FIRST ACTIVITY

Sure!. Reading is an important thing in my life since I was a eight-year-old child, maybe as important to me as listening to music. I haven't got just one special book in my life, there are lots of "special" books for me. I love comics, especially the Belgian School' cartoonists and of course Hergé and the whole Tintin collection. I read a Tintin book for the first time at my cousin Louis' home forty five years ago and I liked it so much that everytime I went there, when all the family was sitting having lunch, I ate as quickly to run upstairs and start reading again and again, "The Seven Crystal Balls", "Tintin and the Temple of the Sun", "Tintin in Tibet" and over all "The Castafiore's Emerald". "The Castafiore's Emerald" is a different Tintin book. It tells a story without journeys all over the world, without evil scientists or slave sellers but there, in it, they are all these incredible characters : Captain Haddock, Tornasol, the

twin cops Hernández and Fernández, the shouter soprano Castafiore, all of them  and also one little robber with wings and a mirror of the post-war Belgian societe. I might say that this kind of drawings and the way to tell stories from the Belgian cartoonists are possibly one of my favourites readings, but not the only one.

By Juan Ramón García del Río.