Readers, what can we say? We love our books. And that love can sometimes be borderline obsessive. See how many of these signs of bookaholism apply to you. It might not be too late to get help.

One: You find yourself referring to fictional characters as if they were real. This isn’t too bad. But if you complain that you weren’t invited to Cole McKenna’s wedding or ask around for Katie Lapp on your next vacation to Lancaster County, I suggest an intervention.

Two: If you stacked up all the books on your To-Be-Read pile, someone would have to send in a search-and-rescue crew to dig you out of your house. (And you’d probably tell them, “Go away! Can’t you see I’m reading?”)

Three: You have named a pet or a child after a fictional character. Or at least seriously considered it. (Confession: growing up, I always wished I had…

Synchronicity means “an apparently meaningful coincidence in time of two or more similar or identical events that are causally unrelated.”

(By the way: It’s also the title of one of the best rock albums from the 1980s – the Police’s fifth and final studio work.)

I think synchronicity is when we understand someone on a deeper, personal level than just merely hearing their transmitted communications, whether via audible, visual or electronic, translating and understanding it. Synchronicity to me is when we “get” something or someone on an almost mystic level. We feel their need or share an emotion.

There’s nothing “new age” about this I don’t think – after all, music is a whole language of synchronicity – of shared emotions, passions, yearnings and “groanings too deep for words” as Romans 8:26 refers to the Holy Spirit’s intercessory prayers on our behalf.

Some people know they have deep wells of…