Escaping into the Pages

I love when a book forces me to look up from a page to assess my own world.  That moment where I am so engrossed in someone else’s world that I lose myself for a bit.  That moment in Richard Wright’s Native Son where a decapitation is seemingly the only possible solution, where I feel Bigger’s struggle so much that if I was to stop reading I would kill off

the character in the story.  I feel responsible for continuing on to the conclusion so that things will reach a result for not just me but for the parties in the story. 

It is not just character that drags me through a book, but the story’s concept of the world – going beyond plot and setting to that essence of a possibly questioning the idea of existentialism.  When I delve into the words of fiction, it champions a new place of interactions where being alive is turning the page, and gripping the world in which I hold the book is only minutely different from intoxicating my brain with substances that governments would ban.  Not all books do it, but all books contain the opportunity.

With nonfiction it is also unique.  A recent discovery of mine was the shocking realization that nonfiction can elicit similar interest and involvement as fiction.  I like the moment where the facts of the world once again cause me to set the book down and let my brain handle the new wrinkle created.  The power of the language can build the mountain in my mind and have me helping deconstruct it.  It draws me in and holds me captive at the top while the monsters or gods of that knowledge take me as their sacrifice. 

The core of all of this is probably some sort of natural escapism, but it is also a need to be uniquely different than what I was before I picked up the book.  It makes me involved in an actual evolution of who I am as a human, and that makes me even happier to be alive and share in the human experience with others.