Life Hack: Books

I absolutely love owning things: from designer bags to extracted molars. All types of things. They can be gifted, inherited, or bought. I only keep things that bring me joy though, in case St. Marie Kondo sees this post.

Maybe that’s why I love books or the mere act of buying and owning books. It’s like having something with a readily attached [hi]story. Like treasure boxes or old lockets.

Like most teenage bibliophiles, half the books I’ve bought in my adult years were left unread. Yet, I keep buying more. It’s addictive. It’s a whole different hobby from reading itself.

And like most book whores, we cover them in plastic, protect the edges from damage and keep them on shelves as expensive as our own closets. Which is not the whole point of books. Books are meant to be read, their spines bent, its pages slightly torn and highlighted, underlined, connoted, passed on from one person to another; to travel for as long as they can.

I have often thought that I failed as a reader, not having finished one book in a couple of years. I think I’ve failed more the sixteen-year-old me, who wanted all the books but did not have the money to buy them. She would read a book for two-three days and then another one for three days, and then another one, and another one…

And now I’m staring at my collection of books, admiring their scents of old vanilla and moss, giddy like a teenage schoolgirl staring at a matinee idol’s wallet-sized photograph, and just wanting to read and read and read. I guess I’ve gotten used to the fact that I wouldn’t be able to read again. However, it takes only one story, I’ve heard, to get the gears moving. To get the teenage bibliophile’s blood boiling again.

To be honest, when I started this post, I wasn’t reading anything. However, recently I finished Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five and better even, re-read it. Now I’m reading Neil Gaiman’s Smoke and Mirrors and I’ve read three stories so far. So I guess to jumpstart a dead reader is to make him or her write about it.

Please pass this on to every person who has long stopped reading and let me know if it worked. It’s a win-win either way: if they don’t start reading yet, the person just became a writer, if they did, they’re both a writer and a reader. Mic. Drop.