SLEEPING IS FOR SISSIES (Or Those Not Invested in a Can't-Put-Down Book)

Let’s start the morning with a quick quiz. Pencils ready? Let’s go.

Which of the following statements best defines the term “Book Hangover”:

     A)  That feeling of sleep deprivation from staying up too late reading a book you can’t put down.

    B)  The Inability to start a new book because you’re still living in the last book’s world.

     C) That moment when you finish a book, look around an realize that everyone is just carrying on with their lives as though you didn’t just experience emotional trauma at the hands of a book.

     D)  Difficulty entering the reality of everyday life after spending the last 48 hours fully immersed in an amazing book.

If you said all four define Book Hangover, then congratulations, you are officially a Book Nerd.

I hadn’t heard the term until it popped up on a Facebook meme a few weeks ago. Again, I’m a candlestick telephone living in a cellphone world, but I do catch up eventually. (Thanks, Facebook!) The term piqued my interest, which, in turn, led me down the rabbit hole of research.

All though the concept has been around for decades, perhaps even a century or more, my research suggests the term wasn’t coined until after the release of the Harry Potter books. Raise your hand if you are guilty of staying up to race through the latest release so you could talk to your friends about it the next day. Of course, it didn’t help that the book went on sale at midnight, so many of us queued up outside the Barnes & Noble at 10 p.m. and didn’t get home until the wee hours, so were sleep deprived before reading the first page.  Now that I think bout it, I wonder if there was ever such thing as the Harry Potter Flu? Where you called in sick to work so that you could stay home and read?  Because let’s be honest, those books, especially the later volumes, required a pretty serious time investment. But I digress.

I experienced my first book hangover when I was a young girl. Stories of the intrepid girl detective, Nancy Drew, were the cause of my suffering. Part of the malaise may have been caused not because of too much reading, but because I did most of it by the dim light of a low-battery flashlight, my head under the covers so that mom wouldn’t catch me. Eye strain and oxygen deprivation certainly contributed to the dreaded book hangover headaches. Never stopped me from crawling under the covers when I received a new Nancy Drew, though.

Fear not, if you are a regular sufferer from book hangovers. I found plenty of prescriptions for relief. Suggestions range from asking a librarian (or the Internet) for a recommendation for another book equally compelling, to reading something from a totally different format/genre (comic book was suggested.) There's always a Netflix binge to help take your mind off the book. Or heading to the nearest wine bar in order to conjure a REAL hangover. There’s always simple things like going for a walk or napping in the hammock or going bowling, anything to give yourself time to fully digest that wonderful book before indulging in the next emotional journey.

But indulge, we will! Despite the suffering we know is in our future.

Read on, my friends!