On Books

On Books

Books.
The word, as a child, used to scare me. It meant learning things I already knew, or learning things I had no interest in. That word was also a synonym of "novel", which was something that I'd never touched at the time. The first novel I read was Eragon. (By "first novel I read", I mean the first novel I've ever finished reading.) That book is the single most important possession I have at the moment. Well, right after the bible. But then again, religious scriptures and fantastic novels are two completely different things. I shouldn't really compare the two, and for their sake, I won't.

Books…

They have a peculliar smell. I love it when I pick up a new books and just thumb through the pages. I loev the smell; every time of paper has its own smell. I've learned to make the difference. Having a mother be your school's librarian does that to you sometimes.
The feeling of the paper is unique, or almost, to every book. It's a really interesting things. Some publishers go as far as to give the pages a rugged, torn-like edge for authenticity. The thickness is also almost always different. The Bible I own has a very thin kind of paper, whereas the diary I have has rugged edges and thick paper.
The covers. Oh! the variety of them! What makes the different isn't whether it's a hardback or a paperback. It's how bent and cracked the covers are by the use of the reader. I've only just begun to read the bible, and already the cover's all wrinkled and bent. I'm proud of that. It gives it an even older, rugged, loved look. My Eragon book, one of the few hardcovers I have, it stained and the fabric-like covering's worn and torn in places. My hardback cover of The Host is scribbled on: I removed the sleeve and wrote the title on the book itself, in jet black ink. I added a bunch of other little things, drew on the back. It became a one-of-a-kind book just by belonging to me. No one else is going to have that same book.

We haven't even gotten into the content yet. But I'm sure that, by now, you can all very clearly see how dear books are to me.

Content is a plus. Almost an unnecessary pleasure to the entire experience of purchasing a book. It's the pride of owning it, to say that, yes, I've tried reading it, that just brings the best out of me.
What's in a book?
Lives. Worlds. Minds. Everything is in a book. So many things are confined in so little pages! The only thing that can make it better is one thing. This one thing makes or breaks any and every author in the world:

Catharsis.

The phenomenon that describes the purging of emotions. You know that sigh that you breathe at the end of a really good movie? That feeling that just all the energy you had's been drained? That's it. That's a catharsis.

Even if I don't experience that while reading a book, the thrill of reading through it and knowing how it ends--and even, sometimes, NOT knowing how it ends!--is more than enough. I feel fulfilled just reading through a novel or a series. All books are precious little things. Sadly, even the Twilight books I own have a special place in my heart. New Moon is especially important: the evolution of all the character, the raw emotion--although perchance a little too raw--was very important at the time in my life when I read it. That same book also housed the many looseleaf papers that hold the words of my own novel-to-be. And so it's very important. It's dogeared and stained, and even torn in places! But I stil love it.

As I read it, a book slowly goes through a metamorphosis. It tranforms, shifts into something completely different: it becomes a part of me. I absorb that books at everything it is and means. At such an extent that I always end up writing in the style of the books I've read or am reading. Even my thoughts are altered by it!
To further explore the subject of transformation, let me compare it to a very odd, yet accurate!, image.

When I think about a book, I imagine myself in a blank space. And it's just me, nothing else. And I hold the book close to my chest, almost hugging it. And slowly, but surely, my body, my skin and chest, extend towards it. Filaments of flesh wrap around it. And then the book it slowly turned into a part of my as it's pulled into my body. However, it never is fully absorbed. It's always as though it's in the process of being taken in. It's never really completed. And so if I ever loose that book, it's like that piece of me is torn away. It would bleed and hurt and make me cry just as though I'd lost a limb.

Whether this is an extremely disturbing way to perceive such a mundane object may be open to discussion. I'm rather perplexed as to know if this is normal or not, myself. But this is how fictional worlds are for me. This is what they are TO me.

I believe that now's as good a time as any to cut things short. I would write more, oh how I would! But I think that I've written enough. Anything else would be extremely boring and redundant.

And so thank you for reading! Though, honestly, we both know you would've had more fun reading something else. Like, say, Eragon. Or maybe Septimus Heap. That's a god saga too…