Top Ten Tuesday: Top Ten Bookish Experiences I’m Thankful For

 

The grammar on that title, am I right? Did I just end a sentence with a preposition? *gasp* Okay, technically a title, not a sentence, but I’m almost certain you’re picking up what I’m putting down.

Anyway…

So, as I mentioned, I’m going to be participating in quite a few of the upcoming Top Ten Tuesday prompts, and I’m very excited about it. If you’ve been around for a hot minute, you may have noticed I love lists. Lists are just peaceful and organized, right? Okay, maybe not the way I do them, but they do tend to bring me a little comfort. It’s not uncommon for me to wake up and make like twelve lists—lists of things I need to do, write, purchase, photograph, what have you. The lists keep the voices in my head a bit more quiet—I mean, what? No, it’s just me here.

So, this week’s prompt for Top Ten Tuesday (as put forth by ThatArtsyReaderGirl—visit her page here if you want to check out the prompts and participate!) is a bit of a freebie with a Thanksgiving/thankful theme. And look—obviously, the first thing that pops into many of our heads is going to be a list of top ten books we are thankful for. And there’s nothing wrong with that. All of us bookworms are extremely thankful for books and reading in general. To some extent, it makes us who we are and shapes us both as humans and as creative individuals.

But no one wants to read 100 of those lists, so I decided to go a little bit more outside the box and think more about bookish experiences than the books themselves. As bookworms—and just as people—we end up having a lot of experiences that hinge on books and creativity, and I believe some of those experiences can have more of an impact on us than we even realize.

And to illustrate that point, I took a good long look at the top ten bookish experiences that I’m thankful to have or have had in my life. Some of them are probably a bit cliché or perhaps extremely routine for other bookworms like myself, but the way we perceive things and the way we let them into our lives can make all the difference. After you read my list, feel free to let me know some of yours in the comments! I think this is a really interesting thing to think about and I’d love to know how everyone else feels about it!

1. Having a Mom Who Read To Me as a Child & Encouraged My Love of Books

A lot of us probably had parents who read to us, at least to some extent, when we were children. At least, I hope a lot of us did. I truly feel bad for children who miss out on this opportunity and absolutely support the encouragement of reading to our children. It’s no secret that there’s tons of research (tons being a totally quantifiable scientific amount) supporting the fact that reading to children has numerous benefits, including improved language skills, better cognitive development, more imagination and creativity, a stronger bond between parent and child, and, of course, the beginning of a love for reading that could (and in my case, did) last for the child’s entire life.

I was lucky enough to have a mom who didn’t just read to me because she knew she should or to get me to fall asleep, but because she was a bookworm, too, and she truly loved it. This is really a beautiful thing, and as an adult, I’ve gotten to witness it in action from one of my best bookworm friends, Chelsea (who literally took me into her home over the summer when I was afloat) reading the Harry Potter books to her newborn baby. Sure, the baby doesn’t necessarily understand what’s happening–but Chelsea knows how good for her it is, and it’s a really precious and heartwarming thing to witness now that I’m grown up and I know how much it did for me as a kid. (I’m not tearing up, there’s just dust in my eyes SHUT UP.)

Not only did my own mother read to me as an infant, but as I got a bit older, she encouraged me to read on my own, too. This encouragement never stopped and as I moved through the different phases of my childhood and young adulthood, it was clear that it was always a priority of my mom’s to make sure I had something to read and to support my love of books. I have many good memories of visiting bookstores with my mom where she walked out with her historical fiction or mystery novels while I happily accompanied her clutching new copies of the American Girl books, the Dear America novels, or the Saddle Club. All my life, we always visited bookstores together, and shopping for books and reading remained favorite pastimes for both of us. Today, I’m fortunate enough to have a mother who I can talk about books with, make recommendations to (though our tastes vary wildly, I’ll admit), and who never thinks I’m totally crazy for buying more books than my apartment can hold (help me, the place is overflowing), or for carrying a book everywhere I go (something she taught me), or for sniffing the heck out of books, oftentimes in public places where people can see me and other mothers might be embarrassed of my weirdness.

There’s something to be said for the relationship between two bookworms, but especially when the bookworms are mother and daughter. If you also have a bookish mom, you know how great it can be to be able to share that common love of reading and have someone in your family who gets you!

2. The Scholastic Book Fair

Speaking of being a kid, seriously who remembers the Scholastic Book Fair?! Do not even lie to me and try to say that this wasn’t the most exciting day of the quarter every time it happened. If you weren’t practically jumping out of your seat with excitement over the Scholastic Book Fair, were you really even a bookworm? I remember going into school in the morning and actually getting a buzz over seeing the tables being set up in the entryway, knowing they were about to be covered in books.

The Scholastic Book Fair wasn’t just a great business decision for Scholastic as a publisher, it’s also a great way to get kids excited about reading and exploring books. Not that I ever needed help getting more excited about books, but for kids who weren’t being raised with a parent who fostered a love of reading, it was another opportunity to find out how awesome it could be. The love of getting new books, for many of us, started out with the Scholastic Book Fair and never went away, leading to us finding ourselves as adults crouched in corners of Barnes & Noble and used bookstores browsing all the options and creating towering stacks of volumes we’ll eventually lug to the cash register where we drop our entire paycheck on our love of reading (just like we threw down all our chore money at the book fair all those years ago. What can I say…some things never change).

3. Bookstagram

At this point, you’re probably used to seeing bookstagrammers talk about how they’re grateful for bookstagram. (Okay, be forewarned now–I’m about to say bookstagram so many times it’s going to seem like even less real of a word than it already is. You have been warned.). It’s not uncommon on days like Thanksgiving or bookstagramaversaries or at moments when we hit certain milestones in our bookstagramming careers to make super sentimental posts just absolutely puking our feelings about how much we love the community and how grateful we are for bookstagram—and that’s a good thing.

We should never take anything for granted—anything—and I love to see bookstagrammers who are grateful for what we have and for our community. I’m no exception to this, and I’m eternally grateful for bookstagram and what it’s done for my life. I never could have expected, roughly a year and a half ago when I started posting overedited and over vignette photos of favorites like Speak by Laurie Halse Andersen and Zombie by J.R. Angelella (which would get maybe 3 likes each—I see you, by the way. I know who you are. And you’re the real MVPs) that it would turn into what it is now.

Bookstagram expanded my horizons into a new way to share my love of books aside from just reading them, writing about them, and generally flailing at people (some of whom absolutely did not care) about how much I love them or how good they are. Despite having no talent for things like drawing (ask me how to draw a dog sometime. If you’re already indoctrinated to my genius method—you’re welcome) or painting or sculpting, I’ve always been a very visual person with a great appreciation for beautiful images, so discovering that I could use photography to share a love of books was so much fun and opened up a new world of creativity. Those of you who are also artists of any sort know that it’s always a ton of fun to find new ways to express yourself or new avenues for your art. I ended up taking a photography class, learning so much about the art form, experimenting with different things, and getting a lot of experience with staging and how to convey feelings and experiences visually, instead of just using words. I’m still learning and having a great time, and think I’m coming into my own now and defining my brand—AKA really being able to show who I am and what I care about via my bookstagram.

Not only did bookstagram help me creatively, but it connected me with an entire community and a whole lot more books. I ended up meeting some of the nicest, kindest, warmest, most understanding people via bookstagram, people who became my friends (shoutout especially to @forests_and_fairytales and @a_bookish_dream, who are two of the kindest individuals and have been there for me through a lot and truly know how to listen and pick a person up when they’re down), and bookstagram was also responsible for me meeting the man who I’m now in a relationship with (and love so freaking much). So at this point, no matter where this form of social media takes me or where I go from here, I have to be grateful for the people it’s brought into my life. People I never would have met without it.

Plus, there’s, you know—the books. Seeing other people’s photos and talking to other bookstagrammers (AKA the whole point of bookstagram, right? Let’s remember that—it’s not necessarily about the numbers and the rep spots and the internet fame, but about connecting and exploring) has helped me discover books and get recommendations that I might not otherwise have picked up on my own. The Raven Cycle, for example, was a series I’d looked into but whose description didn’t do it justice. What did do it justice was the rampant, overflowing love for the series and for Steifvater in general on bookstagram. What people said about the books on there helped me get a much better feel for it and encouraged me to actually pick it up and read it, and I ended up loving it. (Which you can read a little more about here if you’re interested.) The power of the bookstagram community is real, y’all.

4. RIF

So I’m not sure how many other people had RIF at their schools because I’ve asked several people about it and no one else seems to have participated in this program. RIF, which stands for Reading Is Fundamental, is a non-profit children’s literacy organization here in the U.S. This is amazing and I’ve always been a big proponent of children’s literacy and encouraging literacy in general—something I’d love to get more involved with. So RIF was somewhat like the Scholastic Book Fair, with one huge exception—it was free. I was like a kid in a candy store on RIF day. This was something I had during high school in the small town in Pennsylvania where I grew up. What would happen was RIF would come in and set up tables in the auditorium which were laid out with stacks of books for varying reading levels—everything from Captain Underpants books to the classics. Each student was allowed to go to RIF and pick one book, which they then took the RIF volunteers, who stamped the book and took the student’s free book ticket. The catch here is that if there were other kids in your class who really, really were not interested in a free book, sometimes they could be convinced to pass their ticket on to someone more interested (ahem, me). Granted, this did very little for encouraging their literacy, but I’d rather have taken their free book and get more books than have them take any old book and throw it away (something I actually saw happen and was completely horrified by) or choose not to participate at all and just waste the free book.

I ended up getting several free books from the RIF program over my four years at that school (I’m pretty sure they had it twice a year, if I remember correctly) some of which I still have today, like one of my copies of Romeo & Juliet and the well-loved copy of Dracula pictured above. (Check it out, that picture is so old school, it still has my old bookstagram background. #throwback—oh, wait, it’s the wrong day of the week for that.)

5. Attending College for a Literature Based Major

I’ll admit it, there are a lot of things I have done in life that may not have been the greatest decisions. It happens. People screw up. But I’ll tell you this—majoring in Creative Writing is not one of those decisions. I may make a lot of jokes about how I’ll be paying off my student loans until I’m 90 (which I’m only half joking about) or about the seeming uselessness of having a degree in today’s job market (a whole other topic altogether that I can assure you no one has time for), but at the end of the day, I actually have no regrets about my writing major. It may not have been the most “practical” major, as certain people who look down their noses at the arts have said, but I learned so much and I had an amazing time learning it. Having a literature based major really expanded my horizons and while some people may scoff at the required reading for their classes, required reading when you’re a creative writing major is actually a lot of fun. I read so many good books, including things that I may not have picked up on my own if they hadn’t been required reading. From post-structuralist poetry to heartfelt memoirs to literary fiction, I got to experience so many types of literature, and then discuss it with like minds and use what I read and learned to hone my own skills, and I will be forever grateful for that.

If you’re a writer, a bookworm, or a creative type, and you’re considering college, I highly recommend a literature-based college major. If you’re on the fence about majoring in creative writing, my opinion is that it’s totally worth it. Sure, you already know how to write. You don’t need someone to teach you that. And no, majoring in writing is by no means a requisite for success at all. But it’s a fantastic experience that you will enjoy, and you will learn and grow from it both as a writer and a human being.

6. Having a Significant Other Who Also Loves to Read

This image seems counter intuitive to the topic at hand, which I’m laughing about a little, but the reason I included it is because this is actually one of my boyfriend’s books that he recommended I read, and I ended up loving it. Having an SO who also loves to read or comes anywhere close to matching my love for reading is a fairly new experience for me and I absolutely love it. I’m not saying that every bookworm needs to date another bookworm by any means, but to me, it’s pretty awesome. It’s really cool to have someone to talk to about books and reading who is also your Person. And when I say really cool, I’m greatly understating it. It’s also a lot of fun to be able to go to the bookstore with your significant other, or just read together your own books together in the same room. Is that one of the most introvert things ever—yeah, sure, but it’s awesome. And being with another creative individual is helpful because creative people kind of understand other creative people (despite the fact that we all have our own quirks and unique processes). It’s also a really fulfilling experience to live in a household where you’re surrounded by books. It makes me happy to see a bed with two books laying upside and open so we don’t lose our spots, or to walk through the house and see notebooks and pens scattered about, open volumes from where one of us was researching something, or TBR piles that haven’t been contributed to solely by me. These sound like things that don’t matter—but they do to me.

7. Being a Part of the Gifted Program at My Local Library as a Child

Every school’s gifted program works a little bit differently. For many schools, there’s a whole testing process where you end up in a completely different set of classes with a completely different group of kids, or you leave the classroom for certain classes. At my school, it wasn’t like that. Perhaps because it was such a small elementary school with so few students or perhaps because it was a very small, rural community—I’m not sure. But at my school, the gifted program was additional work added on to the classes you already took, but much of it took place at the local library. Which was awesome. The year I started, I was the only kid in my gifted program, so I would just get additional work and go the library with my mom after school where I would explore the stacks looking for books that could help me research for whatever assignment or project I was working on, and then do my work at the big library tables. And while this sounds like the nerdiest thing ever, seriously, it was a lot of fun, and I learned a lot about the library, so I’m still thankful for the experience.

And speaking of the library…

8. Working at the Campus Library During College

I sometimes joke that nearly everything I do is related to books—I’m either reading books, writing books, writing about books, taking pictures of books, shopping for books…you catch my drift. And apparently, it’s kind of always been that way for me. While was attending school for a literature-based major, constantly reading books, and working on writing books, I was also working at our campus’s library. I alternated between working the front desk checking out books and processing interlibrary loans, working in the stacks putting books away, and working the front desk in the library basement where the movies were.

I remember when I first started, I thought working at the front desk would be my favorite thing to do, but it turned out working in the stacks and putting books back—especially on quiet nights—turned out to be the most fun. Something about being surrounded by books on a quiet night was really peaceful. And the coolest thing about it was that I got to discover so many books. This was another situation where I ended up coming across a lot of books that I normally wouldn’t have read or been introduced to, simply because they were crossing my path or I was running across them on the shelves. There really is a lot to be said for just randomly browsing the shelves in the library or bookstore and picking up whatever catches your eye. I ended up discovering a lot of gems this way, from the Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath (which I now own) to a book on the history of horror movies which also ended up introducing me to a lot of movies I might not have checked out all on my own.

If you ever get the chance to work in a library, it really is rewarding—definitely a bookish experience that I’m grateful for.

9. Developing a Love for Used Bookstores

I know there are people in the world who turn their nose up at the concept of anything “used”—and I just don’t get it. Sure, there are things that are better off new. I’m not advocating for used underwear or used tissues or anything. Don’t be gross. But used bookstores are a haven of money saving goodness for bookworms like me, and in my experience, can be an absolute treasure trove. My mother, grandmother, and I used to have a favorite weekend activity of checking out used bookstores, specifically a little independently owned bookstore in a tiny little strip mall next to one of the local Wal-Marts. It was a little shop owned by an elderly couple which just so happened to be next to a little independent café that sold passable coffee and excellent sandwiches, so our favorite thing to do was absolutely loot this bookstore on a weekend and then take everything we’d gotten next door so we could eat and have coffee while we fawned over our new purchases.

Which is, you know, totally normal behavior.

This bookstore ended up being the source of a huge chunk of my collection of antique and vintage books, which I absolutely fell. In. LOVE. With. Many of the books I got from there are beautiful leather-bound volumes from as early as the 1800s, and I ended up getting them for either twenty-five cents or a few bucks because there was so little interest in them that if I hadn’t bought them, the shop owners would have just thrown them away. THROWN THEM AWAY. CAN YOU EVEN?!

Some of these old books ended up being some of my favorites and introduced me to the joy of breathing new life and love into ancient volumes that were basically left for dead by someone who didn’t love them anymore. Some of them are in the picture above, including a copy of Romeo & Juliet which was published by J.M. Dent & Co. in London in 1899.

This was sort of the jumping off point for my love of used bookstores and my realization that you can find so many amazing things there, and nowadays I continue to love used bookstores for their options and the ability to run across books you might not find at larger chains and for how much money I can save there. One of my favorite stores now is definitely Half Price Books, and I still love smaller indie stores, too! If you haven’t discovered the magic of used bookstores yet, you don’t know what you’re missing!

And finally, the 10^th bookish experience I’m most thankful for…

10. The Uprising of the Nerd Community in General

“Nerd” doesn’t have the same ring to it that it used to in the old days. Walk through any mall and check out the displays in the windows of stores like Hot Topic, Spencer’s, Lunchbox, or even the non-book merchandise at places like Barnes & Noble, and you’ll already catch the drift of what’s happening here—being a nerd is cool now.

While bookworms have never given a flying fart whether what we were doing was cool or not (in fact, if you were like me, you knew damn well it wasn’t and just had no desire to be one of the cool kids—they were usually jerks anyway), this works out in favor for a few reasons. First of all, the merch. For example, there is more Harry Potter merch available for purchase in the world now than there was even when the series first came out. Even when the movies were premiering and the books were having midnight releases, there was still not this much Harry Potter merchandise. Nowadays you can literally decorate your entire house in a Harry Potter theme if you wanted to (granted, I wouldn’t exactly recommend it, but, hey to each his own). And the same goes for other books, comics, and graphic novels. No longer do we have to make our own stuff (though we still do)—we can actually go out and buy it, and it doesn’t even take much hunting. Even Target—the holy grail of holy grails—is flush with nerd merch. It’s a downright embarrassment of riches.

Plus, the uprising of nerd culture means the development of more communities—like Bookstagram!!!—where us nerds can meet each other. Sure, we were always finding each other in the corners of the Internet or in our writing classes or what have you, but now it’s easier than ever to connect with other nerds. This may be because with the rise of nerd culture, a lot of people are embracing their inner nerd because they are less afraid of being judged or bullied.

And hey, if people bully us a little bit less because nerdiness is more accepted now—then that’s just another tiny bonus. To be clear, we still don’t give a flying fart what you think of us…

But a lot of us have suffered enough emotional and mental battery, so it’s nice to get a tiny bit of a break. The times, they are a’changin’…

Nerds Unite.

This was a cool prompt, especially for the week of Thanksgiving, and it was a bit of an emotional one, too. Granted, I’m a bit of an emotional person (ha!), but this one had me digging into my feelings and my past and thinking about my loved ones, too. But I guess that’s one of the things we do around the holidays, right? (Yikes, guys, I can’t believe it’s pretty much “the holidays” already).

This has been one of the longest posts ever, but hey, y’all already know I’m super wordy. (And still don’t think this wins for longest of all time.) Will all my Top Ten Tuesday posts be this long? Probably not, but it’s fun to write about these things and share them with all of you!

So what about everyone else? What bookish experiences have you had in your lifetime that you’re thankful for? Do you share any of my bookish experiences? Were you also a huge fan of the Scholastic Book Fair or are you eternally grateful for bookstagram? Let me know in the comments! You know I’d love to talk. <3