Books that changed me – Chances

One of the books that changed me was a Jackie Collins novel Chances. In Croatian translation the title is “Jače od grijeha”. This loosely translates to “Stronger/Harder than sin”. This is a soap opera chick lit book with some steamy sex on the side.

But first let me tell you that there is a long story about this book. I must mention that I was in high school and I got this book from a friend who supposedly stole it from the library. Together with my two friends I passed this book and hid it as boys would treat their porn stash. We used to read the more juicy bits out loud. This was our porn book!

I must warn you all that this was before the age of Internet in the country that just got out of being in war.

All that being said this book is not your average teenager delinquent reading material (if there is such a thing). It was a hardcover chubby with 781 pages.

That’s SEVEN HUNDRED AND EIGHTY ONE PAGES!

It looked like this but our copy was much more frayed from the constant reading and it was missing it’s spine cover. You could see the binding and the way pages were sewn together. It is only while I was searching for the pictures of this edition did I see that it used to come with a jacket. A weird one at that!

Now that you are all properly interested and confused let me tell you a bit on the story or at least the way we saw it.

It is one of those soap opera material stories with all the elements that make it last for hundreds of episodes and make the general population love and hate it’s characters with equal fervor.

This saga about Santangelo family starts with a main character Gino. Later on the books introduce his daughter- badass character Lucky. The rest of the books in this series I did not read.

Some browsing trough the Goodreads reviews proved that most readers get to this book in their high school years and treat it  the same way we did – as contraband!

Whatever the case may be this book still holds a record for me as a book with 781 pages I read trough in three days! I even took her to the bathroom with me and barely slept!

So whats your twisted bookish blast from the past?