31 Signs You Like Books More Than You Like People

1. You often cancel plans to stay home and read, because you just have to find out what happens in the next chapter.

2. In almost everything you read, you find which character you would be, and with the books you really love, you can cast everyone in your life as someone in the novel.

3. You’ll read the same book repeatedly, just to experience it over and over, as much as possible.

4. You’ve binge-read a book or a series until you could finish the whole thing, staying up late nights and avoiding sleep because you just couldn’t put it down.

5. You bring a book with you everywhere, even to movies, concerts or the gym, just in case you need great literature on hand.

6. When you go on vacation, you often bring more books than you do pairs of shoes, and friends or family members will to try force you to leave some of them behind, saying there will be no time to read. There’s always time to read.

7. You often wish you could go back in time to live in Paris with the Lost Generation or London with the Bright Young Things — to see the world like Hemingway, Fitzgerald or Evelyn Waugh.

8. You sometimes describe yourself as having been “born too late” or “having an old soul.”

9. When reading a great book, you get deeply invested in the lives of the character, and you feel like you know them. If it’s a book you’ve read more than once, reading it feels like revisiting old friends.

10. You often kill time in libraries or bookstores, not to get anything, just to browse and skim. Except that you almost always leave with something.

11. Your favorite Christmas present is an Amazon gift card.

12. You can walk while reading a book at the same time, like Belle in Beauty and the Beast. You totally get her deal, except for that whole beastality thing.

13. You know more about your favorite authors than many of the people you know.

14. If someone were to ask you “which book you would live in,” you totally know the answer. (My pick: almost anything by P.G. Wodehouse.)

15. You’ve felt more strongly about the death of a beloved character than the passing of someone you knew.

16. Also, you took the death of your favorite author really hard, as if you had lost a friend or a loved one. You know that you never met, but it felt like you were inside his brain. He got you.

17. Your bedside table and coffee table are piled high with books and there are stacks scattered all over your house. They just have a way of invading your life.

18. You look at almost everything as a potential bookmark, from a receipt and a movie ticket to an errant fruit. A banana is a great placeholder.

19. You have very strong opinions on whether or not you should take notes in the margins, if you’re the kind of person who likes their pages clean or marked up.

20. You don’t need a date to go out and eat. Taking a book and ordering a nice cup of coffee with your meal is just as good of company, if not better.

21. You can’t wait for your social engagements to end, so you can go home and read.

22. At work everyone else will be in the lunchroom on their break, but you’re more likely to be found at your desk or outside — with a book and a sandwich.

23. You own more books than you could probably ever read in your life, and you might not have even cracked open half of them in your house. Don’t worry. You’ll get to them. You swear.

24. When you’re really invested in what you’re reading, you tune the whole world out. A bomb could go off and you might not even notice.

25. You think that the book is always better than the movie — unless the book was really shitty already. You often won’t see the movie version, because you know you’re going to be disappointed.

26. You often develop inappropriate crushes on characters and wish that people were more like Mr. Darcy or Zooey Glass. (Fact: I once had a sex dream about Patrick Bateman.)

27. You love the part where you both get to curl up with a book after sex as much as sex. Great literature is the best form of cuddling.

28. When you really like someone, you give them a book that’s meaningful to you to read, partially to test them but also because that book is a part of you.

29. You regularly judge other people by their book collections, just to see what type of person they are. You think you can tell a lot about someone by what’s on their shelf.

30. Sometimes when you’re talking to someone, you find yourself thinking about the book you’re reading or wondering how a certain character might react to this conversation.

31. You have a book in your head you’ve always wanted to write and you know you will one of these days.