Don’t share your favorite books. Don’t share your favorite books with almost lovers, with best friends, with your mother. Hoard them. Keep their words locked up in hardcovers, paperbacks, trade paper, on a Kindle or iPad. If you have a vault in your home, keep the copies of your favorite books secured inside. Spin the dial, maybe forget the combination. On your bookshelf, turn the spine of your favorite books away from the peripatetic eyes of nosy visitors.

Would you like to know what losing a bit of your soul feels like? No? Well, then don’t share your favorite books with anyone.

Consider the implications. Today you give your favorite book to a human, a beautiful, messy, imperfect fellow human, and you trust them to treat it kindly. Maybe they even begin to love your favorite book like how you love your favorite book, like how you love them.

But what happens when the messy, imperfect human, who has now left a shadow of themselves across the pages of your favorite book, exercises his or her prerogative to be a jerk? A clean excision of a human from your life, while hard, can be accomplished. Don’t allow your favorite book to become collateral damage in the cleanup.

Maybe your favorite book is a classic of the genre, a hundred-year-old, thousand-page tome. Perhaps it’s a crime procedural. Don’t tell me about your favorite book. Don’t trust me with the secret of the words and ideas that have become your emotional education.