A Love Letter to the Bookish Community // A Bibliosmile Guest Post by Vinny

Welcome to The Bibliosmile Project, a series here on Novels & Waffles that aims to spotlight how books (+ the bookish community), has brought smiles, happiness, and positivity into our lives. Through an ongoing series of guest posts, different readers will share their stories of bookish happiness and spread some much-needed positivity, sunshine, and smiles with us all. Hopefully, reading about how books have brought a smile to their faces, it will bring one to yours as well. You can read more about this series in my introduction and catch up on previous guest posts here.

If you’re interested in writing a guest post as part of The Bibliosmile Project, then please contact me at my email, [email protected].

Vinny’s Bibliosmile Story

Hi, everyone. My name is Vinny and I’m blogging over at Artsy Draft. First of all, I want to thank Kat for hosting this wonderful feature to share excitement, happiness, and positivity all around this community. Just like any other community, sometimes, the bookish community can be full of drama, miscommunication or even toxic individuals. But hopefully, with this feature, we can push all of the negative energy aside and just focusing on the positive ones! 😊

In my post today, I want to share about how the bookish community helped, inspired and motivated me. A quick throwback story, I’m a fan of reading ever since I could remember. The first physical book that I owned was Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, and I can remember the day I begged my father to bought me one. I pretty much became a Potterhead that day and since then, I started reading other books as well. Comics, mangas, middle-grade stories, you name it. I spent my childhood sitting in the school library, drowning in detective stories or magical tales. This habit continued until I was in high school. That moment, something’s changed. I realized I don’t want to just read. I want to discuss and talk about books that I read too. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find anyone, because most of my classmates read different books, different genres, or not even reading at all. And with the growth of technology and appearance of smartphones, I started drifting away from books. Instead, I’d spent my free times scrolling endlessly on social media, reading articles about conspiracy theories or watching Youtube.

This happened for years, until a year ago, I accidentally found the bookish community on Twitter. I was amazed by the amount of passion and dedication that people devours into reading. I was internally screaming because this is exactly what my teenage self was looking for back then! Long story short, I decided to join the fun and here are how the bookish community helped me during this past year:

Bookish community made me fall in love with reading again.

I’m not going to lie, but after not reading properly for years, it was difficult to start reading again. All this time, I consumed stories from other media, such as movies, TV, and podcasts. Those media are much more dynamic and delivered stories faster. There will always be a new title or a new episode that demanded you to keep up. When I first picked up a book again, I keep getting distracted with almost everything. I felt the story was too slow and I kept dozing off after a few pages. It was really hard to even finish a chapter. I needed a week just to finished a 300 pages contemporary. 

Practice makes perfect, they said. And it’s true. Not that I become a super speed reader, but I read much faster than before and I enjoyed the process more. The best part? There are so many fun things that I get to do other than just reading. I get to buddy read and share my excitements with others, I get to discuss and learn issues that I’ve never realized or thought before, and I get to have fun doing all of it!

Bookish community motivated me to keep reading.

There will always be one of those days (or weeks!) when you just feel exhausted and having no energy to read. Whenever I’m in a slump and decided to procrastinate my free time on social media, I’d see all of these amazing reviews and lovely words about books that my friends are currently reading or recently finished. This motivated me to keep reading because I feel bad for missing out and left behind on such great stories! 

For some people, the never-ending reviews, listopias, and features in this community may be seen as overwhelming. But, I personally enjoyed and loved every single one of them. I know that I need to not let these stuff goes over my head to dictate me into reading, but, I’d say that its very own existence gives me more motivation rather than pressure!

Bookish community made me aware of diversity and representation.

This is probably an ironic thing to say, coming from a POC reader like myself, but before I joined this community, I never fully aware of the importance of diversity and representation. Sure, I’d always question myself why there was no Asian or Muslim main character in a story that I read? Or even if there was, I’d be happy when I spotted one as a side character. I never questioned more than that. Because as a child, I automatically assumed that a white main character is a default. It is what it is.

When I joined this community, it really helped me to gather my perspective. A white main character is NOT a default. And a story with marginalized character is just as valid and important. Through this community, I discovered fellow POC readers such as myself who tirelessly promoting and supporting diverse literature. CW, Fadwa, Hamad, Kat, Kelly, Lily, Shealea, Tiffany, and Vicky are just a few amazing bloggers and friends that I discovered in this community and I’m grateful for every single one of them. And of course, for every single blogger, readers and reviewers in this community who continuously sharing their excitements and passions for books!

Vinny’s Instagram Vinny’s Twitter Vinny’s Goodreads

How has being a part of the bookish community helped you or changed you for the better?

What are some reasons you love the bookish community?

What’s something positive that’s happened to you lately? Share your recent successes in the comments so we can all celebrate too!