Top Ten Tuesday #54

Hey everyone! I have another Top Ten Tuesday for you all this week, courtesy of the lovely ladies over at The Broke and Bookish. This week’s prompt was Top Ten Bookworm Delights, so I decided to do a slight twist on that and list the Top Ten Reasons I Love Being A Bookworm. Sure I could have easily done a list about things that get me excited as a bookworm, but I liked the idea of listing the reasons why I love reading so I decided to do that. So here we have it, the top ten (possibly more) reasons why I love being a bookworm:

1. You get to go on adventures without leaving the comfort of your own home-Sure, adventuring out in the real world is fun too and that’s why I love to travel, but travel is expensive and reading allows you to go on adventures without even leaving your house. Thanks to reading, I’ve been able to go on multitudes of adventures, to places both real and fantastical and I love it. It’s the best feeling in the world. You know the line about readers living a thousand different lives? Well it’s true.
2. You learn about new things-This is a pretty obvious one, reading teaches you stuff. It’s impossible for me to count all of the things that I’ve learned from reading, from historical stuff to life lessons, the amount that you can learn from books is endless.
3. It’s a great way to de-stress-Reading allows you to escape from your regular stressful life. Whenever work is getting me down, I read for an hour or so and it makes me feel much calmer, because it allows you to get away from your stress for a while and enjoy whatever adventure your book is taking you on this time.
4. It opens up your imagination-I definitely feel that reading has made me a more creative person. Reading widens your imagination, because if an author is doing their job right then you should be able to imagine their story as vividly in your head as they once did in theirs.
5. No one ever reads the same book in the same way-We all read books, sure, but the thing I love about books is that they can be so different to different people. Some people love certain books, some people hate them, we all read the same physical book, but to each person, the story inside that book can be something different and I think that’s incredible!
6. You always have something to do-If I ever get bored and have nothing to do, I just pick up a book and I’m entertained for hours! If you’re a bookworm then you never have to worry about running out of things to do, because chances are you have a book pile the size of the leaning tower of Pisa!
7. You have a community of people to fangirl with-This is more if you’re a blogger, than just simply a bookworm, but being a bookworm for me, lead to being a blogger and it means I have a community of other bookworms to fangirl with about books who understand and appreciate my nerdiness.
8. You are never alone-People seem to think that being a bookworm means that we’re solitary introverts who never leave the house or communicate with other people. This is a completely untrue. I’m going to use a quote from Matilda here to illustrate my point.

   -“So Matilda’s strong young mind continued to grow, nurtured by the voices of all those authors who had sent their books out into the world like ships on the sea. These books gave Matilda a hopeful and comforting message: You are not alone.”

   Reading to me, ensures that I am never alone. Because while it might look like I’m just sitting there with my book, really, I’m experiencing the adventure alongside the characters and we get to see characters experiencing the same things as we do in real life and see that we are not alone, other people feel the same way we do (even if they are fictional characters).

9. You get to experience other people’s perspectives-We only get to live our lives as ourselves, we never get to experience life from someone else’s perspective, but when we read, we get to read from different people’s perspectives and in a small way, it allows us to see what it would be like to be someone else.
10. Reading is like falling in love over and over again-Okay, I’ll admit, I’ve never actually been in love with a real live human being (lots of fictional boyfriends but no real ones), but I imagine it’s the same way that I feel when I read something that I really love, that same kind of indescribable joy.
11. Reading makes me feel alive-It allows you to go on adventures to far off places, places that only exist in your imagination, it allows you to time travel and go back in time to things you weren’t even alive for and there’s something about that which really makes me feel alive.
12. It’s fun-Seems pretty obvious, but reading is fun. I wouldn’t do it if it wasn’t.
13. It’s the closest thing to magic that we have-We might not be able to have real magic like the kind we all read about, but books can take you to fantasy worlds, times that have already passed, places you’ve never even imagined and that’s the closest thing to magic that we’re ever going to get.

I could go on, but I think that last one was a pretty great one to end on, so I’m going to stop here, otherwise I’ll be here writing this list all day! Why do you love reading and being bookworm? Do we share any? What was on your list this week? Let me know! Next week’s topic is Top Ten Childhood Characters I’d Like To Revisit but I’m going to do one of the suggested variations, Top Ten YA Characters I’d Like To Revisit In Ten Years. That’s next week, but in the meantime, I will have another discussion post, my second one of April for you on Saturday, so stay tuned for that.