Bibliophilia: An Essay on Reading

I find that on these dull days, I haven’t a crumb under the kitchen table; I haven’t a word to describe the feeling on the tip of my tongue; I haven’t an overarc to give way to the desperation I feel. On these dull days, where the sun comes out to play only a moment; only a whisper, which my ears can hardly tolerate; only minutes my perilous body can bear. And on these dull days, I overread. If there is even such a thing. I devour stacks of pages across mere hours before moving to the next stack. I devour them like this; like the key Sarah Chihaya’s Bibliophobia (2025) hits just right: 

“I read [One Friday in April] in a couple of hours lying flat on the couch and only got up three times, once to pee and twice to move my agitated body around unsteadily, alternatively crouching and pacing. The rest of the time, I just lay there, tears soaking the pillow beneath me like a sour, damp halo, and turning pages, occasionally keeling so loud and tragicomically that I wondered, as I often do, what the employees of the concrete company downstairs must have thought… I felt my whole body seize as I started reading the book; it did not relax until well after the last page.” (p. 204,6).

Upon reflection, I, too, posit: we humans crave books that will set us ablaze and mold our insides into a new shape of existence, a genesis for our meager, lonesome lives. I crave a book to refine my insides into something good, as if words in sentences in paragraphs in books could cleanse the improper within my thin bones. I erratically split myself between neon scatters of post-its, dog-ears, and chicken-scratch notes. This is the ecstasy I seek in my reading: to flip and fly through pages of library books, on-sale books, borrowed books, and classics of childhood. Over and through, I flip myself, scanning the text for a place worth stopping: a prose-stuck chord for my melting heart to meld into. This tension, too, Chihaya viciously unfolds, between bibliophilia (obsession with books)  and bibliophobia (obsession with books, driven by phobic-threshold fear)- the space between: delicate, glossy; thinly spun in a spiderweb-like form.

During my recent sprint through ivory paper-stacks, I could not be bothered to stop, to take notes, or record the passages that moved me the most, and instead dog-eared the heck out of that blessed library book (O God, may the circulation desk forgive me). Hours before finishing this very text and dipping into its epilogue, I lay in a frighteningly similar “sour, damp halo” on my yoga mat of all places, excreting the emotion with which the day left me. Books like these send my body spinning around my living room- like a lizard frantically leaving its tail behind- book held taught upon my chest, my heartbeat erratic beneath skin. Chihaya similarly unfolds: “...To wrap myself in it, burrow inside it-not in the scholarly convolutions of the book’s plot but really inside the vibrant grain of its texture, the very fibers of its style” (Chihaya, p. 94). This is exactly how I choose a book. I am keenly aware of the coincidence, however, quick to posit: inhaling paragraphs is the oxygenation of every author. After all, “How important it is to read a book that so undoes you that it becomes a precious token of your own destruction to carry to the end of your days” (Chihaya, p. 90). For if we are not changed in reading, we have no business in authorship at all. 

…

This, yes, this is the catharsis of my soul. This very moment. On a Sunday evening, a crow lands outside my window, on a branch, upon the backlight of clouds. I ask myself, is a reader even necessary? The answer, obviously: no. This gravity I experience toward books, is an act of coping. Because I am beginning to feel that the more I want to communicate, the less I can. Every basic word and phrase ravished, my tongue left dry, and my mouth too frozen in fear to open- emptied of all words in one hour, one conversation. The clock will need to perform gymnastics for another twenty-four hours whilst I recover. Otherwise, I fear I will not express a single thought again. My eyes swell, welling with actual, glass-like tears: vulnerable, unsafe, unknown. My chest feels angry and overwhelmed, vibrating with the need to know what is wrong (with me). Why can’t I just talk? Where have my words gone? A soliloquy: 

It is scary to be soft, to feel at all, to feel it all. I’ve lost my appetite- not just for food but for life. There’s a part of me wishing I didn’t have to fight a way forward; that I could vanish into a Kentucky morning’s rural mist. I don’t want to trailblaze anymore. I don’t want to fight so hard just for a place to exist in the world. 

And, in the mirror-like words of Mary Ruefle in Singular Dream, 

O Lord Almighty, creator of 

All things beautiful and sick, 

Who prefers another life on top of this…? 

…

I wonder: is the only softness in this world that which I’ve fashioned in my own palms? Even still, my existence prays in the words of Chambers (1992):

We cannot kindle when we will 

The fire which in our heart resides, 

The Spirit bloweth and is still,

In mystery our soul abides;

But tasks in hours of insight willed 

Can be through hours of gloom fulfilled.

Is it possible for gloom to be logged toward goodness? I question whether my own is worth anything.  

After all, “The kind of reader I wanted to be then was…‘'like God in the universe, present everywhere visible nowhere.’ This is exactly how I wanted to feel in a book…This desire to just be air circulating slowly through a setting…”  (Chihya, 2025, p. 43). Where does one turn when the temptation of becoming a wallflower is too great? When the dusk-like gray of a thundering afternoon settles into the bedroom? When the desire for pasta is overcome by the fear of eating it? What if, after all, “I feel the fog clearing from the corridors of my brain, words reassembling, connecting with their meaning, questions forming” (Weinberg, 2024, p.61)? Yet, however these questions form, will I ever find answers for them? In the end, I suppose all I want is a safe home within the “answers.” Even so, Chihaya reminds me, the calm lent to me; the “sensation of great smugness” is a sign that we have not achieved the enlightenment we hope for through literature. This “home” we hope for is, in the words of James Baldwin, “not a place but simply an irrevocable condition” (Giovanni’s Room).