The Book Nerd’s Guide to Making Your Life More Literary

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.
Summer reading gets a lot of press. There are countless lists of beach books and breezy reads. But for me, fall is the best season for reading. I suspect this is because, to me, reading feels like an activity that should require a little bit of effort, a little bit of struggle. The pleasure of reading often comes from the struggle, after all. We’re imagining whole stories in our minds—with no screen, no app, no Pokeball-shaped wrist accessory. That’s why fall works. The skies darken more quickly and the air is chilled. You need a lamp and a blanket to get comfortable enough to begin a book.
There’s something magical about those circumstances that lure you into a novel, bringing it to life in ways not possible the rest of the year. You start to bond with the story you’re reading. In some ways, as anyone who has checked their chardonnay for cyanide will attest, you begin to become the story.
In that spirit, find other ways to make your life feel more literary. It’s easy if you try.

• Become a novelist, but not a successful one. Publish one book that is moderately well-received and criminally underrated and retreat to support yourself by seedy means, like agreeing to take treasure maps from strangers, leeching off loved ones, or substitute teaching.
• Keep a journal in which you divulge your deepest fears about your certain, impending demise.
• Redact all names in your journal and letters. Leave only a first initial. Present a mystery for those who find your writings after your inevitable grisly death.
• Move to a moor and never once feel easy about it. Suspect that your death approaches from said moor but take no action to forestall it until the last possible moment, when you contact a childhood friend you haven’t spoken to in 15 years.
• Let your home fall into disrepair. Use your inveterate drinking to keep you warm against the draft.
• Alienate your long-time circle of friends with your newfound freewheeling lifestyle and reckless spending. Tease one friend with glimpses of the person you once were. Call them when you cross the border from numbness to despair at who you’ve become.
• Under no circumstances develop any remarkable talents or skills, beyond being handy with a slingshot or having checked out and memorized the complete works of an obscure author from the library in your youth. You are destined for greatness that can only be achieved by the otherwise conveniently ordinary.
• Become overexcited and retire to your bedroom for three or more days.
• Fall in love with a rogue by taking offense at everything he says, until he is forced, after several vague insults, to admit he has never loved another as he does you.
• Get into a confusing situation with his best friend who, bewilderingly and for no reason whatsoever, will not admit directly to not having a relationship with you.
• Win back the love of the rogue by nearly succumbing to pneumonia or one of the wide range of bloody-cough diseases.
• Touch that thing you’re not supposed to touch.
• Read that thing you’re not supposed to read.
• Pretend you have done neither and act as if all is well. It is not all well and you will soon be pulled into a narrative you never could have expected but, with the benefit of hindsight, so desperately wanted.