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The Book Nerd’s Guide to Non-Readers
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.
Many of us read to forget, to escape the cold, cruel world we inhabit. We form book clubs to gather together with our kind, a measure necessary because reading is, by nature, a solitary activity. We go to great lengths to insulate ourselves from a world that doesn’t always understand us.
Yet few of us have lives that preclude interaction with nonreaders. Many of us even come to love those immune to bibliophilia. That doesn’t mean it’s always easy to cooperate, communicate, or cohabitate. Some people just don’t understand why you’d rather stay in with a good book than head out, braving the elements and the rest of humanity, to play trivia at a bar with no good drink specials.
How to Read a Story: (Illustrated Children's Book, Picture Book for Kids, Read Aloud Kindergarten Books)
Kate Messner
Hardcover
$18.99
Ships in 1-2 days.
They ask questions like how many books you read in a week or a month or a year, as if that were a number you could even quantify. (Of course, you could, but your reading challenge intimidates even the most ambitious of intellectuals.) So you say, “a lot,” and they use that as ammunition to coerce you into taking a break. After all, it’s just one evening, or one brunch, or one weekend at the lake. Bring your paddle board. Buy a paddle board. It’s not like you don’t read all the rest of the time, right? Why not get out and do something for a change?
That might be the most obnoxious and misguided statement of them all, the one that assumes reading doesn’t count as “doing something.” Oh, no worries, we’re just conjuring whole scenes and stories in our minds. It’s not as if we’ve just spent the last hour painstakingly assembling a portrait of the main character of this book. I’m sure we can mentally re-map this jawline later. We’re totally free right now. Free as a bird. If the bird in question were The Little Red Hen.
Even when you are in public, you’re not immune to the incomprehension of those around you. In coffee shops or parks, people wander up to you and start chatting. What’s that you’re reading? What’s it about? Is that like that Game of Thrones show, or that one movie? You know, the one set in World War II. You know the one. Anyway, you liking it so far?
In the same way that parents and coworkers only ever see headphones as an invitation, strangers are drawn to the presence of books like moths to a flame. It’s not entirely their fault. If you’ve never been engulfed in a story, so transfixed by a setting that you lose the world around you, it’s hard to fathom another human spurning real-world conversation for one more scene of Jamie Fraser loping about the Highlands, or one more page of I Capture the Castle.
Rather than remain frustrated by them, we should pity these unfortunate souls, so perplexed that a person could become consumed by an object in their hands instead of appreciative of the wonders around them. And we should remember that thought as we take their phones and toss them into the nearest fountain. That’s the best moral this story is gonna get.