10 Snacks to eat While Reading

Eating near a book is always a dangerous game. Sticky fingers, sloshing liquids, crumbs falling in the margin or smudgy fingerprints on the side of the page. It’s the stuff of Nightmares.

However, it’s also the dream. Long hours of reading require sustanence, character drinking warm, sugary ciders make you reach for the nearest hot drink and, or course, nothing pairs better with chocolate than a gripping read.

Here’s a list, for Top Ten Tuesday, of ten foods and drinks that have graced the pages of some of my favourite reads.

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Mentos

1 A staple of young me’s diet. I would curl up in bed, snatching up unnaturally pink and yellow sweets, chewing into the sugary crust and then sucking the sticky ball off my teeth for the next few minutes as I flicked through pages of my book, tiny hands clutching flimsy paperbacks from the library.

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Hot Chocolate

2 Another treat from when I was a kid, although this one has definitely persisted into adulthood. Whether it’s expensive flakes or tasty powder I don’t go long without a sweet, warm mug of chocolate.

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Cookie Dough Brownie

3 The best snack. Layers of eggless cookie dough spooned generously across a chocolatey base. I made a batch once, for YALC, and they didn’t last long.

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Water

4 Unless you are an extremely dehydrated book worm it is inevitable that one of your books will get soggy. Let’s just hope it’s not the signed stack my friend tossed water over at YALC one year.

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Chicken Nuggets

5 Every student will know that any occasion is perfect for chicken Nuggets. Good for birthdays, test results, mornings, lunches and all the hours in between when your peckish and have no regard for your health. They were a staple of my uni existence and I stacked plates high with them, plonked the whole thing on the floor of my room and dunked generously in BBQ sauce as I flung myself into whatever chilling story I was reading, bag near the door as I dreaded the trill of my alarm that would send me scuttling, often late, to my next lecture.

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Cheesy Pasta

6 A university speciality of mine. Whether from my chipped burnt orange bowl, the book flattened our on the kitchen table as I shoveled mouthfuls in and wondered if cheese could count as a vegetable, or from a stained bit of Tupperware in the university library, cracking open a fiction book over my shiny text book and a scatter of messy revision notes, cheesy Pasta was very much a stable of my diet over the last few years.

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Chai Latte

7 Nothing goes better with your latest read that the sweet cinnamon bite of a chai latte. Warm, milky tea with subtle sweet flavours and tangy spices is the perfect companion to any novel.

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Stroopwaffles

8 Liking caramel from sticky fingers, the sugary syrup dripping from between the two crisp waffles and the inevitable smudge that appeared as I crammed in a few pages of Vicious in my hostel at Amsterdam last week. Got to hand it to the Dutch, they sure know how to snack.

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Chips

9 Piping hot, straight from the paper bag, greasy chip shop chips. I used to buy a bag with my brother on the way back from the bus shop after school and greasy little finger prints now marr all my childhood favourites.

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Tea

X Steam curling in the stiff air of my cold student house, my housemates and I too cheap to even think about touching the plastic dial stuck to our kitchen wall. A warm cup was essential to heat up frozen fingers to turn the pages of my latest read.

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Let’s Compare Notes

So there you have it! Ten of my reading snacks. What are you favourite snacks? Had any accidents with food and books? Accidentally given a book a bath? Leave a link, story or snack ideas in the comments!