When I was four years old, bored on a summer afternoon, I sat down in front of my bookshelf and got ready to resume my ritual of staring at the pictures in books and making up stories for them. But on this particular day, as I flipped through the pages of Little Blue and Little Yellow, the squiggly black letters began to make sense. I could read. Since then, I’ve enjoyed many books, and each one has always left me with a peculiar feeling. A sort of longing, almost empty lonely feeling, it turns out I’m not the only one who’s experienced it.
They call it: book-hangover, the phenomenon when you don’t want to let go of a good story. And it’s quite a silly name, the usual alcohol-induced hangover couldn’t be any more different than a book-hangover. While the usual hangover after a night out is filled with regret (wishing you hadn’t taken that last shot), a book-hangover has us wishing we could go back, just one last sentence. You might feel dramatic for feeling this way, afterall, it’s not real-right? Turns out, your brain doesn’t see it that way. Reading transports us to another world, one with amazing characters where we can enter and exit whenever we please, unlike our real life-which is often less exciting. And so, leaving this world behind festers a form of grief inside of us, we must say good-bye to these characters, who feel like friends. Friends whom we can only revisit in pages and hope we’ll see something we didn’t see the first time.
I experienced my own book hangover this week, and I’m still trying to get over it. It was caused by three-weeks spent listening to Donna Tart’s The Secret History, my first murder-mystery. I stared blankly at the wall after hearing the last sentence, immediately checking my phone- are you sure? Is that really it? Unfortunately, that’s the first symptom of a book-hangover, denial (according to me), no one wants the story to end. The rest of my day, and the subsequent days after were spent dissociating over the story. But just like a real hangover, there are ways to remedy it. My steps to recovery are simple: First, you must write down your own review or journal entry about the book. The first thing you’re going to want to do is read other people’s interpretations of the book, but fight the urge and record your own ideas, what you think is valid and just as interesting. Second, now you can go read all the reviews and interpretations about the book, maybe even the author’s thoughts years later, how do they compare to yours? Third–the best part, pass the torch. Recommend the book to someone else, and watch them relive all the same moments as you, although you can never experience the same thing twice, this is the closest it’s gonna get.
I’ve never experienced the same feeling I once had when I first realized I could read—immediately running to my mom to share the great news. But every book hangover takes me back to that moment, to the wide-eyed wonder of stepping into a story for the first time. Just like four-year-old me, sitting in front of my bookshelf, I find myself staring at the last page, unwilling to let go. Maybe that’s the magic of books—not just the stories they tell, but the way they stay with us, long after we’ve turned the final page.