Burglar's love for reading leads to arrest after he gets too engrossed in book to finish the crime

Anyone who loves books knows how difficult it is to put one down once you are hooked on the story. People might willingly and happily give up sleep or even forget to eat simply because they are more interested in knowing what happens next. However, can you imagine sitting down with a book and being unable to put it down while you are out for burglary and the stakes are getting arrested and being put behind bars? A suspected Italian burglar did just that, reports BBC.

The 38-year-old burglar in Rome stopped mid-theft to read a book on Greek mythology. The person broke into the flat through the balcony to steal but sat down with Homer's "The Iliad" and was unable to put it down, leading to the burglar's arrest in the Prati district of Rome. The burglar was so distracted by the book that the homeowner found him reading it after waking up in the middle of the night. When the 71-year-old confronted the thief, he even tried to escape but was arrested eventually. The burglar reportedly told the police that he had climbed up the building to visit someone he knew. "I thought I had ended up in a B&B, saw the book and started to read it," the person remarked. 

It was confirmed that the person was, in fact, a burglar, as he had a bag of expensive clothing that he had stolen from another house that evening. After the news of the hilarious fail started making the news, Giovanni Nucci, the author of "The Gods at Six O'Clock," reached out to the thief and offered him a copy of the book so he could finish reading it. "I'd like to find the person caught red-handed and give him the book because he'll have been arrested halfway through reading it. I'd like him to be able to finish it," Nucci said. "It's a surreal story, but also full of humanity," the author commented. 

The author revealed that his favorite deity from the book was Hermes, the god of thieves. "He is also the god of literature. It is clear: everything fits," he said, The book was kept at the homeowner's bedside table, as per The Standard. A person, u/yourbasicgeek, reposted the BBC article on Reddit and the thread received a slew of hilarious comments. u/OozeNAahz wrote, "Didn't I see a saying posted a week or two ago of 'A reader doesn't steal and a thief doesn't read?' Is this guy just thumbing his nose at that saying?" u/asuddenpie commented, "If he’d just stolen the book to read at home instead of stopping to read it there, they probably wouldn't have caught him." 

u/TheNikkiPink remarked, "Well, he didn't steal it because he got caught. Readers don't not-steal because we're morally superior. We're just distracted by all the lovely books! (As a teen, I worked in a library and was constantly being told off because I was supposed to be shelving the books, not reading them. In a way, I was stealing from the library by not slavishly following the orders I was being paid to carry out)." u/donquixote2000 shared, "Now I have this intense desire to become a burglar just so that I can enter people's homes and browse their bookshelves. LOL."