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Have you ever done anything truly outrageous for the love of books? I feel like I'm fairly ordinary when it comes to my book-loving ways - well, except perhaps for my Well-Read Llama posts - so I polled some friends, and between their recollections and my own I was able to round up ten things that we do *just* for the love of books. Whether they truly qualify as outrageous I'll let you decide. 😉
1. Lost sleep due to excitement
I don't get to go to a brick and mortar bookstore very often. Sometimes, on the nights before a visit is planned, I can't sleep because I'm too excited about the possibility of finding treasures the next day!
2. Before the days of Amazon pre-order deliveries
My friend Robin says she used to "get up real early the morning of a new release to go and buy it...but that’s not as outrageous, in my opinion, as the people who went to the bookstore at midnight! I think it was about 6:00 a.m. for me."
3. First in line
On a similar note, I've stayed up past my bedtime to select a new release for review the moment it becomes available from the publisher. Sometimes all the paperback copies are already requested if you wait until morning!
4. Must have been a good one!
My friend Susan reports that she has stayed up until 5 a.m. reading. Who needs sleep when you've got a good book in your hands?
5. Would you like fries with that?
We all know to take books with us if we anticipate any wait time at all. I don't get fast food often, but when I do, I always take a book to read while in the drive-thru. I don't like to miss a minute of reading time! 😉
6. Cleansing my palate
It's usually a fun thing when a book you enjoy gets made into a movie. But what if it's a horrible adaptation? I once saw a movie version of a beloved classic novel that was so awful I had to immediately begin rereading the book to wash away the negative impressions the film had left.
7. Using those muscles
Last year several of my favorite authors were in my town for a writing retreat, and they put together a book signing event. Between the six authors present, I owned 30 paperback books they had written (and had several more on my Kindle!). I bagged up those 30 books and took every single one to be signed - and refused to be embarrassed about it, especially when it meant so much for the authors to see me lugging them in!
8. Now that's a lot of books!
My friend Abigail used to buy and resell books online. "I have bought literally hundreds of books at a time before... I think the most I ever bought in one day was close to 800. So fun. 🙂" Wow!
9. When sharing is not caring
There's a family legend that says once upon a time my paternal grandparents were so caught up in a book that neither one wanted to put it down. In order to read it almost simultaneously, one would speed through a page, rip it out, and hand it to the other - over and over until they got to the end! I'm not sure why they had to destroy the book instead of coming up with a holistic solution like reading it aloud, but it makes for quite a story!
10. Making it personal
There's one book that meant so much to me when I read it that I bought a personal hardback copy and wrote my own forward on the flyleaf. That book is always going to have a special place in my heart and on my favorites shelf!
Find more Top Ten Tuesday posts at That Artsy Reader Girl.
