Cracking book spines won't make the world end

And other things I've learnt from my reading life.

I have always been that kind of person: book spines can’t be cracked, book pages can’t be dog-eared, notes must be taken in pencil only.

To me, books have always been sacred and didn’t have to be damaged in any way, they had to be pristine on my shelf, even after reading them. I still am that kind of person in a way and I know that a lot of people couldn’t suffer me for that. My mom, for sure, always found me unnerving, being her my exact opposite and borrowing many of my books when I was still living at home.

I still remember the heart aching feeling when a friend of mine handed me back my hardback copy of The Da Vinci Code that I had borrowed to her one Summer long time ago. It looked like it had gone through war. The dust-jacket was torn and dirty and even discolored in some parts, the cardstock corners of the book all bent and rounded, the edges smudged with dirt. I was speechless, she didn’t even apologise when I asked her what happened to my book, she simply laughed rolling her eyes to my surprised stare because I was the weirdo obsessing over pristine books. From that moment onwards I stopped borrowing books and started finding excuses instead. (Besides that other time I was fooled by a crush on a boy who wanted to read a book I owned and he wrecked it as well…*sighs*)

During the last few years though, I started buying more books in English and I noticed that paperbacks especially most of the times have very stiff paper that makes the reading experience quite unpleasant and, to my dismay, it’s impossible not to crack the spines¹. So I have become one of those people who crack book spines. And guess what? The world hasn’t ended…yet. Maybe it has to do with age (or the actual impossibility to reading a book otherwise) but I’m getting good at it. I still wouldn’t dog-ear a page for the life of me though.

This leads me to the other aspect: shitty paper / pretty covers.

Even if I’m becoming a pro at cracking spines, it doesn’t mean that I love it. When I buy a new book in a bookstore I should always feel the book and not stop at a pretty cover. It’s scientifically proven that most of the times pretty covers will have shitty stiff paper and that would lead to cracked spines. So yes, I’m that kind of person who can be spotted testing the floppiness of a book before purchasing it. I still have the decency of looking myself around to be sure that I’m alone before shaking the book though!

Finally, a curious thing that I’ve learned lately is that I should only read finished series because I tend to forget the details of the stories if too much time passes between a book and the other. With ongoing series you may even wait a couple of years before the release of the next book and if I’m not in the mood to re-read the previous ones(s) because the time passed is not enough to have an almost blank slate, then I could struggle to remember events, characters and places. So lesson learned, I look at you, Emily Wilde²…

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The fact that cracking book spines won’t make the world end was only one of the discoveries I made during the last few years. I always find it interesting to observe my reading life from the outside and see in what aspects it has changed over the years. Who knew that I would have rediscovered fantasy in my 30s after a decade of “fantasy is my favourite genre” and then reading only mysteries?

1. Books printed by italian publishing houses usually have not so stiff paper and are more manageable to read, even if the cover design suck most of the times, at least for me.

2. I have struggled quite a bit this Spring with Emily Wilde's Compendium of Lost Tales, the last book of the trilogy, because I had read the previous one (Emily Wilde's Map of the Otherlands) one year ago and it turned out that I had forgotten quite a lot of things.