My Addiction

I'm addicted. Totally and completely addicted; and yet I thought at one stage I was getting better. However, I'm not. When I moved out of my parents' home, I had only one bookcase and it fitted nice and neat downstairs in my living room. It housed all my books and looked like it was going to fall over if I put anymore into it.
Then, I found nobody was visiting enough to use my spare room and I began transforming it into an office. I was storing things in it anyway; so why not use it as my place to write and my place for some of my books. Some...ha! What was I thinking? What started out as about one hundred books or so has surged very quickly to around five hundred... and it's still growing!!! Oh my god! It's been amazing to find that it's not just me who has this gremlin-like collection in my house either! There are people called BookCrossers (yeah, I'm one as well) who trade and swap books across the world to get the books they want to read, borrow books they don't have and ring their own books around the world and have them come back like boomerangs in the post! And from this very thing, my collection of one bookcase increased to four!

But... I love it. I love it that I don't have to go to a library on a wet, cold day. I love it that I can sit on the internet all day and chat with a person in Wisconsin or London through Bookcrossing. I love that. It may keep me from my household chores, but I love that my friends on the net have the passion and love for books just like I do; and they feel just like I do when they see somebody destroying a book (it's a gut-wrenching feeling). We feel downright sad when a book's pages fall out in our hands and its bindings come undone when we go to read them; causing us to shed a silent tear and have to throw them away.
Books also bring people together too. I love that about books; I enjoy the fact that books are universally known to bring love, joy, hope and every other emotion known to humans. So, yeah, my addiction is books.

But I have others.

I collect other things besides books; and they're useful little things too. However, I must leave that for another time. This time, I'd rather talk about books and the joys they have brought to me; the tears and love and hope and fear of turning out the light. Books are the most wonderful things, no matter how much technology they turn them into or how many Sony e-readers or Kindles they put out, the feeling of a real, honest to God, book is so wonderful to hold between your hands. It's the pages, the print... the smell of a brand new book... the odour of an old one and where it's been and how it's lived its life with so many other people (or maybe just one for a very long time). I love books and the way they can be beautifully bound in leather, wood or paper. Their cover art is sought after and their author's words are read by generations of readers; no matter how faded and yellow the pages become.

Books will always be here to be read, loved and enjoyed by all who have come before us, are here today and will be here in the future. Love them for who has had them, who gave them to you and what they mean to you because they are a form of freedom within your mind; a freedom that nobody can take away from you.