You Know You’re A Crazy Bibliophile When…

I am an obsessive reader. I am aware of this. I get so caught up in whatever book I’m reading that everything else I do completely falls to the wayside. It can be a problem. It can be a very unhealthy problem. But it’s a problem I live with and probably encourage a little too much. I was the kid whose mother threatened her with taking away books as punishment. TV I would give up with a minimal amount of fuss. Books on the other hand… I’m pretty sure none of my friends parents ever had to tell them to stop reading. Here my top 10 signs that you’re a crazy bibliophile like me:

1. You have ever lost sleep over a book. This happens to me a lot. I’ll stay up until 2 or 3 in the morning with a book because it’s just not mentally possible for me to put it down. The first time I experienced this was my sophomore year of college when I read Shiver by Maggie Stiefvater. My best friend brought me the book at like 10 o’clock at night and I stayed up until 3 in the morning because I had to know what was going to happen. I tried to put it away. I really did. After thirty minutes of tossing and turning with my brain entirely too keyed up for me to sleep, I gave up, turned the light back on and didn’t sleep until I had finished it.
2. You are emotionally invested in fictional relationships. I am extremely guilty of this. Two characters in a book  I was reading got in a fight, and I started to panic. I also consider myself to be the Saint Jude (the patron saint of lost causes) of fictional relationships. I always ended up cheering for the wrong guy in a series. Like The Hunger Games for example. Gale was barely in the first book, and I was convinced he and Katniss belonged together. I knew it was a completely lost cause, but I still found myself cheering for him.
3. You have in depth conversations about characters/books with friends (who could sometimes care less). This also in part refers to The Hunger Games, mostly because it’s the book that all of my friends are (finally) reading. My little and I have literally had hour long conversations about that book since I got her to start reading them a week before the movie came out. We text about it. We talk about it whenever we’re together. It’s obsessive, and we sound like crazy teenage fan girls (although she technically still is a teenager so it’s okay for her). I do it with other books too though. I have to talk about a book as soon as I finish reading it. Often this is to my mother, because she’ll just let me get it out. Now I try to do it on this blog. I love sharing my opinions about books with other people. Almost to an unhealthy extent.
4. You sacrifice grocery money for books. I have never gone hungry because of my obsession with books. I have, however, lived on ramen noodles for a week because I spent my grocery money on a couple of new books. I have no regrets. Groceries get eaten or go bad. I still have the books and frequently reread them. I don’t recommend doing this if you are married or have a family, but for a single college student like myself, I think it’s perfectly acceptable. Just don’t tell my mother.
5. You sometimes wonder if you have too many books. I know this is not actually possible. But as my books pile up in double rows on my bookshelf or in stacks on my desk or my dresser or the floor, I sometimes wonder if just maybe I have too many. Don’t ask me to part with any of them. It would be like selling off my own children. I’ll lend them to people willingly. I just want them back. How am I ever going to fill my own library someday if I don’t keep all of my books?
6. You have countdowns going for when the next book in a series comes out. The only book I’m eagerly awaiting right now is Clockwork Princess which is the next book in the Infernal Devices Series by Cassandra Clare, and it does not have a release date yet, so I can’t give you an exact countdown for anything I’m waiting for. But I could tell you the exact number of days until City of Glass came out for the Mortal Instruments books when I was awaiting its release. I pretty much thought I was going to die waiting for that one.
7. You have realized that books are always released on Tuesdays. It took me a while to realize that. I felt really dumb after. It just seemed so convenient that books were always released on my usual grocery shopping day. It just worked out so perfectly. Eventually I realized it was always a Tuesday. I’ve never had an exception to this rule. I’m not sure what it is about Tuesdays, but they’re kind of my favorite day of the week as a result.
8. You view social media sites primarily as a way to be in contact with your favorite authors.  I have a twitter. I don’t use it. Everyone who I want to know about my life is my friend on facebook. I do, however, use it to follow my favorite authors. I religiously follow everything Sarah Dessen posts because even though I am probably out of her target audience range at this point in my life, I eagerly await all of her books. And she posts about how she’s writing a new book sometimes. It’s enough to keep me going until her next book is released.
9. Your celebrity crushes are all fictional characters. Maybe this is because I actually know a fictional character’s personality and there’s no risk that the guy is actually a jerk in real life, but I don’t get crushes on celebrities. I get them on the characters of the books I read. I’m absolutely convinced that Wes from The Truth About Forever by Sarah Dessen is the man of my dreams. I’m absolutely in love with him.
10. Your Christmas list consists almost entirely of books. This frustrates my parents to no end when they ask me what I want for Christmas and I direct them to my “Books I Want to Read” board on pinterest . But they’re really the only things I feel like I need in life.

If you have experienced at least five of these symptoms, you’re probably as crazy as I am. But hey, you’re not alone in the world. You’re not the only person who sacrifices sleep and food and homework because you’re just going to die if you don’t know what happens next. It’s a problem, but it’s a problem we can all face together.