TTT: Bookworm Joys

This week's Top Ten Tuesday post, as always planned and shared by The Broke and the Bookish, is "Top Ten Bookworm Delights."  Leaving aside the discussion about whether bookworm, book nerd, or Cate's Book Dragon is the preferred term, there is no real way to limit the list to ten.

Things that bring joy to my reader's heart fit into specific categories:

AS A TEACHER/PARENT

• Seeing a student who doesn't identify as a reader get sucked into a book, so much so that they are reading it when they don't "have to" be reading it.
• Reading aloud and having kids hang on every word.
• Hearing my kids quote from a book we've read.
• The way my children lean up against me while I read to them.  (Meaning my personal, family-type children, not my students.  Just to clarify.)  
• This year's seventh graders' enthusiasm for all my wacky book stuff.  I send them a selfie of meeting Margaret Peterson Haddix, and the sub send me back a photo of them squealing and leaping.  I tell them I'm going to participate in a 24 hour read-a-thon, and they want to know if we can do one too, spending 24 hours at school with our books.  My principal buys me a two sided book display, and when the guy who put it together wheels it into class, they erupt with excitement and rush to help me choose what books to put in it.  

AS A BOOK BUYER/BORROWER

• Wandering a bookstore looking at the pretty covers and jotting down notes taking photos of books I might want to get.
• Sneaking in a library or bookstore visit on my way home from school.
• Themed book displays at the library.  
• Just--the feeling of walking into my library.  
• Getting books as gifts.  Or gift cards for bookstores.
• Also, all the other cute stuff they sell in bookstores these days.  Yes, I wrote a post about it all being too commercial, but still.  I love my book t-shirts.  And socks.  And jewelry.  And posters.  And mugs.  

GENERAL BOOKWORM GLORY

• Reading the right book at the right time.  
• Reading a terrific book and finding out that it's the first in a series.  
• Dedications, forwards, and acknowledgements that are sweet and/or funny instead of dull or entirely in-jokes.
• Someone suggesting a book to me that I haven't heard of, then really liking it.
• Clever chapter titles.  
• That realization, as you read the first 1/4 of a complex book, that you are in the hands of someone who knows what they are doing, and that all threads will come together into a beautiful tapestry by the time you are done.  
• Books that make me laugh or cry so much that people around me become alarmed.