10 Unfounded Fears That Keep Book Nerds Up at Night

Let other people lie awake at night contemplating money, the future, and the void. I’d rather focus my fears on worrying I might be out of the country when Laini Taylor’s next series starter drops, or that a future Pottermore story might force me to someday contemplate Mr. and Mrs. Weasley’s mortality. Here are 10 more largely unfounded (right?) book nerd fears you might be able to relate to. (Unless it really is just me.)
1. After reading a book right before bed, you fall asleep, dream an ending you come to believe is the real one, and neglect to actually finish the book (and also seriously embarrass yourself at book club).
2. While walking and reading at the same time because you only have 10 pages left and you need to know how it ends, you drop your unfinished book down an open manhole/into a foot-deep puddle/down the crack between the train and the platform.
3. You kindly introduce your friend to your favorite book. She loves it even more than you do, becomes Twitter besties with the author, ends up in the dedication of book two, and fails to remember you’re the one who told her about it in the first place.
4. You’re at a café and the people next to you start flagrantly spoiling the ending of a book you haven’t read yet, forcing you to run away like there’s a spider in your hair, knocking several tables over on the way.
5. That crusty weird stain on your library book’s pages is probably just chocolate. BUT WHAT IF IT ISN’T?
6. A character with the same name as you ends up becoming the most hated fictional human since Dolores Umbridge. Your name becomes synonymous with everything readers hate.
7.You order the perfectly acceptable original cover edition of a book—but what arrives is the movie tie-in edition, starring Justin Bieber as both leads.
8. You’re stuck on a plane next to someone who sees your book and blurts out, “Hey, don’t you love the part when (spoiler)?” and you have to spend the next four hours resisting the urge to strangle them.
9. You get a tattoo in homage to your favorite character in a series…and in the next book, the character turns evil/has a crappy storyline/starts wearing a cheesy hat in every scene for some reason.
10. You’re ugly-crying in public over the sad book you never should’ve left the house with, and someone takes your picture. The picture becomes a meme. Your crying face ends up on T-shirts.
11. Dubious bonus time, a TOTALLY FOUNDED fear: You think you have enough pages in your book left to get you through your commute…then discover most of them are blank end pages/acknowledgments/a book club guide, and you are forced to stare into space, not reading. The horror!
Don’t leave us hanging. What are your weird unfounded book nerd fears?