Senior Moments: Being a bookworm

I talk about books a lot. Ever since I was little, reading has been my thing. Unlike with many childhood obsessions, my book phase showed up early and has yet to leave.

I’ve never comprehended how people don’t like to read. I once had a friend tell me she would rather stare at a blank wall than read a book. How someone wouldn’t want to delve into worlds of infinite beauty, possibility and words has always been beyond me.

Needless to say, as a person whose mantra has always been, ‘If you don’t like reading, you just haven’t found the right book,’ I am an absolute pain to my non-reading friends. I don’t know if I’m capable of stopping my crusade to ensure each and every person I come in contact with experiences that delicious devastation of finishing a book and realizing you’ve experienced it to the fullest extent possible.

Being someone who lives for seeing their own words spread out on a page has made me a slightly possessive reader. More than once, I’ve read something that captures just the right moment, just the right feeling, and it causes a ping somewhere in my chest, echoing a wish for those words to be mine, to have come from me. This feels somewhat selfish, but I think, overall, it’s a good thing. I don’t know if there’s a more meaningful takeaway than, ‘I read your words, and they sat so close to my heart I wished they were my own.’ The vicariousness of reading may be both my favorite and least favorite thing about it — the sense of knowing this little world belongs to the person who made it, but feeling like it’s mine, anyway.

This need for literature to belong to me is hardly new. Growing up, I would spend a lot of time at the small bookstore in our town, digging through stacks of new and used books and pleading my case to my mother as to why I needed a particular book or why I simply couldn’t get through one more week without owning another. Each book we bought there had a small, square sticker on the back of it with a barcode and the store’s price for the book. When I got home, I would unload my newly-purchased books onto the shelf in my bedroom but would leave the stickers on. I didn’t feel right taking those price stickers off until I read the book. If I removed them, I was saying I owned the book, and maybe physically I did, but until I read the book from start to finish, the words inside were in no way mine. My habit of leaving stickers on books lives on today, and I’ve found there is nothing more satisfying than commemorating the ending of a book by peeling up that little white square.

I’ve always believed there is nothing more powerful than words. They hold the power to move us, entertain us, make us laugh, make us cry. I’ve also always believed the best place to encounter these words is in books — vessels for when we’re at our most human.

I’ve spent the last hour writing about the importance of reading, so now, I think I’m going to go and actually do it. Here’s to you, “A Room with a View.”

Mia Timlin is a senior at Notre Dame Regional High School. She's lived in Cape Girardeau for five years and loves reading, dancing, watching movies and the Beatles.