Teenage bibliophile

While other teenagers always get berated by their parents because of playing too many online games, partying until midnight and spending too much time with their boyfriends or girlfriends, I get in trouble for reading books way past my bedtime.

Too often, people ask me why I love reading books when after all these are just works of fiction and completely boring. And I just sit there thinking why there are people who ask stupid questions like that. I mean, what’s not to love about reading books? Why shouldn’t you love something that gives meaning to your life? And even though the characters aren’t real, the happiness, pain and tears are. Most importantly, why would I find boring something that makes my blood race and makes me feel so alive?

As a matter of fact, reading keeps saving me in every way that a person can be saved. I’m someone who doesn’t like sharing her miseries with other people, and books have become my saving grace. Unlike people, books don’t ask silly questions, books don’t judge, books don’t leave you alone. That is why I spend most of my time content and happy in curling up with a book.

For most people, reading is dull and boring. It’s something they wouldn’t do unless their professors require it. But they must know, reading is only boring to those who don’t indulge and savor the book. Because once you really give attention to it, once you really care, you will often identify yourself with the characters, you will consider their flaws as your flaws and their strength as your strength. And the more you read, the more you feel like you know the characters really well, so well that you begin to think that they really exist, and that you have spent most of your life with them, and that knowing them was able to save you in every way possible. You start to feel like you belong somewhere, that you have found home.

And it doesn’t stop there. The more you read books, the more you will believe that life can be an adventure, that the good can prevail in the end, that people can really love each other forever, that there can be peace, that we can all end up happy, that magic can happen. You see, books not only take you to different places and let you live multiple lives, they also make you believe that the impossible can be possible, and that even though a dream has yet to happen, we begin living our lives hoping and believing that someday it will.

That’s why for me, there’s nothing that’s more real and more perfect than books. I mean, what would be more perfect than millions of lives and experiences written in words and bound in pages you can hold, smell and embrace? What’s more perfect than something that brings you into a whole new world and a whole new life just through flipping a page? What is more perfect than something which doesn’t have the ability to breathe and live, but has the power to make you feel alive?

We all have our saving grace. Something that we hold on to whenever we feel like we’re on the verge of falling and whenever we feel like giving up. Something that we can’t live without. Something that if we never discovered, our whole life will lose its meaning and we won’t even know how we will survive. And for a teenage bibliophile like me, that something has taken form in a book.

Oh, and one more thing about reading books: Remember, dinosaurs did not read. And what happened to them?

Trisha Mapacpac, 14, is a junior student at Quezon National High School and an aspiring journalist.