A person entranced by a book simply forgets to breathe. The house can catch alight and a reader deep in a book will not look up until the wallpaper is in flames. 
– Mister Pip, by Lloyd Jones.

 

For non-wizarding folk, the sorcery of books are both beguiling and abominably out of their domain of faith. Why? Because it is more than difficult to pretend that when the novel you stay up for till 3, maybe 4am in the morning (when you know you shouldn’t be), simply ends and a part of you has been shut along with it. I, for one cannot take the idea of something ending. Limitations are suffocating. Claustrophobic to the point of “how free are you on the scale of 1 to America” whence July the 4th.

Do books end? Physically, yes. Via paperback or hardback. Figuratively, no. Ever heard of fanfiction? It’s not just a website for penning down the what if’s and the what could have been’s or what the children of the seventeen year old protagonists would look like ten years later. It’s a living vat of butter churning away in everyone’s brains all day, everyday. The characters, the story, the facial expressions, the very way they “speak” are basically alive in us. It’s living in us, inhabiting our very beings whether that’s involuntarily or voluntarily.

Going back to Lloyd Jones and appropriating that to the digital age, however, a physically-bound book can literally stop you from looking up when your house is alight. (Have you seen those Folio Society books?) If you’re using a smart little phone, the key word is little. It’s small enough for your peripheral vision to take in the burning curtains and scream (or maybe snapchat) its poor demise. Tragic, really.

‘A person entranced by a book simply forgets to breathe.’
And this. Does this mean that when the book kills you, everything ends then? Tragically, yes. Metaphorically, no. Death is simply the beginning. You know what? Perhaps I’ll even write a story about that.

To the River of Styx it is!