25 Bookworm Problems Only Book Lovers Understand

While reading is an incredibly beneficial activity, book lovers do have to face some issues of their own. Called, to some extent ironically, bookworm problems, these have a tremendous range and some of them can actually be quite annoying for those of us who love reading. 

Luckily, as annoying as they are, most of these bookish problems have rather simple solutions and we know them all. But first, let’s find out exactly what bookworm problems are.

What Are Bookworm Problems?

While the term is pretty self-explanatory, the definition of bookworm problems is a bit more complex as one might expect, mostly because of the huge variety of issues an avid reader could face. 

First, to clarify, a bookworm is considered to be a person who spends a lot of time reading or studying and even prefers these actions over others most people find enjoyable, including social interactions and other forms of entertainment. 

Bookworm problems are defined as problems only book lovers understand and cover a huge variety of issues that affect people who read on a regular basis.

Top Bookish Problems and How to Overcome Them

Let’s explore some of the most popular problems most book lovers have to face and check some possible solutions for each one.

1. Books Are Expensive

While reading in itself is an activity that requires no investment, acquiring and collecting reading material can turn out to be quite expensive. Especially if you read a lot and you are one of the people who prefer to have books in better-looking editions, reading can be quite a burden on your pocket.

A possible solution could be to simply stop buying your books brand new. You can enjoy the same content at a much smaller price if you buy your books from second-hand stores and you may even discover some hidden gems in those stores too.

Alternatively, if you have no interest in collecting books and only want to read them, you can opt to borrow books from your city’s library. The costs are usually insignificant and you can choose more titles than you could ever read in a lifetime.

A more modern solution is to invest in an e-book reader. While the initial investment can set you back a couple of hundred dollars, in the long run you will save a lot of money. E-books can hold hundreds if not thousands of books at once. While the feeling of holding a book is irreplaceable, the benefit of purchasing your novels in digital format is that they cost a fraction of their paper versions.

2. The “Book Hangover”

A book hangover is a pretty common effect that great books can have on their readers. By their definition, book hangovers are the feeling a reader gets after finishing a book (usually a very captivating fiction novel), which leaves the reader thinking about the action of the book for hours or even days after reading it.

While this may not sound like such a big issue, I can assure you that book hangovers are not to be dismissed when it comes to bookworm problems. The worst thing about them is that they leave the readers completely unable to start a new book after finishing a great one because their expectations are too high and they know it.

While no cure has yet been discovered for the book hangover, a good way to overcome the inability to pick up another book after finishing one that left you in awe is to strictly stick to your reading list. Instead of wondering what you should read next, simply pick up the next book on your list. Once you start reading it, things will get easier, I promise.

3. Buying Too Many Books

Once you get in the habit of reading constantly, it’s pretty easy to become overenthusiastic with the purchases you make. The number of available titles in libraries is huge and the level of temptation for a book lover is through the roof. Buying every book you think is interesting can soon turn out to be an issue, both from a financial point of view and because you may find yourself surrounded by books you will never have enough time to read.

The best solution for this problem is to create a reading list and to strictly stick to it. Add all the books you want to read to this list and start buying them one by one. You can keep adding more titles to the list, but never buy a new one before you finish the previous one on the list. This way you make sure you never buy more books than you can actually read. 

How can Basmo help?

A great way of creating and populating your reading list is to use a reading app. This way you eliminate the risk of losing your list or damaging it. Moreover, if you use an app like Basmo, you will have the option to create an unlimited number of custom reading lists, which can be easily populated according to your desire.

4. Not Knowing What to Read Next

Whether it’s the effect of a book hangover, lack of ideas, or the inability to choose because of the high number of options, not being able to decide what your next book should be is a tormenting experience.

As I mentioned above, reading lists can work wonders when it comes to solving this problem. Use a reading app like Basmo, create your reading list, and stick to it no matter what.

5. Watching Movies Based on Books You Love and Realizing They’re Ruined

I can think of very few things that are more annoying than watching a movie based on a book you love and realizing that it doesn’t live up to our expectations. And for some reason, they never really do.

An obvious solution would be to simply stop watching movies based on your favorite novels since books are generally better than movies. The problem is that we tend to forget our deceptions quite quickly after experiencing them. Personally I’ve told myself that “this is the last time I watch a movie based on a book I liked” more times than I would like to admit.

And it’s understandable. The temptation to see on a screen what we visualized while reading the book is huge. Rather than swearing off watching movies based on books you read altogether, opt for the milder option of doing proper research before deciding whether to see a movie or not. Check online reviews, ask friends who watched that particular movie, and base your decision on the information you manage to gather.

6. Being Interrupted While Reading

Being interrupted is annoying regardless of the activity you’re involved in. But when it comes to reading, things are definitely worse. You are not just being stopped from doing something you love and kept from finding out what happens in the book you’re reading, you are also very likely to forget where you were on the page before the interruption. 

Having to keep reading the same paragraph over and over again in order to understand while you are constantly being disturbed is an awful experience.

A good way to avoid this is to create a reading space within your home. If you can set your reading space in a different room than the one where the rest of your family is usually hanging out, that would be ideal. For those of you who don’t have this possibility, combining a reading space with a reading schedule everyone in your family is made aware of could be a great alternative. Discuss this with the people you are living with and nicely ask them to respect your reading time.

7. Not Being Able to Remember All the Books You Own

Another one of the more common book lover problems is the fact that while building up your book collection, after a certain point, it becomes a bit difficult to remember every title you own. Most bookworms have at least one duplicate in their book collection and the reason for that is usually that they simply can’t remember everything they own.

Annoying as this may be, there is a quite simple solution and that is cataloging your books. Whether you create your inventory in a notebook, in a document on your laptop or with a reading tracking app, it’s important to always write down all the titles you own.

From our experience, the best way to catalog books is with a reading app. Creating a custom book collection with Basmo is incredibly easy, as I described above, and comes with the huge advantage that you can edit your collection anytime and from anywhere. As long as you have your smartphone with you, you can access the book collection and edit it.

8. Damaging Books While Annotating Them

While some consider writing on a book blasphemy, others can’t live without annotating the books they read. There are numerous benefits to annotating books, but more often than not, you will be left with a book that has been scribbled on and looks far from the mint condition you would have liked it to be.

The best solution for this is to use modern technology for your book annotations. Rather than putting pen to paper and writing, underlining or highlighting text directly in the book, you can use a reading app.

Basmo offers its users the possibility to make notes while reading, and even to scan pages and extract the relevant text from them. The notes can be organized and formatted according to each user’s preference, making them extremely useful, accessible, and easy to read.

9. Accepting the Death of a Character You Love

Another rather serious bookworm problem has to do with the way we become attached to the characters in the books we read. It is not uncommon for a book lover to have strong feelings for a fictional character. And it’s easy to understand why.

While reading, we become engulfed in the story, we gain a close understanding of the way characters act and think and we sometimes even identify with some of them. Maybe one of the characters reminds us of ourselves or someone else we love. Perhaps even though it passes no resemblance to people in our lives, we simply get to love them because we like how they think and act in the book and how they impact the story.

Many books leave us with a gaping hole in our lives once the character we love suddenly disappears from the story. We often experience their death in a much more real way than we would like. But that is just something book lovers learn to accept and it enhances the reading experience. 

10. The Agonizing Wait for the Next Book in a Series

We all know how difficult it can be to finish a book and realize that it can be years until the author releases the next title in the series. Not knowing how things will turn out and where the story is going next can be agonizing.

For many bookworms, the wait for the next book in the series is such a difficult thing to handle, that they turn to fan fiction or even start doing some writing themselves. Even though our TBR pile rarely gets any smaller, we often find ourselves too hung up on the books we just finished reading that we find it difficult to even start something else.

11. Not Having Friends You Can Share the Joy of Reading With

We are all social creatures and we love being a part of a community we share interests with. We love sharing our thoughts, opinions, and experiences with others, and even though bookworms are oftentimes labeled as lonely and uninterested in relationships, things are actually quite different.

A common bookworm problem is the simple fact that we don’t have friends or family members we can share our love for books with. There is a true joy in being able to talk to somebody about a book you read, hearing their view of the story, and understanding how different people can experience the same book from other perspectives. 

That is why so many bookworms join book clubs and online communities dedicated to reading enthusiasts. 

12. Finishing Books Too Quickly

Reading a book you love is, without a doubt, one of the greatest things you can experience. Many books are so good, you can barely find the strength to put them down for a well-deserved reading break.

While reading for prolonged periods of time can come with a couple of other disadvantages, for bookworms the biggest drawback is finishing a book too quickly. Getting excited about reading a book you’ve been waiting to read for some time and finishing it in a couple of hours is an agonizing experience, especially if the book is part of a series and you know there could be years until the next title will be released.

Experiencing the joy of reading a book you love and realizing the whole thing is over in just a couple of hours can be a huge bookworm problem.

13. Staying up All Night to Read

This really has happened to all of us. The plot of a book is so interesting that we can’t stop reading and before we know it, it’s 3 AM. Staying up all night may be all fun and games in our twenties, but once we reach 30, things change. Getting up in the morning and going to work after a sleepless night is challenging, to say the least.

To avoid this, the best thing to do would be to stick to a daily reading schedule. Analyze your daily schedule, find a place where you can easily squeeze a reading session every day and read every day in the designated time frame.

How Can Basmo Help?

Again, reading apps can be of great help with creating a reading schedule and sticking to it. Basmo, for example, allows users to schedule daily reading sessions, reading goals and even set reminders before each session in order to never miss one.

14. When Your Predictions Are Too Accurate (Self-Spoilers)

We all use our imagination while reading and we all try to make predictions in our mind. Especially when reading books that keep us on the edge of our seats, we always try to figure out what is going to happen next and where the story is going. The problems with books we can’t seem to put down usually revolve around our ability to foresee where the action is taking us.

Self-spoilers are sometimes quite painful for bookworms. Figuring out how things are going to end way before finishing the book takes some of the fun out of reading it. On the other hand, though, you do get the satisfaction of being right, but at what cost?

15. Not Having Enough Time to Read Everything You Want to Read

Our time has become one of the scarcest resources we have at our disposal. While this is clearly frustrating in every aspect of our lives, when it comes to reading, this can be a nightmare for the bookworms out there. Seeing your titles piling up on your reading list and knowing there’s no time in your schedule to get all that reading done is a horrible feeling.

While the solution is not as clear and obvious as it was for the bookworm problems above, there is still hope. A good way to handle this is to get organized and set yourself realistic goals. That way you avoid the frustration of rarely reaching your goals and as we all know, positivity is essential for our productivity.

Think long and hard before setting yourself a goal. Take a close look at your daily schedule and try to figure out how much time you can squeeze into it for reading. Whether it’s an hour, 30 minutes, or even less, try to find out how much reading you can get done in that timeframe.

Using a reading tracking app can be extremely helpful in setting your goals and managing your expectations. Basmo offers you the possibility to set daily or yearly goals and to track your progress toward reaching them. Combine this with the daily reminders, the reading schedule, and the reading statistics the app can provide, and you are on your way to improving your productivity considerably.

16. Organizing Your Bookshelf

As bookworms, we tend to have impressive collections of books. Every once in a while, we realize that our books need reorganizing. Whether it’s because we think of a better way to arrange them or simply need to adapt to the constant growth of our book collection, the process of organizing our books can be a daunting one.

A rather common bookworm problem is exactly the fact that we constantly surround ourselves with books, only to realize in the end that we need a new system, a new bookshelf, or even worse, that we need to throw away some of our books to make room for new ones.

17. The Guilt of Not Finishing a Book

Another issue book lovers tend to face is overcoming the misconception that not finishing a book is simply wrong. We love reading, and we appreciate the effort the author has put into writing them, and when you add that to the way we were educated in school, a weird and uncomfortable sense of guilt starts to surface every time we can’t or won’t finish a certain novel.

Not finishing a book is not something you should be ashamed of or something you should ever feel guilty about. The choice to read or not read something is entirely yours and sometimes it is a lot better and healthier to simply stop reading than to push through a process that brings you no joy.

18. The Struggle to Keep Up With New Releases

While some bookworms find more joy in reading books from the past and focus more on classics, others have an approach that focuses more on being among the first to get their hands on new releases.

According to recent stats from 2022, almost one million books are published every year. As you can imagine, keeping up with them is literally impossible. The struggle of staying up-to-date with all the books that are being published is a real problem for those who are interested in always reading the most recent books. 

19. When Your Book Is Too Big for Your Purse

Some books are bigger than others. And even though we would always love to take our books with us and read in any circumstance, sometimes things can be a little difficult. Carrying the Da Vinci Code in your wallet purse is not really an option.

For bookworms, this can be rather challenging, especially if we are hoping to be able to read somewhere else other than our homes while attending an event or in a circumstance with a smart dress code. 

20. The Book Clutter Can Be a Challenge

Books take up a lot of space. If you are anything like us here at Basmo, your books are probably scattered all over your home. They are on your nightstand, on your bookshelf, on the coffee table in the living room, and in a couple of other, more creative places as well. 

Yes, there are a lot of ways to remove clutter, and decluttering methods are now more popular than ever before. But do we really want to? As book lovers do we really want to get rid of half our book collection? Or should we learn to adapt to the clutter and live with it? The decision is entirely yours, but you should always keep in mind that you are not alone. Every bookworm out there goes through the same struggle.

21. Finding the Balance Between Reading and Real-Life Responsibilities

Reading can take up a lot of your time. Where should you draw the line? While for you, as a bookworm, few things are more important than reading, your friends, family, and employer might disagree. 

Reading many books is great, but at some point, this amazingly healthy habit can turn against us. Finding a balance between our love for books and keeping up with daily duties like going to work, managing our household, and running errands is not an easy thing to do. This is perhaps one of the most common questions asked by bookworms all over the world: how much of my time should I spend reading every day?

22. The Emotional Roller Coaster Can Be Exhausting

Authors love to play with our emotions. Books can be an emotional roller coaster and while the overall experience of having all your emotional buttons pushed can be thrilling, the truth is that many bookworms struggle to cope with the exhaustion that comes along with it.

Most book lovers and reading enthusiasts out there experience the book they read at a deeply emotional level. From a touching love story to the tragedy of reading about a character’s death, and the thrill of reading about heroic adventures, books can take their toll on the way we experience emotions. 

23. The Re-Reads

As bookworms, we often find ourselves choosing to read one of our favorite books again, even though our TBR list is huge. Choosing what to read next can be extremely difficult, which is why we sometimes tend to consider a re-read a much better option than taking a chance on a new book.

While this is perfectly normal, you should keep in mind that it is a habit that limits your progress to a certain extent. Of course, re-reading your favorite book once a year is not going to do you any harm if you also read a lot of other new books. But if you find yourself stuck in a cycle of re-reads, you might want to adjust your habits a little to give yourself a chance to truly evolve. 

24. The E-reader vs Paperback Struggle

I can’t think of a single bookworm I ever met who didn’t have an internal struggle regarding the format of the books they were reading. Every single one of us accepts the advantages of e-readers and the joys of a device that can hold tens of thousands of books at once and understand the benefits that can have for our TBR list.

But there is another dimension to reading that bookworms can’t seem to ignore. I am referring to the physical experience of reading. Holding a book, admiring it as an object, enjoying its smell, and hearing the sound of a page being turned are things bookworms can’t seem to live without. 

25. Books Can Be Heavy

Reading while on vacation is one of the greatest joys in life. Sipping on a cocktail on a sandy beach while reading a good book is probably one of the most enjoyable and relaxing activities you dream about throughout the year. 

Traveling with enough books to last you the entire holiday can be quite difficult, especially if you are flying to your destination. Books can weigh a lot and weight limitations on air travel can put you in a pickle. Of course, you can always use an e-reader when traveling, but many books are a lot more enjoyable on paper. 

Conclusion

I am sure most of you avid readers out there have dealt with at least a couple of the bookworm problems I presented above. Now you also know that there are accessible and clever solutions for most of them.Because we know that book lover problems can be annoying, to say the least, we worked really hard to find a way of solving most of them so that you can become a bookworm without problems. And that solution turned out to be Basmo, a reading app that has a plethora of functions that helps its users have a more pleasant and efficient reading experience.

Business vector created by pch.vector – www.freepik.com