Nick's Random Gibberish (1) : Lending Books

Nick's Random Gibberish is a weekly post here at Nick's Book Blog where I, Nick, will talk about random topics from personal posts to discussion posts.

Hello beautiful people!

After thinking through a dilemma I was going through I have decided to no longer do book haul posts for personal reasons. Instead, I'll be using Saturdays to post random posts that will range from personal experiences to discussions posts. I hope you will enjoy it and if you have any suggestion for topics or things you want to know about me, feel free to let me know in the comments section.

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Anyways, today's post as you can already tell, is going to be on lending books! 

I'm usually all for sharing my books and letting people experience the awesomeness of books. I figure I am doing a good deed by exposing others to books. That's what I used to think at least. Turns out, there is a down-side to letting other people borrow books and that has made me incredibly wary of lending my coveted books to others.

Back home, I didn't get the occasion to buy many physical copies. Firstly, they were ridiculously expensive. Paperbacks would cost about $20-$30! Crazy, huh? Secondly, it was rare to find good books, especially YA books. People back home tend to devour mostly romantic or crime thriller reads. Thirdly, I had no idea The Book Depository existed until I started blogging. So when I used to travel abroad, the first thing I would do was to visit the book stores and buy tons of books. Then, I would go back home and you would find me reading my new purchases during school recess. And that's where things started to go wrong.


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Other bookish lovers like me in my class would ask to borrow the book. I remember when I bought a copy of Sophie Kinsella's Can You Keep a Secret?. A close friend of mine saw me reading it and asked to borrow it. I agreed and lent it to her because I wanted to share my happiness and love for the book with her so we could fangirl about Jack, the love interest together. She actually took really good care of the book, but another classmate saw her reading the book and asked to borrow it. I agreed. As the time went by, more people asked and I didn't mind because I knew books like Sophie Kinsella were hard to find. By the time the book was back in my hands, the cover had been ripped off and taped, the papers were stained (with curry I think *gags*) and people had written in it. You guys, I was SO freaking angry. Just thinking about it gets my blood boiling! I wanted to rage and get mad and demand who had done this to my beloved book, but I was not that kind of person, so I simply refused to let my classmates borrow my books in the future claiming some excuse such as the book belonging to another friend mine or something similar. I hated lying, but it had to be done. 

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You would think I would have learned a lesson about lending books to others, but no. A few years later, I did it again ... with my Twilight series collection. The Twilight series wasn't available at my local bookstore and I had a friend of my dad order it for me from England. It took me weeks to get the series, but the copies were beautiful and I was so excited about reading them, especially because it was my first series ever! Anyways, after I had read them, a family friend of mine asked to borrow the book. I agreed because it was only going into the hands of one person, so nothing would happen to my books, right? Big fat NOPE. By the time I got them back, 4 months later by the way, the books were stained so badly and there was a huge rip in my Breaking Dawn cover. I wanted to CRY and RAGE and YELL. But I couldn't say anything to the friend I borrowed because I felt petty doing it. So, I quietly suffered. 

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What those two events taught me is to be incredibly wary to the people I let borrow my books. Nowadays, I don't have that many books and I have e-reader so it's not a huge deal. I only lend my hard copies to certain people who I know take care of their books like it's their children. Does that make me a bad person for not letting some people borrow my books? *shrugs* Probably! But I honestly don't care because I bought these books my hard-earned money and I'm not going to give it to someone I know will ruin it. 

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What do you all think of lending books? Do you lend books to everyone who asks?
Do you have any horror stories to share as well?

Let me know in the comments below!