Practically speaking, books are the most useless things in the world. Unless you’re short on firewood (which I imagine they are excellent for) it’s hard to see the value in wrinkly old pages written primarily by wrinkly old men, especially when YouTube and Netflix exist and will probably get you more bang for your buck without forcing you to struggle through twenty pages of flowery prose and exposition. 

I agree that my time might be better spent finishing those twenty math problems due tomorrow. Or the many, many articles I have yet to write. But somehow, somehow, despite all the angry red marks on my agenda and notes-to-self and promises to actually get some work done this time, I always end the day, no matter how much work I have yet to complete, with a book in my hands.

That’s why I hate books. Books are evil. They annihilate my grades and pile up on my shelves faster than I can get through them, and they’ll always keep coming because no matter what I do there’s no way I can actually read every book there is.

I realized this fact upon my first visit to the Arcadia Public Library, a Great Dane of a library that made my elementary school’s library seem like a Chihuahua in comparison. I could barely recite my times tables at the time, but the sheer enormity of the catalog was enough to make me wonder how the heck there were enough people in the world to write this many stories. I remember listening to hours tick by as I wove through colonnades packed with shiny, plastic-wrapped spines, often until my parents threatened to leave me behind if I didn’t hurry and check something out. 

I spent so much time at the library that, to this day, many of my happiest memories are buried somewhere between the first and last pages of its books. If I close my eyes, I can still remember how it felt, reading to the comforting sounds of deadened footsteps and chatter, eyes gliding through lines like scissors through silk, imbibing on every painterly observation of exotic locales, loving, fighting, and dying alongside every character whose eyes I saw the world through.

Every one of those books held a person and their story. A world utterly foreign to my own. It still makes me sad to think that no matter how hard I read, I’ll never be able to read every good book out there. But then I think to myself that if there’s anything I hope will never change from now to the day I die, it’s to always end the day, no matter how many more assignments I still have to finish, with a book in my hands and a story in my heart.