I’m still groggy after reading into the wee hours of the morning, and I’m still processing. That’s right, I’ve got a Book Hangover™.
Symptoms include:
Headache, drowsiness, concentration problems, fatigue, absence of hunger, light sensitivity, depression, hyper-excitability, irritability, anxiety, and mourning fictional characters as if they were real people. (Frankly, I find it perverse that an author would do everything in their power to make me sympathise with and admire a character — warts and all — only to kill them off.)
My skull throbs with a dozen figments of an author’s imagination and a make-belief world that feels far more real and inspired than the one I’m inhabiting—only physically, mind you—like some sort of shell-shocked zombie.
If the real world feels like a crude, garish pantomime, then don’t even get me started on other books. To read even one sentence of another book right now is unthinkable. To keep up the analogy, it would be like chasing quality red wine with dime-store vodka.
To immediately start re-reading the book is tempting, but feels a bit like a drunkard pouring water into a bottle and swishing it around, hoping to get at the last few drops. There’s just no recapturing the unadulterated magic of reading a good book for the first time, ya know?
There were signs from the start, of course, that things would end this way. The back cover proclaiming it an “epic” (that’s like 192 proof alcohol in book terms), enthusiastic recommendations; getting a little teary over tragic backstories… all went unheeded.
And finally, the one true sign I was going to be left with a real humdinger of a book hangover was the horrifying realisation that the more book I read, the less book I had. Alas, you cannot have your book and devour it too. (You can tell yourself lies, though, such as “Just one more chapter and then I’ll go to bed”.)
So, friends, what’s the cure for a book hangover? What’s hair of the dog for getting the author’s sticky tendrils out of your head and re-immersing yourself in the real world?
Perhaps the only cure is time… and maybe, the second book in the trilogy.
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