Reading is a strange hobby / past time.
You are basically taking words, simple things and
deriving enjoyment from them.
Stories themselves have power, they are alive and we the
readers are their transmitting vector.
Kind of like a pathogen … I know that sounds very heavy.
But stories are alive, we read them then pass them on to
others or tell them to others. They change and grow or subtract in the
retelling. There are authors who have brought out different editions of their
works.
Edition one;
Author’s edition;
Special edition;
Anniversary edition;
And it can go on.
So stories are alive and they have very real power.
Stories move people, cause them to cry when they reach a
revelation or a specific character dies. When a villain or character is written
to the point where a reader truly dislikes said character (see GRR Martin’s
King Joffrey in Game of Thrones).
Or characters we like no matter their affiliation or
moral compass, they become lovable rogues or villainous characters we agree
with even if their methods are extreme (RA Salvatore’s Jarlaxle character is
seen as one of the best rogues in the Forgotten Realms setting).
Another aspect that is also strange is the power of the
reader’s imagination on what they are reading.
Film gives a viewer a definitive and subjective view of a
character or world. So what you see is what you get. The fluid world becomes
concrete and fixed.
But an author will often give a description of a
character or setting and the reader makes an image in their own mind.
A good example is Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time, his one
character is described as tall with red hair but both me and a fellow reader
saw her as having black hair. It just happened to be how he wrote her, we did
not see her having red hair.
At the same time you can also see the opposite when
readers discuss the same book.
Characters become alive and different – this reader sees
tall with long hair, that one sees medium height with shoulder length. Faces
change, the characters morph and become malleable clay figurines. The world
becomes different and personal to each reader.
Therein lies part of the magic of reading, the book now
becomes personal to the reader, they receive the message intended for them through
their own subjectivity.
I am not complaining about this facet, just merely
stating its existence.
Though there is also a down side to this phenomenon.
Readers can put in meaning and personalities not there.
There is a well know story of a South African poet who
was part of a lecture and the students started asking how his traffic light
went red in the poem and it represented the violence and bloodshed that was
happening in the country at that time. He simply said that no the traffic light
simply happened to be red when he got there.
Non-fiction books are also good things to read but they
are influenced by ‘real’ (as real as the author remembers when writing) and
concrete events. The image is influenced by the real world a person
experiences.
Fiction is different, the reader has to suspend the real
world for a short while and create the fantastic.
So yes, keep reading. Keep those stories alive and help
them grow.
