Giving Thanks: Books of (nearly every) genre

Hi everyone! Welcome back to Too Many Books to Count! I’m so glad you stopped by. It’s November, the month of Thanksgiving where I’m from, and so I wanted this month’s theme to match, in some way. This year, I went completely literal. So all month long, we’re talking about things that I’m thankful for, as an author and editor, and looking at them through a lens that you might not have thought about previously.

So far, we’ve talked about things like wordsmiths, creativity, and even linguistics—and today, we’re talking about the most obvious thing.

Giving Thanks: Books of (nearly every) genre

We’re writers, so obviously we love books. We have to. If we didn’t love books, we probably wouldn’t be in this field. And that’s okay. We wouldn’t have to be. But I don’t think enough of us really consider why we ought to be thankful for books, or what it is about books that requires our thanks. It’s not the authors behind them, not the people behind them who’ve worked to make those books amazing and readable and like a work of art that we could step into without a beat, nor is it the editors who’ve slaved for hours on end to help those authors make these books exactly what they are by the time we read them. No, it’s the books themselves, that we should be thankful for.

Why? Because books aren’t just the thing we love, the thing we work in, the thing we pride ourselves on. Books are adventures. Books are lessons. Books are whatever we take them to be, on the day we pick them up. Books are a way we learn about the world around us, in a way we can’t do through television, or even through audio (yeah, I said it—you won’t get as much out of a book if you only listen to it).

Be thankful for books, because books were created for you, for a purpose.

For me, books are a form of escape, in some ways. It’s a way to move from reality into a new world, a world that’s very different from the one in which I really live. They’re also a way to learn. I read books a great deal, even rather than searching the internet in some cases, in an effort to learn things I didn’t already know. Books are a way for me to discover things, a way for me to understand the world in new ways, all because I sat down and read for a few hours.

I don’t think we think about it enough, if I’m being perfectly honest. I think that we take books for granted, and that we should really think about it, like we should think about all the little things in our lives—and be thankful, because as you’ve seen in many of those books on your shelves, the world could’ve turned out differently, in many different ways. There could’ve been a world with no books, and where would we be, then?

I don’t want to know. I don’t want to know, at all.

[love]

{Rani Divine}