Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by The Broke and The Bookish!This week’s topic: top ten bookworm delights, so ten things that make my reading soul happy. This isn’t something I ordinarily really even think about, so it was a little work to flesh out this list, but here are ten things I love in my bookish life!
Finding the right spot on the couch to get cozy: The eternal struggle! Find a spot that makes your back happy, realize it’s making you lean on your arm funky. Then your neck starts to ache from looking downward all the time. So you readjust, and your back starts to hurt, so you move again and lather rinse repeat. Finding that perfect spot is the greatest thing.
A new bookstore: That feeling of walking into a brand new store full of books to explore and run your fingers over and figure out how it’s laid out is an exhilarating feeling! When we travel and are out exploring, I like to find a local bookstore to poke around in. You never know what you’ll find!
Snagging that book you’ve been looking for secondhand: When there’s a book you’ve had your eye on and you stop in a secondhand store and there it is…it feels like fate. I recently picked up an apparently new hardcover copy of Seveneves, which has been on my TBR list for a while now and even the Kindle book is like $13.99, for $1 at the SPCA thrift store and I couldn’t stop grinning triumphantly to myself for hours.
Finding someone to talk to who loves the books you love: It’s pretty rare for me to meet an actual real-life person (I know all you lovely book bloggers out there are also real life persons, but I mean in my own real life) who enjoys books like I do. So when I meet someone who tells me that they’ve enjoyed The Virgin Suicides or The Secret History, my eyes light up like Christmas morning.
Quiet time to read: I love my fiance with my whole heart but he enjoys playing video games and watching TV. While I can mostly block out the noise, some uninterrupted quiet time (well, quiet besides the weird noises my pug makes) to get my read on is just lovely.
A gift certificate to buy books: Money to spend at a bookstore, for books only (not like Amazon where the temptation to replace a dying hairdryer can be hard to resist) is a rare treat. And I hardly ever splurge on new books, so it’s a double treat!
Bookish decor: I’ve been looking for a print of Arya Stark’s lesson from her dancing master Syrio- “Fear cuts deeper than swords”- for forever (I actually found one I liked and then as I dinked around deciding whether or not to pull the trigger, they stopped making it). But finding quotes that I loved from books that I loved as decor or coffee mugs makes my heart sing.
Someone loving a book you recommended to them: For most of us serious readers, the books that we love are more than “just books”, they’re little pieces of our heart. So recommending one feels like revealing a long-held secret…it’s so personal, and if they’re not receptive it just feels like a slap in the face. But when they love it? You feel so on top of the world and bonded.
Finding out they’re making a movie/TV show of one of your favorite books: This is delightful and also frightening. Some book adaptations are the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and some…are The Hobbit. It’s hard to tell until it hits the screen but casting announcements and director choices are so fun to react to and talk about!
Little Free Libraries: The actual library is the bomb, but it can be located at quite a distance from your house or have restrictive hours that makes it hard to get there at the right time. Which is why neighborhood-based little free libraries are such a thrill to find in the wild! Just people sharing books with other people. It’s fantastic.