You Need a Good Book Binge

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The world has been a scary place in the last couple of weeks. My mind needed a break. A time out. Let me off this ride! 

My best go to is a good book binge. I’ve never asked friends if they do this, but I love one. Often, I don’t even realize I’m bingeing until I’m in the middle of it.  

Jasmin Whiscy

Here’s what normally happens. Life. In my brain, an avalanche is bearing down on me. Whatever pressure lands on me, I search for a backdoor out of there. I’ll pick up my kindle and start browsing. This week a bookbub email reminded me about a Patricia Briggs series I hadn’t finished. She writes a book a year and has several series going. I lose track of when things come out. Thankfully, my kindle is ready to sell all kinds of books. 

I started with the first book and inhaled it over an afternoon. My guy feeds and waters me, but otherwise lets me read. He’s a very intelligent man. The dogs wander in and out as I laze around under a comfy blanket, reading. Sometimes I laugh, or maybe I gasp. If I do the latter, I’ll have both dogs in my face wondering what’s wrong.  

My finger hit buy on book two before I thought about it. I continued on reading book three then four. Then I slowed down. I was about thirty-six hours into my binge. The series list warned me there were only two books left. Did I want to read them all now? Or save them as a treat for later? 

Then my mind thought about old books that reminded me of the series I’d been eating up. I started searching my library. Turns out I’ve got over about eleven hundred books in my Goodreads library. Desperate, I started googling for the books I thought I was looking for. After about half an hour, I found the exact trilogy I wanted.  

They were short books. Maybe sixty thousand words. I blazed through them and then I wanted more. More action, more scenarios, so many more words needed to cool my stress levels. While I hunted, I visited old books I hadn’t read in a very long time. Like years. I remember most of them in vague ways. Snippets in my head were “Wolf and his secretary caught in a snowstorm.” Or “A wolf on leave from the military stuck in a snowstorm.”  

Whether the stories were short or longer, I worked my way through nine books in a couple of days. Exhausted and with my anxieties squashed, I got back to the land of the living. There were emails and texts and things that required my attention, but overall, my soul was in a better place for taking the time to rest my brain.  

The best distractions are stories. Whether you want to read, or listen to a book, maybe watch a movie or dog videos, they all are stories. As a creator of stories, letting myself float in words fills up my story bank. If you write, you need to read. Fill up your own story bank and then write the books you’re meant to.