Worlds in Ink

I love the smell of books. I love to flip through the pages and stare at the words someone else has created. I love reading the excerpts on the front flap and back cover and thinking about how antagonizingly interesting they are. I love listening to the pages turn, and I love staring at the cover and thinking about how that cover relates to the book. I have a love affair with books, like Leisel Meminger in The Book Thief. (Sorry, just finished it a few days ago. The story's still stuck in my head.) Sometimes it's enough that I don't want to read the book—just stare at the cover, and admire the words without scanning them.

Of course, I wouldn't resort to stealing them—no matter how tempting it might be. It's so much fun to imagine the day that we'll walk into a bookstore and see our own titles sitting on the shelf, waiting for someone else with a love affair with books to pick it up and open the book just to hear the pages turn and gaze at the cover like a lost lover. There's been times I'll hold a book upside-down so I don't recognize the text and wonder if that font might be the one for my book.

A fantasy shared by all writers, right? I hope so...! Books can be so terribly distracting, so gratefully distracting. That's the magic of it. Knowledge stored within adventure of the eyes, emotion stored within ink. Love, hate, agony, curiosity, anxiety, naivety—the world is no stranger to them. But we love books for that very reason. We can experience that hate, love, and agony through pages. We get to experience it through someone else's eyes, especially if it's too much for us to handle.

Books are a godsend. For some reason this just came into my mind, something I've known all-too-well since the third grade. But it was just a chiming musical note today. I sat in my dad's chair (yes, we classify our home's chairs!) and stared at the book I was reading, and thought, "Books are great."

It just suddenly seemed like no one appreciates that gift as much as they should. I know that not everyone cares to read, but a lot of people I know don't seem to give it a chance. Let me stop before I turn this into a sob story. It was just something I wanted to get off my chest. I have a book sitting next to me right now. I like that, too. It's like having a whole cast of people sitting next to you, whispering to you and begging you to read them. Back to the terribly distracting!

It's just a sensation that I love, and I thought I would share it. Brief, but I like to jam a lot into something small. Bad habit... or good? Who knows? That's the magic of words, writing, and books in general. To be truthful, for writing, anything goes. Create a world out of words and nurture it. Nurture it until it blossoms from an infant to an adult that can hold out on their own and influence the entire world.

---

Listening to: Driving All Night - X-Ray Dog
Reading: Revolution - Jennifer Donnelly
Quote: "Even a genius cannot change the world alone. It isn't for us to change the world. We can only aid that process." — L (Ryuzaki) / L: change the WorLd / "M"