What Was Your First Book Love?

Book Love

Book love is something like romantic love. When we are reading a really good book, burdens seem lighter, cares seem smaller, and commonplaces are suddenly delightful. You become your best optimistic self. Like romantic love, book love fills you with a certain warmth and completeness. The world holds promise. The atmosphere is clearer and brighter, a beckoning wind blows your hair.

But while romantic love can be fleeting, book love can last. (page 7,The Little Guide to Your Well-Read Life)

You've had this feeling, all readers have. It's that book you can't put down, the story that swallows your consciousness whole and sweeps you out of your reality. It doesn't have to be a work of fiction that takes you there and it happens (hopefully) multiple times in a reader's life. There's nothing quite like being in book love... when you have it and reach the end of the tale, you long for more, ever on a quest for the next great love of your reader's soul.

How It Can Happen
 
It is our first true book love that made us readers. For some lucky people they experienced their first book love in their childhood - perhaps being read aloud to or through the pages of one of their very own first picture books. The scholarly books introduced in school helped some students feel book love for the first time, while other students, perhaps in the very same classrooms, first fell for the comic book they hid in between their schoolbook pages. And, of course, large groups of people didn't find their first book love until their formal education was far behind them.

How DID It Happen?
 
Which one are you?

Which book first captured you so completely that you longed to search for more?

I have discovered mine and that has caused me to become increasingly curious about everyone else's! I would like to do a recurring segment on Rivera Runs Through It about first book loves and I'm inviting you to participate. If you remember your first love and want to share your story, please e-mail me at blogwithnv@gmail.com so I can set up an interview with you!

Some Questions to Ponder

Here are just some of my curiosities about your first book love:

• How did you find the book? 
• When/where did you read it? 
• Have you ever re-read it? 
• What do you think first drew you in - the genre? the writing? the art? something else?
• How did you feel about reading before reading this book?
• Do you recommend the book to others?
• How easy/difficult has it been for you to fall in "book love" again since that book?

...other book-related and reading related questions.

I hope to hear from you. I also hope you are having a wonderful New Year so far and that you are in book love right now. If not, put down whatever you are reading, and go find something that wakes your soul.