Don’t you ever just want to live in the pages of your book? Jump into the crazy adventures, talk with the awe-inspiring heroes, or fight against injustice for your honor or integrity. Or maybe just eat with the hobbits, go to summer camp at Camp Half-Blood, or learn how to air-bend with the Avatar gang. Reading can transport you to other worlds, but sometimes when you finish all you’re left with is a longing.

 

I can’t give you powers, special abilities, or a connection with a God, but I can give you a little more than a book and an aching heart. With a little creative reimagining, we can find ways to live in these books through experiences, skills, and delusion. These activities have helped me feel a part of the book’s world by bringing me into my characters’ hobbies, skills, and experiences.

 

Book Boxes

I love book boxes. The excitement of getting a new book mailed to me every month, getting to unwrap it like a present, the whole thing is set up to make me feel like a kid on Christmas. My favorite thing about them is that several have little bookish gifts inside, ranging from jewelry to kitchen decor.

 

My personal favorite is Once Upon a Book Club Box because they take the whole book box a step further. They even label each wrapped gift with a page number, which corresponds to a specific page and paragraph in the book. Once you get to that page, you open the gift!

 

While this isn’t a skill or hobby, I would consider this an experience hard to match. Getting to pull items straight from out of the book and hold them in your hands, as you’re reading the book, is a surreal experience. One that should not be missed. They can be a bit pricey, but most book boxes sell individual boxes too, so you can skip the monthly or quarterly payment and get a treat when you need it instead.

 

Travel

This is my preferred method of living in books, albeit the most difficult and expensive. I travel to places that either are or emulate the settings in my books, mostly to explore those areas. I’ve made whole travel itineraries for books, just to follow in the footsteps of my characters for at least part of their story. Now, depending on your genre this could be very easy, such as going to South Carolina for The Notebook, or impossible, like The Martian. With a little ingenuity, we can solve your genre problems.

 

You might not be able to go to Mars, but there are places on Earth that can give you the same empty, eerie feeling. A quick Google search leads me to Devon Island in Canada, The Wave in Arizona, or Wadi Rum in Jordan. You give me a book and I guarantee we can find at least one place to visit.

 

My obsession with The Lightning Thief led me to explore dozens of creeks in the woods, pretending I was claimed by Poseidon while standing in a creek at Camp Half-Blood, just like Percy. Being in New York was irrelevant, as long as I got the details, a creek in the woods, correct.

 

This can be as big or little as you want. I’ve known people to just go to a park nearby, a fancy new restaurant, or an entirely different continent. This all depends on your time, budget, and outside responsibilities.

 

Make Food from Books

I’m biased toward this activity because I already love to cook. Something about cooking the same meal as my favorite characters makes me feel closer to them. This is also skewed more toward books that we already know what their food is, but you can bullshit the rest of it if you wish.

 

I’ve always imagined ambrosia, from the Percy Jackson series, as something mostly like baklava. Gold in color and cube-shaped? Close enough for me, and it’s not like baklava isn’t delicious, so it fits. Nectar is a little… different. I can’t make a drink taste like everyone’s mom’s chocolate chip cookies. I can, however, make something that I know will taste like something I like, with a little imagination.

 

Something even more fun is trying this with friends. You never know who’s lying about their cooking ability, and who is truly horrendous, until everyone is in the kitchen with the smoke alarm blaring. After the final product- good or bad- is made, everyone can sit around and toast to the books. Or maybe have another bookish activity follow.

 

Learn Skills

Now this is the one everyone was probably expecting, and already annoyed at. How can you learn the skills of a master swordsman, gunslinger, mob boss, airbender, fire-wielding favorite character? That’s ludicrous. I can’t argue that. No one is going to make you ‘a master’ of anything by the time you’re sixteen if you haven’t been training since age three. However, we can participate in these hobbies anyway.

 

I’m impressed by the amount of sword, martial arts, and weapons training in my area. These three things probably cover half the skills in the books I read. I would highly recommend picking a skill from a book and trying to find something that correlates with that skill in your area. This is going to be harder if you’re in the middle of nowhere, the drives might be further, or essentially impossible for you to make. This moves you to a backup plan.

 

Learn the shit on your own. Can this be done for everything? No, unfortunately not. But we take what we can in this household. You might have to change what you’re learning, but you can still take something from each book. Yoga and animal flows emulate warrior stances, magic tricks can be learned at home with a book and YouTube, and a $20 lockpick kit can get you breaking into simple locks like a sly thief.

 

For more of these more at-home bookish side quests, I would highly recommend a YouTube channel called The Modern Rogue. Not sponsored, I don’t even think they do sponsorships, but I’ve binge-watched all their episodes at a frightening speed. They do anything from lock-picking to hacking to firing a bow and arrow like a Mongolian warrior. They taught me that with a little ingenuity, anything skill can be learnable.

 

Conclusion

Books are an amazing way to explore new worlds, take on new adventures, and learn new things. For me, the point of all of this is to make those experiences a reality. Sharing even the smallest of moments with my favorite characters is a way to bring these books to life all over again.

 

Have any other ideas, or have you tried any of these before? Comment below and let me know, maybe we can swap ideas!