New SAT Reading Practice Test 9

This passage is from Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Angel’s Game. ©2008 by Dragonworks, S.L. Translation ©2009 by Lucia Graves. The narrator, a writer, recalls his childhood in early twentieth-century Barcelona.

Even then my only friends were made of paper
and ink. At school I had learned to read and write
long before the other children. Where my school
friends saw notches of ink on incomprehensible
5 pages, I saw light, streets, and people. Words and the
mystery of their hidden science fascinated me, and I
saw in them a key with which I could unlock a
boundless world, a safe haven from that home, those
streets, and those troubled days in which even I
10 could sense that only a limited fortune awaited me.
My father didn’t like to see books in the house.
There was something about them—apart from the
letters he could not decipher—that offended him.
He used to tell me that as soon as I was ten he would
15 send me off to work and that I’d better get rid of all
my scatterbrained ideas if I didn’t want to end up a
loser, a nobody. I used to hide my books under the
mattress and wait for him to go out or fall asleep so
that I could read. Once he caught me reading at night
20 and flew into a rage. He tore the book from my
hands and flung it out of the window.
“If I catch you wasting electricity again, reading
all this nonsense, you’ll be sorry.”
My father was not a miser and, despite the
25 hardships we suffered, whenever he could he gave me
a few coins so that I could buy myself some treats like
the other children. He was convinced that I spent
them on licorice sticks, sunflower seeds, or sweets,
but I would keep them in a coffee tin under the bed,
30 and when I’d collected four or five reales I’d secretly
rush out to buy myself a book.
My favorite place in the whole city was the
Sempere & Sons bookshop on Calle Santa Ana. It
smelled of old paper and dust and it was my
35 sanctuary, my refuge. The bookseller would let me sit
on a chair in a corner and read any book I liked to
my heart’s content. He hardly ever allowed me to pay
for the books he placed in my hands, but when he
wasn’t looking I’d leave the coins I’d managed to
40 collect on the counter before I left. It was only small
change—if I’d had to buy a book with that pittance, I
would probably have been able to afford only a
booklet of cigarette papers. When it was time for me
to leave, I would do so dragging my feet, a weight on
45 my soul. If it had been up to me, I would have stayed
there forever.
One Christmas Sempere gave me the best gift I
have ever received. It was an old volume, read and
experienced to the full.
50 “Great Expectations, by Charles Dickens,” I read
on the cover.
I was aware that Sempere knew a few authors who
frequented his establishment and, judging by the care
with which he handled the volume, I thought
55 perhaps this Mr. Dickens was one of them.
“A friend of yours?”
“A lifelong friend. And from now on, he’s your
friend too.”
That afternoon I took my new friend home,
60 hidden under my clothes so that my father wouldn’t
see it. It was a rainy winter, with days as gray as lead,
and I read Great Expectations about nine times,
partly because I had no other book at hand, partly
because I did not think there could be a better one in
65 the whole world and I was beginning to suspect that
Mr. Dickens had written it just for me. Soon I was
convinced that I didn’t want to do anything else in
life but learn to do what Mr. Dickens had done.