Let’s talk about anything about books:
- Your favorite book(s)
- Your favorite author(s)
- Your book you wrote
- What book you still remember 20 years later (or 10 or 5 or 1)
- What book astounded you and why
Stuff like that.
My baby sister and I are BIG readers. Always have been. My parents and my paternal grandfather were big readers, too. In fact, one of my oldest memories is of my dad, in his barcalounger, the foot rest extended, one hand holding a paperback novel and the other hand was him chewing on his fingernails. Oblivious to the world, which in his case included four girl children all 2 years apart, and in the 1960s that meant 4 kids running up and down the stairs endlessly, playing chase, loudly. Every day. So oblivion was a much desired status. He gave me a nail biting problem right along with a love of the written word, but sometimes you just have to take the bad with the good.
Myself, I am still managing about a book a day, and for me, books are my escape from reality. The real world isn’t romantic or kind or reasonable, not in 2024. It’s mean and chaotic and in far too many ways, destructive and dangerous.
So I love really good escapist fiction. The sort of story which captures your imagination and just sucks you into the world the author has created. When the suspension of disbelief becomes so deep that you hear something and realize that you’ve been IN that story, and not even watching the sunlight dim and turn your living room from a bright sunny spot into a murky, shadowy room; because while it got dark you were engaged in the investigation into a murder mystery, and failed to turn on any lights.
I still have about 400 dead tree books on the shelves of my living room library, but for the most part, I’ve moved to buying eBooks and am subscribed to the Kindle Unlimited service at Amazon. I get a lot of value out of that subscription, but I am not a regular kind of reader. Like I said, it’s about a book a day.
I know a lot of people who read maybe five books a year. Or less. They love movies and tv, though. Which I find sad. Because a visual medium just doesn’t engage your mind that way the written word does. In a written story you get a few clues from the author about scenery or the setting, but for the most part, you own mind has to fill in all of the gaps, and for reader, that world looks different, and which colors the story itself in ways which may not be apparently to individual readers until or unless they read a review of the story later on, or have the story come up in a discussion or conversation with someone else who has also read that story.
So stories which force your own imagination to “fill in the blanks” are ones that I truly love. One of the older stories, in which I first understood this was happening to me, was a novel by Stephen King, The Talisman [https://stephenking.com/works/novel/talisman.html] which was first published in 1984. Unlike most of his work at the time, the story isn’t a horror story, but a fantasy story with hints of Epic Quest and a complex mystery. If you’ve never read it before, give it a try.
Twelve-year-old Jack Sawyer embarks on an epic quest--a walk from the seacoast of New Hampshire to the California coast--to find the talisman that will save his dying mother's life. Jack's journey takes him into the Territories, a parallel medieval universe, where most people from his own universe have analogs called "twinners." The queen of the Territories, Jack's mother's twinner, is also dying.
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