Books are the absolute best. They take you on a journey of emotions and imaginations in a million different ways. I am an avid book lover and a book collector. No amount of books is ever enough read or enough collected for me. I am kind of person who saves my lunch money to buy a new book. I am the kind of person who takes lone trips to book stores whenever I am sad or whenever I am happy or whenever there is free time. I strongly believe that I was quite lost in life until I found my love for books. There are a million perks to being an avid reader but not many people talk about the perils of it. And oh boy, there are some! Here, I talk about the main four menaces that I have had to deal with while I shower myself with the smell of new books and go on a journey of storytelling while my dog sleeps on my lap.
1. I ain’t got no MONEY!
Let me start with the Coriolanus Snow of the menaces – the evil with a capital ‘E’, the one behind most problems in the world – MONEY! You read a book, you like it. Then you move to another book, you like it too. Slowly, you start feeling the need to read more and more books. And if you are like me who does not like to borrow books and needs to feel the ownership towards the book whilst you read it, you NEED to buy the book. But there comes the problem. The Minister Snow of the real world, money. As a book lover and one of the unemployed youth among the 13.1 percent of the total unemployed population of the world,according to International Labor Organization, 2016 (mandatory citation because you must do it, it is basic manners) , I constantly face this peril where I want to buy a book when I can barely afford to buy myself a snack. So if you are a reader, and a voracious one at that who also LOVES collecting books, you get what I mean. Money is a bitch.
2. Books – Movies, what’s the difference, right?
Moving on to the second entry to the list of menaces of being a voracious reader, which is the most frustrating one – your favorite books turning into movies. Oh, the pain, the torture when you have to witness your favorite books being absolutely destroyed by the movies. The pain when the perfect and original book cover is replaced by the movie covers! The pain when the “movie-watchers” talk about how great the movie is when they haven’t even seen half of what there was in the books! But you can’t even not see the movie because you want to see how they illustrated the magical stories from the books to the movies and whether or not they match up to your expectations. But it never does! The books to movies illustration always suck. I stopped liking Shailene Woodly because she was in the debacle of the movie illustrations of my favorite book series – The Divergent Series. So you know the pain, it is real.
3. Please don’t hurt my books, humans!
You know how Arya Stark went through so much and developed a lot of trust issues, so much so that she had a hard time trusting her own sister? As a book lover, it happens to you. You develop a lot of trust issues. Why? – because people are mean! They borrow your books in a perfectly great condition. The books look like they have just been bought from a book store. But when they give it back, there are always numerous stains on the books as if they cooked their lunch on it or the pages are torn as if they fought the white-walkers and sometimes, they don’t even give the books back. But you can’t show your anger because people will think you are paranoid (I don’t really care what people think, so I show my anger hahaha). But yeah, this happens to you so many times that you stop trusting anyone, – even your parents for that matter. Because for book lovers, the world is like hunger games, if you want to save your books, you have to be careful about the alliances you make.
4. Oh, the horror of the final chapter!
If you love to read, you must be very well aware of the feeling you get at the end of every book. The void you feel when you finish the final chapter and all you are left with is the memory of the wonderful adventure that the book took you in. That is the fourth and final peril of being an avid reader. You don’t know what to do with your life after you finish your book. The time between the end of one book and the start of another is like the time between Christmas and New Year, you don’t know what to do and the feeling is very bad. Imagine that you read an amazing book that changed your life (Thinking of Tuesdays with Morrie when I imagine this), and there are a few pages remaining. The journey has been great but you also know that it is coming to an end, the feeling is the worst. I call for a group hug, fellow book lovers!
Even though I wrote all this about the hardships that a book lover faces, let me tell you, books will be your best friend for life! Take it from me, I don’t have best friends, and I don’t like human interaction that much, but books complete me. I love the smell of a new book, I love going on the journey that the author takes us in. But these days, people have stopped reading that much. People find it boring and as a book lover, it breaks my heart. So I encourage everyone to find a genre that they like and join in the book-love community for life.
