Rea(d)lise

"Dort wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man auch am Ende Menschen."

"Where they burn books, they will also burn people." - Heinrich Heines

Books are really important. There is something about books that has lasted and will last in one form or another for many, many more years. 

While I've had my heart broken several times over the last few years as I watched several large franchise book stores shut down due to a lack of profit, popularity, and/or general sustained success - I've also experienced quite a bit of mending. Mending in the form of the Kindle, audio books, YouTuber written or promoted books, and a quiet omnipresence of books around me amongst family and friends and strangers. While I do not personally dabble in the aforementioned "new age" forms of consuming literature, they have definitely served as both a comfort and a little fuel to my interest fire for reading. 

Be it copious amounts of time on the internet, or a complete overdose of word consumption during my senior years of high school, I slowly but surely found it harder and harder to pick up a book and really stick to it. I seem to have adopted this habit of starting books and simply never finishing them, which may be okay for some people, but is completely not okay for me.* I would either lose the rhythm of reading or simply move on to another shiny new book. Or I would incessantly re-read books, as I tend to do so with many other things: re-consume, despite the opportunity to explore the new. And thus, The Pile originated. Or The Piles, I should say. 

Over the past year or two, I appear to have amassed quite a collection of books on/in my bedside table, those of which were:

A) Gifted to me

B) Borrowed by me/lent to me

C) Ambitiously bought by me

All of these books in The Pile share something dreadful in common, however; I haven't read/finished any of them. This Pile isn't exhaustive either. Some happy news is that I did indeed finish a book (not pictured: An Abundance of Katherines by John Green - one of my Year 10 bible study girls' favourite Green book) this afternoon. That book, or at least the act of reading that book, is in fact what has led me to write this post. I was reminded of how much more I like how I function when I read. In fact, I like the world and humans and everything just that bit more. Everything is heightened and slowed down and just that bit clearer and sharper and better. 

This is almost a sequel to my previous post. I'm going to get through this pile, book by book and word by word. Life is busy, but not busy enough to forget things that you love, and things that also arguably love you back in their own way. Books make the world go round and they are oh so special if you would only give them a shot. 

*Exceptions to my general inherent inclination to finish books: The Hobbit and Peter Pan - popular and classic respectively, were both almost a struggle to get through. I only reached about half-way with both before abandoning them. I'm not sure if I'm willing to add them to The Pile. They are currently being Ignored. Maybe. Maybe when I have finished better books.