Welcome to bookchat! Where you can talk about anything; books, plays, essays, and audio books. You don’t have to be reading a book to come in, sit down, and chat with us.
When I lose myself in a great novel, that is as close as I get to God. When I close the book and emerge at the end, I feel I have been wandering through a cathedral, not of stone but of trees, a forest of refreshing greens and dappled sunlight. I travel through all the tragedies and triumphs of stumbling and growing, all the wonders and surprises of humanity discovering itself. I forget my petty anxieties and grow beyond myself. Deep reading enriches, enlarges, and weaves my parts together.
You, dear reader and book lover, know this too. That is why you came here, to read and talk about books. You have walked through green cathedrals, you have journeyed to distant worlds. You have probably also read articles about how reading books stretches our minds and teaches us empathy. In The Guardian, three years ago today, Maryanne Wolf explained how ’Skim reading is the new normal. The effect on society is profound.’ It’s a sobering warning, worth reading for all the information and insights it contains. But this Bookchat is more heartening, so I’ll only quote her most encouraging paragraph:
As work in neurosciences indicates, the acquisition of literacy necessitated a new circuit in our species’ brain more than 6,000 years ago. That circuit evolved from a very simple mechanism for decoding basic information, like the number of goats in one’s herd, to the present, highly elaborated reading brain. My research depicts how the present reading brain enables the development of some of our most important intellectual and affective processes: internalized knowledge, analogical reasoning, and inference; perspective-taking and empathy; critical analysis and the generation of insight.
Beyond this science, there is a special magic in deep reading which fascinates me. When you dive entirely into a story, when you pour your whole self in without hesitations or cold analysis, you become a collaborator in the writer’s creative process.
We might be transported by a painting, but the storytelling there is less holistic and proactive (for us viewers). Suppose we are standing in a gallery, side by side, gazing into Monet’s Water Lilies or Van Gogh’s Starry Night. There is magic here, in how these fertile works stir up our feelings and memories, perhaps lead us into reverie. But we both see an identical painting, whose plain meaning is written on its surface. To which our hearts may add personal hues, but still see essentially the same.
Any art, at its peak, can transport a sensitive viewer or listener. Modern Art, Jazz or Classical Symphonies can leave the mundane behind, and launch into flights of pure imagination. They leave so much room for us to feel or picture whatever we will, to dream freely in response to their soulful dances. This is partly because they are uncluttered with the details of one carefully realized image or plotted story. They are not nailed down. Their stories land wherever our own winds blow us.
Storytelling changes the whole game. I find (good) novels the richest form of storytelling, but that’s rather subjective. Poems, plays, operas and many symphonies also tell intricate and articulated stories, and each has its own powers, that can’t squeeze between the covers of a book to be trapped in black and white squiggles.
Movies may offer the most encompassing and information-dense storytelling: they create a more spectacular and lifelike world than squiggles ever can. What they are best at is, crafting a much more nailed-down world than books evoke. Every Michael Bay movie, and most of Spielberg’s, are filmed with enormous care and specificity — via framing, lighting, special effects, and soundtrack — to lead viewers through the director’s personal vision of their story. They manipulate our emotions toward each of their characters and plot-twists, so their audience will gasp, laugh, and cry in unison. We are not supposed to bring our own world to the cinema, but to swallow theirs whole. I think Bergman, Tarkovsky and Wong Kar-wai are more generous, inviting more personal responses from the viewers. But most movies are stories told as completely as possible, so that even their implications are clearly spotlit.
A novel doesn’t hand you a high-resolution, already realized world. A book shows you a bare-boned sketch, a schematic blueprint, and leaves the concrete house-building to your own imagination. Shakespeare had a genius for sketching just the crucial plot and characters, and not one detail further. Each of his plays has been reinterpreted into every language and myriad periods and styles, by all the directors whose souls were sparked by his raw visions. He gave them seeds, then they cultivated marvelous blooms in their distinct imaginative gardens. Which perhaps botches my entire theory, as Shakespeare never wrote a book, he just put his plays onstage. Ah, hoist on my own petard! Such is life.
Dickens shared some of Shakespeare’s gifts. He also had a knack for knowing which stories were universal, and how to present peculiar tales and people so that we immediately feel we recognize them. He somehow wrote cinematically, long before cinemas were invented. Each of his books has been made into several movies, many of them far apart in look and feel. He is the master of character, in that he can introduce someone in two sentences — a feature, a gesture and a word — and we already see them whole. Because he painted their essence, so we could complete their picture in our mind’s eye.
Every great writer began their career as a voracious reader. Our original voices evolve from our own fan fictions. We are amazed and inspired by writers who tell the stories we wish we could. We borrow their best tricks, and — if we write, and write, and write better — gradually our voices start to sound more like our single selves than our forebears, the giants whose shoulders we first stood on to see further. What I contend is, we were already doing all of this long before we put pen to paper. The books that most enchant us involve our own creative muscles, as we visualize characters and entire worlds. These visions are born from other writers’ sketches, combined with the colors we painted in between their lines. Hungry young readers are writers in embryo, training for our grand campaign.
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