I've never thought of reading as an escape--reading is just how I entertain myself, and it always has been.
I've never thought of reading as an escape--reading is just how I entertain myself, and it always has been.
Reading has been my escape and entertainment since I discovered Nancy Drew and Beverly Cleary 60 years ago.
I do read some non-fiction to educate myself and sometimes for entertainment as well. I've always consumed more fiction though for entertainment and occasionally for escape. I had introduced a friend to the Jack Reacher books by Lee Childs. She is currently treating for breast cancer and says these books have been a wonderful escape for her.
My husband reads incessantly. He gets 6 books at a time from the library and reads them in a week, usually. Right now he's reading a series by WEB Griffin that a friend gave him. He finishes one, closes it, picks up the next, opens it up and starts in. Just like that. Yes, he "escapes." Retired. Some days all he does is read, only stopping to fix himself something to eat and visit the loo.
I enjoy reading, and the Outlander series was really an escape, but I don't do that much.
My therapist told me the way to achieve true inner peace is to finish what I start. So far today, I have finished two bags of M&Ms and a chocolate cake. I feel better already!
I have cleared the decks for immersion in Charles Dickens' David Copperfield
I am putting the kettle on for tea on the sunporch (where sunlight is streaming in!). I have the Everyman's Library edition (877 pages, illustrated.) and I plan to read along with an audiobook. I will be several afternoons on the sun-porch before I finish.
I never read this novel before, but I am told it was Dickens' own favorite, and it was a watershed (half-light and half-darkness... the novels he wrote after David Copperfield were all darkness).
G. K. Chesterton concluded in his introduction:
... When a man sees perfection he goes blind... This book of David Copperfield is the one, perhaps, on which [Dickens] expended most of his actual ambition to be exhaustive, artistic and perfect. It is not exhaustive, artistic, nor perfect. The only thing is that, when you see it at the proper angle, it is annihilating.
I love non-fiction, but it's not an escape.
Fiction is the ultimate escape. Any good work of fiction. My immersion into a good book absolutely distorts my reality. I remember reading books set in winter, during which I'll put the book down and go to the window to see if it's still snowing. In July.
Poetry is an escape. I'm getting back into poetry. I used to love poems in my youth, but not so much for most of my adult life. But I'm back to appreciating he ultimate efficiency of the words in poems. Mary Oliver, T.S. Eliot, Walt Whitman are some of my favorites.
"Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it--every, every minute?" Emily Webb, Our Town
www.silententry.wordpress.com
What does it say about a person who can seldom finish a book? I might know somebody like that.
As I mentioned in another thread, I recently read The Songs of Distant Earth. It was the deepest escape I ever took through a book. I highly recommend it.
I'm buying it now - songs of distant earth. Wikipedia says it was Arthur c Clark's favorite of all his stuff.
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