Best Things About Being a Book Lover

To me, this is always a very welcome sight: the discounted books cart. Bargain!

Bargain books are my catnip.

Ambling around the city, perhaps killing time before meeting someone, I'll come upon a bookstore and see the discounted books cart just outside its door. The lure of cheap books, usually priced at $1 each, is just too strong for me to resist. So I'll walk over and crouch behind the cart, looking over paperbacks that have seen better days in hopes of finding my next read for next to nothing.

Happening upon book sales is #20 on the list of "The 23 Best Parts of Being a Book Lover," compiled by Arianna Rebolini for BuzzFeed. Spotting a book you've been waiting to buy priced at half off, or seeing paperback classics you've long wanted to read being sold at a deep discount, is definitely one of the small joys of being a bibliophile. However, impulsively buying books that are too cheap to pass up leads to another aspect of being a book lover, and I would hesitate to say that it's one of the best parts: Buying books faster than you can read them (#22).

My bookshelf is slowly (d)evolving into this one.

Already, my red bookshelf has become too small to hold all of my books. So I've begun to do that thing where you place books on their sides on top of books that have been shelved upright. Sure, it's not aesthetically pleasing - I would even say that it looks cluttered - but books do belong on the bookshelf, right? You tell yourself that it's only temporary until you weed your collection (not likely to happen) or buy a bigger bookshelf (likelier to happen, but not anytime soon).

Other parts of being a book lover, as listed by BuzzFeed, are a little too hard-core for me: midnight release parties (#17), sniffing old books (#15), and picking out the perfect bookplates (#10), for instance. And I'm hardly opinionated about which editions of the classics are the best (#8) - as long as they don't use a photo from the film adaptation for the cover. Speaking of film adaptations, it's usually with some reservations that I see "beloved characters come to life on the big screen" (#13). Yet I do get excited when one of my favorite authors releases a new book (#21), I enjoy book clubs (#6), and I geek out at book festivals (#4).

To find out all of "The 23 Best Parts of Being a Book Lover," many of which I'm sure you will relate to, see Rebolini's BuzzFeed article HERE. Bonus: The article's excellent use of GIFs, including the one of Sawyer from Lost reading Judy Blume's Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret.

All above photos from http://www.buzzfeed.com