The Book Nerd’s Guide to Lies They Told You

Welcome to the Book Nerd’s Guide to Life! Every other week, we convene in this safe place to discuss the unique challenges of life for people whose noses are always wedged in books. For past guides, click here.  
I think we all like reading. You’re not viewing this page unless you’re into books, or have become terribly, terribly lost on the World Wide Web. For most of us, this affinity for the written word was cultivated in childhood, at our local libraries or Scholastic Book Fairs or in a cupboard under our cruel guardians’ staircases. We always knew reading was important. We also knew we liked it. And it was endlessly reiterated that that was the true and proper way of things.
Now, no one’s disputing those particular facts. But I am saying we were lied to, in a number of ways and over a number of years. Harmless lies, really, or so the adults thought. They were just little fibs to lure kids to hardbacks. What harm could there be?
Tell that to malleable young minds. Tell that to everyone who internalized these life lessons before figuring out they were falsehoods and deceptions. Tell that to the purely hypothetical idiot who stayed up reading All the Missing Girls into the wee hours and became convinced those thumps weren’t coming from her downstairs neighbors but from some shadowy figure from her past lurking outside the door.
Tell these lies to that, again, entirely hypothetical person.
Reading Is Fun-damental
For me, the carefree days of childhood were pumped full of this messaging, whether through celebrity posters or preachy, on-brand bookmarks. Of course, I’m not disagreeing with the fundamental nature of reading. It’s the bedrock of enlightenment, a worthwhile way to fill the yawning hours of existence. But fun? Fun? Have you, well-intentioned school librarian, ever hurled a paperback copy of A Storm of Swords against a wall in a fit of fury and betrayal? My reading maturation led me from Clifford the Big Red Dog to the Red Wedding, with little to no warning. I’m still shook. Reading isn’t always fun, kids. Sometimes it’s the embodiment of the cold, cruel world we live in. The bookshelf is dark and full of terrors, and you need to be ready for them.
You Can’t Judge a Book by Its Cover
It’s a metaphor, I get it, but it’s a flawed one. I defy you to look at the cover of Claire-Louise Bennett’s Pond, or The Vegetarian, by Han Kang, or literally any volume of Saga and tell me you don’t immediately want to bury your face in it. While it’s important to teach youngsters not to turn up their noses at battered old mass market paperbacks, it’s also perfectly reasonable to make some snap decisions based on appearance. Beautiful covers often hold yet more beautiful books. The better lesson is that beauty comes in all shapes, all sizes, and all bindings, and good decisions can indeed be made based on ornamental book displays.
They Lived Happily Ever After
Sure. Sure they did. Of course. Nothing to see here.
Slow and Steady Wins the Race
When you’re 10, life seems like it will wind on forever. You will have interminable amounts of time to find yourself and reach for the stars. You must only endure the fleeting, painful years of adolescence before you realize how very wrong that assumption is. Sometimes I wake up finding it difficult to negotiate myself out of bed, because I feel crushed by the weight of the realization that I will never be able to plow through all the books I want to read. My to-read stack feels Sisyphean, forever replenishing without ever depleting. There is no end in sight. Slow and steady will do nothing for me, except ensure you’ll discover my corpse someday next to an ample stack of unfinished books. Please, be kind and bury me with the contents of what was in my online shopping cart.