CoffeeBear.net

Why I Read?

Posted by Mark | Filed under Life

A friend of mine recently asked if other peo­ple had sim­i­lar reac­tions when read­ing a good book. Since this site has been heav­ier on the brain­less fluff of late; I decided to answer the ques­tion here rather than in her comments.

When I’ve got a really good book in my paws, — mind you this is only for a REALLY GOOD book! — I’ll start read­ing and won’t notice the pas­sage of time until either:
A. My blood­sugar has dropped from not eat­ing in 8 hours.
B. It’s sud­denly four in the morn­ing and my eyes are tired so the words on the page start look­ing insanely small.

With a book that catches me like that, my head is totally in the book. Peo­ple in real life can try talk­ing to me, but they’ll get grunts for answers (at best). When my favorite char­ac­ter¹ is happy, I’m happy. When they’re run­ning through forests; I can hear leaves rustling and feel the branches drag across my face as I dash through the trees.

The last time I really felt this way about a book was when I first read the book that I’m cur­rently read­ing, Ghosts in the Snow by Tamara Siler Jones. A friend of ours had got­ten her hands on an early (review?) copy of the book and rec­om­mended it to my wife & I. Ariesna sat down and read the entire book while we were at the friend’s house that night. I think I man­aged to wait until we bought a copy of our own to read it, but once I did I started to get really angry.

I need to pause a moment here to explain about how I gen­er­ally enjoy my enter­tain­ments. If the book/movie/whatever has even a rea­son­ably decent story; then I’ll sus­pend my dis­be­lief and just enjoy it with­out ana­lyz­ing it. This is par­tic­u­larly true on my first expe­ri­ence with the book/movie/whatever.

And what exactly does that have to do with get­ting angry while read­ing Ghosts in the Snow? Ghosts is a mys­tery story with a fan­ta­si­cal set­ting and I was get­ting attached to one of the char­ac­ters. This char­ac­ter hap­pened to be a sus­pect in mul­ti­ple mur­ders and some of the clues in the book seemed to be point­ing to him being the killer. The thought of this being true was mak­ing me too angry to con­tinue read­ing. Even­tu­ally, I had to ask my wife if he was the killer because I was so upset about it that I wouldn’t be able to fin­ish the book if he was. She told me he wasn’t but not who the killer was (at my request) and I was able to fin­ish the book.

It’s for moments like those that I read.

¹ This will usu­ally be a sup­port­ing char­ac­ter. Why? Because the main char­ac­ters tend to get all the glory while some­body else is doing more to accom­plish the goal (e.g. Sam vs. Frodo).

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