10 Bookworm Delights

This week the ladies at The Broke and the Bookish are talking about bookish delights -- all the wonderful things associated with books and reading. This was a super easy and fun list to compile because books foster so many wonderful, unique experiences and perspectives and products. Reading just enhances life, darnit! So below we have my top 10 bookworm delights. What are yours?


1. Achieving that perfect "curl up with a book" ambiance -- preferably with rain or snow coming down outside, a blanket, a fireplace crackling, a warm beverage, and a soft, furry animal on your lap. Oh yeah, and a totally engrossing read!

2. Seeing as #1 can't really be accomplished in the warmer months, I also love lounging in my hammock with a good book and a glass of iced tea, birds chirping in the yard and the sun warming my skin. I just bought a fun pillow for my hammock so I'll probably be even more likely to doze off while reading now...

3. Literary tourism! How awesome is it to work some bookish fun into a vacation, like visiting Jane Austen's house, or Hemingway's residence on the Florida Keys, or the Harry Potter film studio, or staying at a book-themed hotel like this one? Recently I convinced my husband to take a little detour off I-70 so I could visit the Community Bookshelf at the Kansas City Public Library and I could not have been more excited! Below is a photo from our trip to New York City last summer, when I dragged everyone to the New York Public Library to see the stuffed animals that inspired Winnie-the-Pooh. (So cool!)

4. The joy of becoming totally immersed in another world. My fandom of choice is Harry Potter, and I was lucky enough to visit The Wizarding World of Harry Potter in Orlando a few months ago. It was AMAZING. (That's a butterbeer mustache!)

5. New book smell and old book smell. Mmmm.

6. Bookish goods and plenty of places to buy them! I've bought some gorgeous art prints from Etsy, I have several fun t-shirts, and I recently ordered a bookish pillow from Society 6. I have my eye on many, many more things, like all those book-themed candles, bookish jewelry, a million other Harry Potter goodies...

7. One thing I love about reading is that I learn something from every single book I read, even fiction (not to mention all the new vocabulary words).  I'm an obsessive Googler and I have to look up everything I encounter reading that I'm not familiar with: green mamba snakes, Lululemon workout gear, Angkor Wat temple, the Pink Door restaurant in Seattle. And I've discovered so many places to visit, foods to try and products I'd never heard of. For instance, I added an Antarctica cruise to my bucket list after reading "Where'd You Go, Bernadette."

8. Hand-in-hand with #7, I love when a book I've read enhances a real-life experience. For instance, I read "Molokai" by Alan Brennert when we were stationed in Hawaii, and I think it made me appreciate the mule ride we took down to the leper colony of Kalaupapa a million times more, having vividly experienced life there through the novel. And after I read "The Devil in the White City," we visited the Biltmore, the gardens of which were designed by famed landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, one of the book's characters.

9. When a book I love gets turned into a movie, and I actually love the movie too! ("The Martian," the Hunger Games trilogy, "Gone Girl.") I also adore all the different Sherlock Holmes iterations.

10. The joy of an intense book discussion. Bookish camaraderie. Booknerds uniting. The wonderful community -- online and in real life -- for readers. Books bringing people together.