It must be running in your bloodstream, the love for books.

I don’t believe that it is something you acquire over time. It must be in your DNA code, something you’ve born with, like the color of your eyes or that moll on your cheek. You’re born with, blessed with, then it runs through your blood, like a virus.

When I say love for books I do not mean enjoying books and reading, that’s love of books, fondness, liking the way you like something you glance at. By love for books I mean needing books. Needing to read them, to hold them, to own them, to surround oneself with them. Like an addict.

I hear people saying, ‘I like to read, but I don’t have enough time so I read just a bit.’

Those with the virus, with love for books, don’t have to make time. And you see them every day, nights too. Mornings are the best, surprising them with a book in hand. They don’t need an ideal reading spot, or silence or background music. They can read everywhere, in the subway, the bus, the train, in a crowded room, and sometimes even during in class.

And you do know how their homes look like too. I don’t mean bookshelves, but stacked with books.

People with a love for books always carry a book with them the way others hold their cellphone or fashionable ladies carry their emergency cosmetic bag. But those with a love for books are fearless. They do not worry that they will miss a call, or a message, or a Tweet, or that their beauty will smudge during the day. They do fear, though, that the thin paper layer protecting their souls will get damaged throughout the day, exposing them to noise, to wickedness, to mental pollution.

You see, people with a love for books, those who carry that book virus in their bloodstream, need a periodic shot, call it chronic medication, of reading. Of living elsewhere for a short while so that they can survive in the present. Of accumulating life experience so that they can share it with the rest. Of laughing or crying elsewhere, so that they can compare it to the laughing and the crying from the real world and clarifying, once and for all, how original life can be.

For only when life is conveyed into a book will that book be cradled and read by someone with a love for books, and afterwards explained to others.

You see now why writers need readers with a love for books just as much as those with a love for books need books.