You've heard great things about it. Everyone you look at seems to be reading it and it's been recommended to you several times. But you're busy and hardly have the space in your day to start a book that will keep you up in to the wee hours of the night. So, you pass by the book store once again and think, "oh there will be another good book out soon and maybe I'll read this one over summer." But you keep getting pestered and your mom even tells you that you would LOVE this book. So, you go to the book store and you buy it. You could've gotten it from the library and not paid a cent but this felt like "the book" and you thought it deserved the money and the special care.
As you walk down the street with your brown paper bag concealing "the book," you start to feel more invested after spending just five, short minutes with it by your side. Your walking pace speeds up to a brisk jog and the book follows you right up your apartment stairs, through the door with the broken handle, into your favorite chair with the tear on the right arm. You even forget to water your plant, Hufflepuff, because "the book" has become the center of your life.
The moment has a arrived. Everybody knows this exact feeling; opening a book for the first time and hearing the spine crackle just a bit, as the freshly printed scent of ink rises from the pages. And in that moment you feel as if your whole life has stopped and the book is calling you in and you just have to start reading or you might explode.
The first page, then the second page, then the first chapter, and all of sudden you're in the middle of the book and you hate every character and the plot hasn't developed and it seems like a soap opera stuffed onto a page. It's disappointing. You had such high expectations for "the book" and it let you down. You know it's only one book and there are millions of other books waiting to be discovered. But you still feel as if this one has stabbed you in the heart. You gave up everything for this book. ( Well, not really... Only 25 dollars, a cold afternoon, and a dying plant.) But still, you were ready to fall for this one. You were mentally prepared to cry at 4 a.m. when it ended even though you promised yourself you would save the last pages for tomorrow just so you could hold on a little longer.
You close the book that you're half way done with and push it onto your book shelf. There's nothing worse than seeing an unfinished book look at you with judgmental eyes, so you rearrange all the books on the shelf and hide it behind Atlas Shrugged and The Grapes of Wrath just so you don't have to look at it everyday.
When your friends ask you how you liked the book a couple of weeks later, you respond that it just wasn't your "cup of tea." When, in reality, you want to shake them by the shoulders and ask them how they could have ever recommended such an awful story to you because you're still up at night thinking about just how bad that book was and questioning all of humanity because somehow for the fourth week in a row, it's on the bestselling list. How?! But, you keep your composure and explain that you're now on the market for a completely obscure book that will unexpectedly take your breath away.
As you walk by the book store you see "the book" in the window and turn up your nose. After all, if it didn't captivate you, it wasn't worth it to begin with.
You know, bad books are kind of like boys.
