Lending and Giving Away Books

I’ll be honest, most of what I have read this week has been emails. But I am sure with the school being moved online and my parents wanting me to come home I am hoping that I will have more time to read! What I have taken notice to though from packing up my dorm room is the different types of books I have.

            I have a pretty even distribution of books I have read and books I haven’t read. Of the books I have read, I have been trying to lend them out to people. When it comes to lending out books, I really enjoy doing it. If I read a book for pleasure reading, I don’t normally annotate, but if I really like a book I will highlight my favorite parts. When I lend books to people I kind of like to see their annotations. I enjoy what they see as important or impactful. Some things I don’t mind, like bending spines or dog-earring pages. I hate doing it myself but when I lend out a book to someone, I expect that everyone reads books differently.

            There was one book, All the Bright Places they just made it into a Netflix movie, that I have not yet convinced myself to watch. I mentioned this book in particular because I think it has a really interesting “transferring books” story. I read the book in my freshman year if High school, and something you have to understand about this book in particular is that it is a really REALLY sad book. I am very easily influenced by the things I either watch or read. So, binging that book and getting really invested in the sad characters head space, made me really sad after finishing it. So sad, in fact, that I felt like I needed to get rid of it. I still though it was a good book though so I passed it on to my cousin, who would normally take recommendations from me. This time though, she was really surprised that I GAVE it to her. I warned her that it was sad and let her have it. After she finished it though, I found out she had felt the same way and passed to book on to her friend because she felt like she needed to get rid of it as well. A few years later I asked her if she knew what her friend did with the book and she told me that her friend gave it away after reading it too! I have since lost contact of where the book is but I imagine it has been making its way to different people which I think is a really cool!