books are humanity in print.

'Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I'm not living' - Jonathan Safran Foer (Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close)

I used to be a massive book worm. The librarian at school and I were on first name terms (not really, but we should have been) and she totally let me borrow more books at a time than was allowed re: library policies.

Then something happened and i stopped reading. I suppose I was stressed in the last two years of high school and I didn't want to read more than was required.

Luckily, I found the beauty of reading again in uni and am hungrily devouring as many books as I can.

Although you learn from your own life experiences and mistakes, I think there is only so much you can learn from that one life you are given.

As mozzarella cheesy as this may sound, I learn so much from reading - all the experiences, lessons, knowledge and quotes of others that I come across from reading, I often take to heart and learn from it. All the things I'm unable to learn from all the lives I'm unable to live.

Maybe I'm just really young and impressionable, but I find that books are also never short of inspirations.

But it is probably rarer than the pink amazonian dolphin to find someone who has read On the Road and was not fuelled and infected by wanderlust.

It's also a freaking amazing way to escape reality i.e. re-reading Harry Potter twice a year, every exam period of each semester (still waiting for my letter from Hogwarts).

Reading really should be one of the daily to-dos for everyone, even if it's just to improve on grammar and spelling. Because everyone knows that good grammar and spelling are hot. And you'll get sexual action (refer to quote below).

'If you go home with somebody and they don't have books, don't fuck them' - John Waters

I'm very very close to finishing reading Naked Lunch. In saying all this, I'm actually not quite sure what I've learnt from this book. Maybe just that William S. Burroughs was really a troubled (and gifted) writer and heroin is B.A.D. baaad (don't care how good your veins are).

This book/movie is so disturbing. It's like the love child of a violent and perverted 3 way between Trainspotting, Choke and American Psycho.