Life Of A Bibliophile

By Manya Shahani

“Books are safer than people anyway.” Books, something which have a contrasting meaning for everyone. For some, they are just a collection of papers, but for others they are the real definition of best friends or heaven. And I find pleasure to be a part of those others. Analogous bookworms like me are known as "Bibliophiles", people who collect or have a prominent love of books. My journey of loving books started back in 2018 in grade 5 when my class teacher occasionally used to narrate the story of the Harry Potter books. Everything about it was just so fascinating. And that's how I awakened the Bibliophile inside me. My first series was the Harry Potter series which got me into researching more about books. And that research led me to so many amazing authors, genres and even books of different languages. Well, that was my expedition of becoming a bibliophile, a short one indeed. Now describing the bibliophile community, it is immensely colossal and diverse. Their preferences, genres, and authors all vary from person to person. But of course, we do have similarities

too. Talking about them, the major one is that we love bookshops. That was kind-of self explanatory but bookshops mean a lot to us. If you’ll ask us the definition of heaven, we’ll simply take you to a book shop. Our TBR(to be read) list never stops. Oh yes it never does! Even though we have a pile of books on our shelf waiting for us to read them, we still buy a dozen more. And then it comes to a point where your mom doesn’t buy you more books, because in her opinion, you already have a lot to read. But she would not never be able to understand us. We feel proud of our book collection. Oh yes, we do! We love to show people our shelves, our collections. Well not only people, we feel proud of ourselves about the collection. Seeing our bookshelves is just another satisfaction. For us, it is the actual peace and happiness, the escape from reality. For us, book characters are the comfort beings in our life, the ones with whom we can relate, the ones who are our friends without being physically present with us. They are the ones who know the pain of being alone, they understand you when

no else does. Books for us are just another world where we wish we can go someday. Books are and will always be my best friends. “Books are a uniquely portable magic”

By Manya Shahani