How to... Be a bookworm

September 08, 2010 09:23 pm | Updated 09:24 pm IST - Chennai

Reading through the night and going to work / school half-asleep the next morning is a bookworm's badge of honour.

Reading through the night and going to work / school half-asleep the next morning is a bookworm's badge of honour.

You don't read books — you inhale them. Once you start reading, it's going to take a pretty earthshaking event (or really, really rotten writing) to make you stop before you get to the end. (Skipping to the last chapter and reading the ending is simply not an option, as any self-respecting bookworm knows).

Reading through the night and going to work / school bleary-eyed and half-asleep the next morning is a bookworm's badge of honour. And nothing, of course, is better than having a day all to yourself to just read, continuously and obsessively (family and friends know better than to try and come between you and your book on such a day).

Going to a library or a bookstore is both incredibly exciting and stressful to a bookworm. So much to read, and so little time… you usually end up cross-eyed after hours of non-stop browsing and in a state of frenzied despair over what books you should choose out of the hundreds calling out to you.

Simple pleasures that make a bookworm's day — that wonderful new-book smell (you've been known to stick your nose between the pages and breathe in blissfully), the joy of re-reading that well-thumbed old novel (in which you know every fold or tear of the pages), and that warm feeling you get when you see a stack of yet-to-be read books sitting invitingly on your bedside table…

Book listings, literary review columns and such may be just something to skim over for most; for the bookworm, they're the Holy Grail. If you find yourself constantly making mental wish-lists of what to read, and insist on lugging half-a-dozen heavy books with you, even on a trekking holiday (because you'll never get through your list otherwise!), you are firmly in book-geek territory.

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