Falling Back In Love With Books
A Love Letter to Books
Last year, I got back to reading. And it ended up being one of the best decisions of my life.
I got my first book when I was four. It was a collection of Aesop’s Fables. I couldn’t read yet, but that was the point. I loved stories, so my parents used stories to get me interested in reading.
And it totally worked.
At first my mother would read the stories out to me. But as I learned to read, I took over. That was the beginning of my bookish journey. I’d read non-stop, I’d read whatever I could get my hands on. Books were pretty much my entire personality.
But as I grew older, towards my late teens and early twenties, I started to drift away from books.
It was a long, gradual process, which made it hard to notice at first. But slowly, it became more and more obvious that I wasn’t reading as much as I used to. But it didn’t bother me. Because surely there were other things to do in life? So, I took my waning interest in books as an indication that I was now growing up and moving on.
Until last year.
Last year, my brother was leaving for his master’s and I was a bit sad. So, I decided to read a book, just to keep myself occupied.
The book I picked was The Stranger or The Outsider by Albert Camus. In the book, the main character, Meursault, kills a man and gets the death penalty. When he gets the sentence, Meursault just cannot accept it. He searches for one way, any way to evade it. He considers escaping, dreams about changing the law, hopes the guillotine would malfunction; he simply cannot accept that he’s going to die like that. And as I was reading the book, witnessing his frustration and desperation, inside my head, I heard myself screaming, ‘He gets it! He gets it! Someone finally gets it!’
The thing is, when I was about twenty two, after one night’s conversation with my sister, I was suddenly hit by the idea of mortality. The fact that I must die. I was at that age where most healthy people don’t generally feel death approaching. But whether I felt it or not, death indeed was approaching me from the moment I was born and one day it was going to get me. There was nothing I could do to escape. Absolutely nothing.
I remember the next afternoon, my sister was on the phone with her boyfriend. And all I could think was, ‘What’s the point? He’s going to die, she’s going to die, if they get married and have children, they’re also going to die. What is the point? Of anything?’
And to make matters worse, around that time, I saw three deaths. All untimely.
Ever since, my life hasn’t been the same.
It’s not exactly fun, to live while constantly thinking about death. But what’s even less fun is the isolation it brings along.
I’ve never been able to make anyone understand this feeling. Whenever I try (and I don’t try a lot because I don’t want others to feel this way), the response I get is, ‘Yes, of course we’re all going to die, we know that.’ And they’re right, I did know, even before that night. But it was just a piece of information in the back of my mind. But now this little piece of information had come alive and was taking over my life.
And no-one understood.
Until I read that book.
You see, the book didn’t give me a solution to my problem, it didn’t find me an escape from death. No. But it did something important.
It told me that I was not alone.
The dread I was feeling was not just mine, there was someone who had felt it before me. I was no longer isolated in my struggle.
It was like when James Baldwin said:
“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.”
The reason I love books is because they’re my biggest connection to the human experience as a whole.
You see, we humans are forever trapped inside our own heads, in that sense we’re pretty isolated. We can never really see another person’s thoughts firsthand. But books, they offer us a glimpse. Every book is a peek inside the writer’s head. Because books are outbursts of the writer’s deeper thoughts. Like Oscar Wilde wrote in The Picture of Dorian Gray:
“Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter.”
The more you read a writer’s works, the more obvious it becomes. Agatha Christie often said that every criminal has a pattern they can’t escape from, and so do writers. Every writer has something they write about again and again. Take Agatha Christie herself, she writes a type of stories, very different from what Fyodor Dostoevsky writes, and Jane Austen writes another type of stories that’s different from both of them. Why? Simply because they were all different people with very different life experiences.
Books are like a catalogue that showcases the wide span of the human experience.
Now, not all of these experiences are going to be relatable to us. I don’t particularly find anything ‘relatable’ in Jane Austen’s works. But that’s also part of the fun. To experience the thoughts of others, thoughts we’ll never explore on our own. And as we do, we realise that different as our thoughts might be, human emotions are still pretty universal.
Isn’t it crazy, the consolation I couldn’t find from the people around me, my family, friends, I finally found from a person from another continent who died long before I was even born? He lived a different life, was a different person altogether, there’s absolutely no similarity between him and me. And, yet, it was him I felt understood by.
And that’s what makes books so special to me.
Whenever I walk into a room and see a book, I feel an immediate sense of relief. For a really long time, I didn’t understand why. But now I do.
It’s because all my life, books have offered me emotional comfort and safety. Books accepted me, guided me, they pretty much made me. If I’ve ever felt at home, it’s in the pages of the books I’ve read.
But sometimes we don’t understand just how important something is to us until we live without it. I did that, I lived a life without books, and in a way I’m glad I did. Because if I hadn’t, I’d probably never figure out what books mean to me. So, now that I’ve found my way back to books, I’m never going to stray away ever again.
What about you? Do you love books? Why do you love books? Don’t forget to let me know.
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Also, if you’d like me to write for you, you can contact me at joyiewrites@gmail.com