Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme hosted by The Broke and The Bookish. Every week, they post a new Top Ten topic and other bloggers respond with their own lists. I take part in this meme when I have something to say for the topic and I remember what day it is.
I like this week’s topic, and I’m taking it as a combination of funny problems and serious ones I encounter in the bookish world.
- Books are expensive.
- I have never liked libraries (“You have to give them back?”), so I end up buying basically every book I read. Most of this is financed by gift cards I get from my birthday or Christmas, but I do end up paying some out of pocket. I love owning books and being able to lend them out to my friends, but it is not cheap.
- When a book makes me cry but I’m in public.
- I love it when a books makes me cry; it is a cleansing experience for me. However, I do a lot of reading at school, and I’ve had some awkward times trying to hold in tears. Nowadays if I can tell that a book will have a sad ending, I’ll leave it at home and start a new book at school to avoid awkwardness. But sometime books don’t give you a warning…
- Massive hardcover books.
- Again, I do most of my reading at school, which means I’m carrying around a book in my backpack 24/7. Massive hardcover books take up a ton of space in my backpack and are really heavy. Heir of Fire by Sarah J. Maas nearly killed me, as did The Sweet Far Thing by Libba Bray.
- Organizing my bookshelves.
- As you can tell from my Top Shelf page, I obsessively organize books by how good they are. My sister and I have to agree. Sometimes, I’ll look at my bookshelves and freak out because I feel like a book is in a totally wrong place–and then we have to reorganize the entire system of bookshelves.
- Trying to decide what to read next.
- I never know what to read next. I usually leave the decision until the morning before school. I’ll have five minutes until I need to leave and I’m just staring at my bookshelves going, “what mood am I in?” This is why I suck at “what I’ll read next” posts–they always end up being lies.
- Trying to get the people around me to read.
- I love recommending books to people! It’s a game for me: matching books to people. I’ll even lend them the books (my friends joke that I’m their “book dealer”). But then they will return the book months later and will admit, “I read the first chapter.” Disappointing, but I still love them.
- Deciding what to do with books I didn’t like.
- Again, I buy all my books, so if I really didn’t like a book, I still have it sitting around in my room. Sometimes I’ll put books on Paperbackswap.com (an amazing website!!!) right away, but a lot of times I just leave them on my “I hated this” shelf until I run out of bookshelf space and need to clear them out. It feels like such a waste though, to buy a book and then hate it, which is why I almost never DNF books.
- Reading a book too fast/too slow
- The amount of time I have in my life to read isn’t consistent, so I end up reading some books with giant gaps of time between chapters, or reading a book in one sitting. Both of these things can negatively impact my impression of the book. Read a book too slowly and I’ll forget what I was enjoying about it. Read a book to fast and I miss important details and feel like I didn’t absorb the book in its entirety.
- When romance in books is so adorable it makes me give up on reality.
- This one is basically a joke, but sometimes couples in books are so adorable it is hard to believe in “real life love.” Also, I’m in high school and most boys are jerks, so that can’t help.
- When really good series end
- What are you supposed to do? I want MORE. I’ll fall in love with characters and plots and then boom–it’s over. Heart, crushed.
52 Letters in the Alphabet 