This is another excerpt from a longer piece I’m working on about (not) reading during COVID; you can read the first excerpt here. I’d love your thoughts.
Technically, there is no single species of insect called a “bookworm.” Entomologists (who study worms, as opposed to etymologists, who study words) use the term generally to describe any small worm, usually in the larval stage, that burrows into books and eats the pages.
I don’t remember the first time someone referred to me as a bookworm, but I’m sure it was when I was in my own larval stage. My mother insists that I was reading by the time I was two, and although I’m not sure she is an entirely reliable narrator on this, it is true that I burrowed into books as a very young person, and in a way I ate them too: I had a mystifying and terrible childhood habit of absentmindedly butchering the book I was reading by tearing off the upper right-hand corner of each page and rolling it between my fingers into a little paper ball. These little paper balls were like fairy-tale breadcrumbs, since I dropped them everywhere and they always led back to books, my brain’s hearth and home. My parents got a new couch for our family room when I was ten, and when they moved the old couch they found a fluffy mountain range of little paper balls reaching almost halfway up the wall, a Himalayan-shaped testament to my devotion and destruction. The bookshelves in my room stretched from floor to ceiling and were filled with hundreds of well-loved, mutilated, cornerless books, as if a scythe had come through at a perfect 45-degree angle and uniformly decapitated the upper right-hand corner of every page.
I have never explored my book-destroying habit in a therapeutic scenario–something that has been gently suggested to me more than once–but I suspect it is related to the same human instinct that makes a baby’s cheeks look delicious enough to eat. I loved books so much that reading them wasn’t enough. I wanted to devour them.
Adding my confession to yours: as a young reader (I mean, up until I was twelve or so!) I regularly vandalized my best, most-often-reread library books by tearing off corners of the pages and ... yes, well, eating them. It's amazing that a.) the library never caught on and banned me, and b.) I'm still alive.