Is My Bibliophilia Unhealthy?

One time, many years, ago, I was at this semi-swanky party in Brooklyn. A cocktail party or birthday soiree or some bullshit. If you know anything about me, you know I’m about as swanky as a moldy peach on the side of the highway, so when I entered, people started to naturally gravitate away from me. I have that way about me in general. I’m a Scorpio, socially awkward, tall, oversized, sulky, and like a dark shadow that makes other people feel uneasy. Sure, people tolerate me, in so much as they would tolerate the grim reaper if it showed up at a cocktail party.

I’m navigating my way through this party, feigning busyness, which mainly consisted of me gorging on finger foods and refilling my wine cup, when somebody said, “That’s not my favorite Murakami novel.”

And the world stopped. Everything around me froze. Voices ceased to be. My heart started to hammer. I immediately flew over to whoever had uttered these words and I caught whiffs about how Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage is not representative of Haruki Murakami’s oeuvre, a notion I strongly disagreed with. Before I know it, I was talking, mingling, as long as the subject of Murakami stayed in focus, or at least in the peripheral.

In hindsight, this story illustrates an illness about myself—a perceived illness, I should clarify, not an actual illness: If somebody mentions books or writing, something peculiar happens. I metamorphosize. From the closed-off, 99-percent-introverted, don’t-talk-to-me shadow that I normally am into a laughing, wow-this-Scorpio-is-not-a-total-asshole social bee. My personality becomes looser. My mood shifts. I’m social and do I daresay pleasant to be around. I’m no longer a shadow, but something of a human, opening up to the world. I get, in so many words, intoxicated by talking about books.

Which begs a few questions straight off the bat: First, what’s wrong with me? Then: Is there something wrong with me? Then: Is it truly possible that I have nothing else meaningful to talk about?

Short answer: It’s complicated. Of course, there are many things happening in my life not book-centric. For starters, I have a kid, which entails its own sets of discussions. But, also, social media is chock-full of important issues that demand attention and discussion. But, even then, as I discuss these issues, I often think about them in terms of narrative, story. Not a book per se, but how every little damn thing, even that snail that has made its journey across my driveway, has a story. And that’s what writing is to me more than anything: story.

I guess being sober, more or less, has resulted in me hyper-focusing on such the phenomenon of story, and using the concreteness of books to manifest this obsession. I overspend on books. I surround myself with books, literally. I read at least five books at a time (a print book, an audiobook, an ebook on my phone, the book I am proofreading, and an ebook on my Kindle, at minimum). I married someone who studies books as a living, and we even had a literary wedding (with Virginia Woolf quotations interwoven throughout). My job as a copyeditor/proofreader is to read books. My friends are writers, my colleagues are readers, and my inspiration for my first tattoo is inspired by books. But most of all, my interaction with the world, my connection to it, and my connection to other human beings, seems to be through the filter of books, which both limits me but also opens me up.

So, I continue to wonder, and will continue to work through: Is my extreme love of books taking it too far? Is it a patch for some deep psychological problems? Or, is this chosen drug—since I don’t really do other drugs—an acceptable and even salubrious way to make sense of living?