One of the perfect ways to spend your day off is to curl up on your couch with a good book with some good music playing in the background. You can find immense pleasure reading a book. Reading is a passion that has to be cultivated on your own – you can’t force a person to take it up.
Today happens to be World Book Day, a day to celebrate authors, poets, illustrators, books, and more importantly, the joy of reading. The excitement that surges when you open a favorite, well-worn book is incomparable. The book is ready to take you into another world – all from the comfort of your couch/bed, without any conscious effort on your part other than some imagination.
Image source: Google, copyright-free image under Creative Commons License
You can have adventures in the desert or the bitter cold, fight great battles, carry out espionage, fall in love, laugh your head off, you cry, feel sorry, make new friends – for life, learn new and exciting things about new places and new people (or old and dead people as well), learn about different cultures of the world, go gallivanting across any continent you wish – all this from the comfort of your couch. You can leave behind all your troubles and the drudgery of life and escape to an alternate world while you’re reading. You live vicariously through your beloved characters. All thanks to the author who put his/her thoughts and imagination into words for us.
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Many times, when you read a book, you connect with some parts and they stay with you for a long time. At odd moments, you find yourself picturing a particularly wonderful scene or experiencing something in real life that you’d only read about till now. You sort of relive it in your head for quite some time. That’s the profound power of words for you!
Written words are eternal. I’m entranced by the fact that you can reduce an event to the page and make it not transitory, but fixed. Whatever be the magnitude of the event, it can be reduced to a page, say, with words.
Image source: Pixabay, under Creative Commons License
If you let it, books can become your best friend. It cares for you, listens to you (when you write in it), doesn’t judge you or give you the hairy eyeball. It comforts you when you’re down, soothes you when you’re depressed, lifts you when you’re dejected, and be there for you when you need it the most. You don’t have to worry about keeping up appearances with it. You just are who you are with it.
Some people find it hard to connect with people as such. Such people invest their time and emotions in material things, like books, rather than in human relationships and risk getting hurt. Sometimes it’s better to be in the company of books than among judgmental and self-righteous pr**ks.
In my opinion, books have to be revered. They should be handled with utmost care and love. They shouldn’t be dog-eared or mishandled in any way. I believe it’s criminal to treat books with disdain.
So on the occasion of World Book Day, let’s all pledge to read a little more, love a little more, and live a little more – not necessarily in that order though! Spread the joy of reading! 😉
Featured image source: Pixabay, under Creative Commons License
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