It’s hard to escape the news nowadays - natural disasters, mass shootings, and immigration wars are endless. Unplugging from it all is hard when it’s constantly being thrown at your face and actively attacking good, innocent people.
Unless you pick up a book. Then this world just kind of fades away for hours on end and is replaced by someone else’s dreams.
I’ve always been an avid reader. When I travel, every spare minute I have — on a plane, in the airport, in a passenger's seat, when I'm on the toilet, when I'm eating — will be spent reading. If I have to get interrupted in the middle of a book, it'd either be for something very, very important or the book better be so good that I want to put it down for a minute because I want it to last just that much longer.
For me, it's all about the novel. The fiction. The stories we want to tell, for whatever reason we want to tell them. I love getting lost in other's worlds, in having my world become that world, in thinking about how many worlds there are. There are so many worlds out there.
There's the greater world, the one world in which we all live in, that we read about in the news, and there's the 7 billion individual worlds we all exist in. And there are countless worlds we create between each other, one-on-one or in groups of friends, with the way we become when we're together. And then there's the ways to see the world that are themselves their own worlds, the worlds of politics and the world of science and of philosophy and of photography. And then there's the theoretical worlds, the parallel worlds that we cannot see but that exist all around us, in which everything that can happen does happen, and then there's all the worlds out there so far away that we can only imagine their existence, the alien worlds and the other earths. And there are the worlds we create in our stories, in our fictions, in our dreams, in our narratives. So many worlds. So many possible ways to fall in love.
Or not.
You have relationships with books — or at least, I do. Most of them come and they go. I read them for a bit and we have dinner together and it's an interesting conversation and I see what happens, but in the end, we just weren't really meant to be and the book gets closed and they quickly become ancient history. But some books will really come to mean something to you. They'll change the way you look at the world, or they'll inspire you, or they'll open some new connection to someone else that hadn't existed before. And some books will really just stick with you. You can't forget them, no matter how sick or twisted or dark or ordinary or unreal the story was. You want to remember them. You want to have them front and center on your book shelf, safe and secure where you can see it every day, where you can reminisce about the good times you had when you were first discovering each other.
My relationship with books started with The Little Prince, a story I love (and the movie is amazing too). It's a beautiful reminder of how important imagination is to us all. But I might be biased. My dad used to read The Little Prince to me when I was just a wee little kid. I remember the effort spent on it and the years that followed that effort: how books like The Giving Tree and The Frog Prince Continued became my favorite places to go in elementary school and the time I spent with A Wrinkle in Time in junior high. I would regularly read hundreds of pages of books in a single night, staying up under the blankets with a flashlight in my room so that my mom wouldn't yell at me to go to sleep.
More recently, during a trip home to Michigan, I read The Light of the Fireflies by Paul Pen and The Butterfly Garden by Dot Hutchison. I don't know how I came across either of these two books, honestly. The first, I think I started because I'm attracted to books told by unreliable and naive narrators, and also dark families and difficult circumstances. The second seemed like a good serial killer crime novel. I'd say my relationship with both these books was more along the Tinder date spectrum of love than the long-term real deal, but I did enjoy them both enough to finish the conversations we started.
The Light of Fireflies is about a twisted family who locked themselves down in a basement to live, and it's told from the perspective of a young, imaginative child, who isn't old enough to understand the world yet and the book follows him as he starts to learn more and more about his situation. It was enjoyable as a reader because you really only knew as much as the narrator, and I think that confusion worked well and added to the story. It's definitely a skill in writing to release just the right amount of information at the right time, to show instead of tell. That's always been something I've struggled with in my own fiction: Does the reader need to know this right now and why? What can't the character know about his or her own world to make the story develop?
The Butterfly Garden is a mystery of sorts about a girl who is abducted by a beauty-obsessed serial killer and forced to live in his "butterfly" garden until he kills them upon their 21st birthday to preserve their youth. (Is that a spoiler? I'm new to this.) The story tells the story of the girls forced to live in the garden together, until they all somehow escape one day. I'd been hoping for some deep, thought-provoking storytelling about beauty and captivity and psychology, but the narrative is told as a conversation between one of the girls and some police officers after they've all been rescued. So there's this additional wall between the narrator and the reader which makes it impersonal. I never felt like I was getting to know the narrator. I felt more like I was listening in to someone else's conversation.
the books I've loved:
Room, by Emma Donoghue:
Yes, this book is a movie now, and yes, the movie was good. But it wasn't as good as the book. It couldn't have been. The book — which I read long before the movie came out — completely transports you into the mind of a five-year-old boy who has never seen the world before, doesn't even know it exists, and his bravery and wonder as he discovers it all. I loved, loved, loved reading it. Even though it has dark undertones, it protects you from them like a mother wrapping a child in a blanket. I took a long time reading this book, because I didn't want it to end. I would read a paragraph on the bus then put it down again just to slow down time.
The Tinder Date to Soulmate Love Scale: This book is family.
The Art of Racing in the Rain, by Garth Stein:
I'm pretty sure this book is about to become a movie, which makes this a Must-Read-Now literary emergency. This is a book about a family told from the dog's perspective, and it's amazing. I might be biased, though, as I really love dogs and talk to mine all the time.
The Tinder Date to Soulmate Love Scale: This book is every pet you've ever had.
The Stand, by Stephen King:
I have read this epic post-apocalyptic religious-sci-fi fantasy story 13 times from cover to cover, so it would be hard not to include it on my list of favorite books (although I've been stuck on Book IV of The Dark Tower series for about three years now, which is frustrating). King is a master of creating relatable alternative universes that are both horrifying and realistic. I've loved his books ever since I first read Christine in 1995 just before getting my driver's license. The Stand is a well-crafted tale that just has a bit of everything: a spiritual battle of good and evil, a government conspiracy, a world-ending disease, road trip resiliency and stories, powerful villains, etc.
The Tinder Date to Soulmate Love Scale: The guy your mom warned you about, but you didn't care because he was exciting and you got to his motorcycle.
A Short History of Nearly Everything, by Bill Bryson, and The Four Percent Universe, by Richard Panek:
I'm putting these together because they are two separate non-fiction books that use amazing story telling abilities to try and explain modern physics and scientific theories to laymen such as myself, and I found them both thoroughly enjoyable, not to mention mind-blowing and mind-bending. Though I'd like to believe I understood both books all the way through, my scientific understanding of a lot of what they talk about is probably practically fictional — which didn't make them any less fun to think about.
The Tinder Date to Soulmate Love Scale: The most intriguing crush you met in college, who could get you to study probability and statistics for hours on end.
5. Slaughterhouse Five, by Kurt Vonnegut:
The Tralfamadorians changed my life, and Kurt Vonnegut is a genius. I read a book of his essays once, and it felt just like riding the bus with Kurt Vonnegut and sitting under the tree with Kurt Vonnegut, and I rode the bus and sat under a lot of trees during that time.
The Tinder Date to Soulmate Love Scale: Your first real relationship where you really tried hard to deal with each others’ ups and downs but just couldn't and you still feel a bit guilty about that.
6. My Name is Memory, by Ann Brashares:
Because who doesn't love a love story that stretches across many, many, many lives? Ann Brashares is an author that makes me believe in all the possibilities of reincarnation.
The Tinder Date to Soulmate Love Scale: The four-week fling that convinced you love is real, until it disappeared.
The Solitude of Prime Numbers, by Paolo Giordano:
A story about love and friendship between two traumatized and solitary kids, the realistic portrayal of love in this book counteracts the fantasy of My Name is Memory.
The Tinder Date to Soulmate Love Scale: The best friend who understands you better than anyone but who will always just be the Best Friend.
I Wrote This for You by Pleasefindthis, by author Iain S. Thomas and photographer Jon Ellis:
Look. I don't even know if this is really a book. I don't know who wrote it or who they wrote it for, whether it's a story or a diary or a letter. I don't know, and I don't care; I really felt when I was reading it that they wrote it for me to find, and I did. It's not really a novel; it's a book of poetry and inspiration and photography and just day-to-day thoughts about life and living. But it was like reading my soul. It was almost creepy.
The Tinder Date to Soulmate Love Scale: The ones you loved and had to let go of anyway.
The Tao of Pooh, by Benjamin Hoff, A New Earth, by Eckhart Tolle,
The Untethered Soul, by Michael A. Singer and, Courageous Souls, by Robert Schwartz:
I always enjoy a good philosophical or spiritual theory or discussion about how we can all become our best selves. These were all recommended to me by close friends and each helped me get through difficult times.
The Tinder Date to Soulmate Love Scale: Your spouse as he grows up and then grows old.