30 Signs You Like Books More Than You Like People
If the internet goes out, you won't gripe. Well, maybe you'll gripe for like a second, but then you grab a book and you're fine.
By 
Ella Ceron
1. You have a love/hate relationship with the concept of an eBook. On the one hand, how dare you remove that most visceral of pleasures, the turning of pages, the smell of books, the way they greet you so happily when you come home and see your bookshelf…
2. But then you try to take five really heavy books with you on vacation and you’re like, okay, I get it.
3. Any bag you buy has one major rule: will it fit your wallet, your phone, your keys, a pair of sunglasses, and a book? Clutches need not apply.
4. You welcome the idea of someone giving you a book for the holidays, even though it is the kind of present that may have once made the 5 year-old you shudder with disappointment. You didn’t know any better as a child. You have since repented. (Read: books cost how much?!)
5. You have a patented method of curling up with a book in the corner of Barnes & Noble so as to rouse the least amount of suspicion possible from the staff.
6. Any time anyone tells you that they loooove [Insert Trendy, Polarizing Book Series Here] you have to remind yourself that at least they’re reading. At least they’re trying.
7. (You’ve totally read all the books in the series, too.)
8. UGK’s line in the defining rap hit “Big Pimpin'” about illiterate fools reading books and picking up their vocab is one of your favorite insults.
9. There is one book that shadows your past. You have lent copies of this book to countless people whom you couldn’t believe hadn’t read it, only to never see the copies again, so you buy another one, only to meet someone else who hasn’t read it so you lend it to them, only to…
10. Secondhand bookshops and library booksales are your crack. HOW MANY PRECIOUS BABY BOOKS FOR A DOLLAR EACH?!
11. You especially treasure the books you find with little inscriptions on the inside covers. The lives these books have lived. The apartments they’ve seen. The people who have loved them!
12. You hold all of your potential love interests against the John Waters test: if you go back to their place and see nary a book in sight, thanks but no thanks.
13. If the internet goes out, you won’t gripe. Well, maybe you’ll gripe for like a second, but then you grab a book and you’re fine.
14. Or you didn’t even notice, because you were curled up with a really good book anyway.
15. You have very strong feelings regarding the hardcover versus paperback debate.
16. Knowing that someone you know owns a first edition of a book you adore is enough to make you go blind with jealousy.
17. You’ve reread some of the books you had to read in high school and college, and were amazed at the nuance that you didn’t pick up the first time around. The Great Gatsby in high school? Meh. The Great Gatsby today, as you yourself are a struggling 20-something disillusioned with the false sense of hope in the sprawling metropolis defined by capitalism and consumerism and— I mean, you get it.
18. You could replace your bedside table with the stack of books on it and it’d still reach the same surface height.
19. Whenever you make your bed, you wind up finding the strangest assortment of books nestled up in your sheets.
20. Why is it a novelty to have a library card? Everyone should have one.
21. Amazon’s suggestion emails are to you what Netflix Recommends is to everyone else.
22. You’ve considered working part time at a bookstore to help fund your habit. Do they have work study? Is that a thing you can do?
23. Your opinions on people who write all over the pages in their books are very strong.
24. Chances are, you are someone who writes all over the pages of your books.
25. You live in fear of the next time you have to move, because it is all those boxes of all those books, and not your furniture, that is the heaviest and most precious of assets you’ll have to transport.
26. If you are a tattoo person, you have a quote from your favorite book inked somewhere along your body. (Or at least you’ve thought of doing it.)
27. Seriously, if someone were to gift you with the kind of library that the Beast gave Belle in Beauty and the Beast… I mean, how could you NOT fall in love with them?
28. Would it be going too far to hold funerals for the books you’ve read so often that the spine has cracked and the glue has disintegrated and the binding has come unstitched and pages have gone to where pages go in the great beyond?
29. You have a really, really hard time trusting people who thought the movie was better than the book. You love them — really, you do — but they’re so misguided and it just. It hurts your heart, you know? Don’t fret, you can show them the error of their ways.
30. You know that if you’re ever having a bad day, all you have to do is curl up in the corner of the couch with a book, lose yourself in the story of characters who are really more like your friends, and everything will once again be right with the world. 
