focused on tragic women. But to my peers, I was just a weird kid.
During a particularly unforgiving hot summer, I had nothing new to read, so I wandered through my mother’s bookshelves. The Lisbon Book Fair was not until two weeks from then, and I was extremely bored and unwilling to venture into the outside world before nightfall. That’s how I came to meet Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. While their stories mainly starred men, I couldn’t help but feel embraced by the melancholy and dark humor present in all of them. The Idiot by Dostoyevsky became a favorite by the time I acquired the more age-appropriate Hunger Games trilogy—which I adored!
Reading transported me to different realities, allowing me to live in the shoes of others. Writing, on the other end, was where I found the comfort of transforming all of my wildest ideas into something palpable. I found myself writing about worlds I made up in my head and characters who struggled with the same things as me. In a way, it helped me comprehend the issues I was facing, taking away a lot of the anxiety of starting high school, university and, later, moving abroad.
Whenever I reminisce over my past lives, I tend to attach books to them. The first time I kissed a boy, I was in the middle of the first Twilight book. When I inevitably got my heart broken, I found myself re-reading chapters of Anna Karenina until I became sick of the book. The day I had a meltdown over my degree choice, I wallowed my way up to a mall bookstore and found The Bird’s Nest—this would kickstart an addiction to Shirley Jackson’s writing and a shrine to her work that has since been taken down due to my continuously moving to different places. The day I started to plan my move to Berlin from Lisbon, I had just finished The Master & Margarita—my favorite book of all time and completely unrelated to the moving decision as far as I’m aware.
Books gave me the gift of empathy. I understood how my lived reality was shaped by many factors I could not control—my skin tone, my passport, my education. As a firm believer in the human right to dignity, and that we should all be equal under the law, I was fuelled to use my research skills to improve the world. Working for Transparency International, an anti-corruption NGO, was extremely fulfilling due to my intrinsic need to help others. Contributing to Sundress Publication’s mission aligns this with my love for literature and the belief that books can make us better people.
Ines Pinto (she/her) is from a small beach town near Lisbon, Portugal. She decided to leave those shores behind as she moved around Europe, eventually completing her master’s degree in International Politics. She dreams of a fairer world, so she worked in the non-profit sector to call for the end of corruption and dirty money flows before moving to New York to start a brand new adventure. She is also the proud mother of a spoiled cat named Louis, a certified multilingual Eurovision fan, and a reader with an appreciation for all genres.
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