The smell you get when you open a book is perhaps one of the strongest pheromones for all bookworms like me. Engrossed in a book in your comfy chair with a sweater on, sipping on hot chocolate when it’s raining outside is the ultimate utopia. The reason why people read books can be varied. Be it for knowledge and information about science, technology, history, or improving your language skills or just escaping the world for a moment or two. Your reasons need not be justified.
When you read a book, you travel to a world of imagination and creativity, entirely your own. The characters and their landscape might be given, but your imagination fills the colours and allows you to bring that story to life. Sometimes when the characters are not given a description, you are free to imagine whatever you want. Everything is in your control.
When I’m reading a book, I find myself lost in its pages. Not worried about my past or future. The moments the characters are living, are my moments. I am present there in flesh and blood. Be it helping Harry Potter finding Horcruxes, be it solving clues with Robert Langdon, be it fighting alongside Percy Jackson, I am there helping out as much as I can because that’s the world I am lost in.
I usually see people change the type of books they read as they mature. It is apparent that we outgrow some books and choose more advanced and sophisticated ones as we grow. However, I’ve noticed in myself is that I cannot seem to let go of those books that I read as a teen. I cannot stop reading them again and again and again. Some of which I’ve read up to 9-10 times, especially certain parts. I’ve read the same book back to back just after finishing it. I used to wonder why this was so. Why were others growing up, when I refused to do so. I found out the reason for that very recently. The times in which I read those books were the times in which I found myself. I grew up with those characters, alongside their stories. I feel they are a part of me. I do not want to leave. They are my childhood, and I don’t want to grow up.
Unfortunately, that is not possible in real life, however constant contact with those books makes me feel like that 12 year old who was reading it with innocence and excitement for the first time, lost in a world he would soon be obsessed with.
–An article by Atideepth Bharadwaj, 3rd year Chemical Engineering