book confessions.

As a lover of books, I have some things to get off my chest. I have some guilty literary secrets and I feel I must confess them to you.

Here are my book confessions:

I love cookbooks and have a cupboard filled with them in my kitchen but most nights, I eat a grilled cheese or microwaveable meal for dinner. If there is a cookbook out there that is full of 5-minute recipes containing cheese and 1 other ingredient, please let me know!

I’ve watched the 1995 BBC Pride and Prejudice miniseries and the 2005 Pride and Prejudice movie probably a hundred times and own both on dvd, but I can’t make it through the book without falling asleep. Same with Emma and Sense and Sensibility – love the movies, but I can’t get into the writing.

I frequently will skip to the end of a book or read ahead because I get impatient and want to know what happens. I often skim random pages ahead of where I am reading and read half a page here and half a page there in order to find out the plot.

Sometimes if I want to read a book but don’t want to buy or borrow it, I’ll go to the bookstore and stand in the aisle for an hour skimming it. I use to do this a lot when I was younger!

I judge books by their covers. Sorry, but if I don’t find the cover appealing, I probably won’t want to read your book.

I hate trilogies. Really, I just hate series where you have to read all the books in a series and invest time in reading ALL the books in order to have a conclusion. If your book ends in a cliff hanger and I have to read the next 2 books to find out what happens, there’s a good chance I won’t.

I don’t think books smell. I know this is something bibliophiles love to bring up, but maybe my nose doesn’t work right because I can hardly ever tell how a book smells. Unless a book is moldy, they all have very little aroma. Plus I have to get my nose right up next to the pages and take a deep breath in order to catch any kind of scent.

It’s hard for me to quit a book. Mostly this is because I feel guilty that someone has written all these words and I’m just giving up on them. I feel like I’m always thinking, “this book has to get better.” I’ve only not finished a handful of books.

Maybe not so much a confession because I know I’m not the only person who does this, but more than once I’ve been late to work or some other event because I’ve been reading. Just one more chapter, right?

Do you have any guilty literary confessions?