A change of scene - escaping into a good book
A good book can often be a means to escape, as anyone who has read 'The Shawshank Redemption' knows. A compelling thriller that drives you on to turn the pages in a hurry to get from chase to court room to electric chair to the page where the publisher explains that the author died leaving the book unfinished to anger management classes is a classic route, and a good book an be an immersive experience, causing the real world to drop away around you. This is quite understandable if the real world is, say, public transport, or prison, less so if that world is a beach or hotel pool. Presumably one can enjoy Harry Potter at any time, while sunburn and snacks served to you on a lounger are not part of everyday life for most folk.
The power of the written word can be demonstrated in two ways, the first is that one occasionally sees otherwise normal looking people walking along reading a book. Actually preferring to find out what happens to their favourite character next than look where they are going. The second is the reaction that coming across somebody with the same last name as you in a book elicits. Mostly, the reaction is to hope that the character does not, at any time in the next three hundred odd pages, commit an act of gross indecency with a goat. And while we're at it, is it just me, or is the 'gross' tacked on to any accusation of indecency with a goat wholly unnecessary?
Readers escape into other various other worlds. They can be dark and gritty reflections of the real world, with familiar landmarks seen through a glass darkly; Rebus's Edinburgh for instance, rather less mime and rather more murder than usual. Or they can be like our own but twisted, like Neil Geiman's London. Or they can be magically distorted, like Hogwarts.
The mother load of escapist fiction is science fiction and fantasy, especially where a group of writers create and populate a shared universe or where one writer creates a saga so vast that one feels that the time spent reading it roughly equates to the time they actually spend living in the real world in any one week. Certainly, by the time I finished 'Game of Thrones' I was surprised that I didn't have chain mail ring marks puckering my arse where I'd been sitting on my armour.
Just as fanciful as science fiction is romantic fiction, with the odds of some rich good looking guy falling for the quirky fat girl about the same as somebody developing instantaneous interstellar travel in their shed, although this seems to be the plot of quite a number of novels in each genre respectively (fat girl finding love = romantic fiction, space ship in shed = science fiction, for the avoidance of doubt. Geeky guy finding love with quirky girl = plot of the sitcom 'Big bang theory'). Guys read books about space ships in sheds because they would like to live in a world where they could look out of the shed window and see the rings of Saturn rather than a compost heap, presumably women read romantic fiction because they would like to live in a world where lots of dairy in the diet and romantic perfection are not mutually exclusive.
The power of the written word can be demonstrated in two ways, the first is that one occasionally sees otherwise normal looking people walking along reading a book. Actually preferring to find out what happens to their favourite character next than look where they are going. The second is the reaction that coming across somebody with the same last name as you in a book elicits. Mostly, the reaction is to hope that the character does not, at any time in the next three hundred odd pages, commit an act of gross indecency with a goat. And while we're at it, is it just me, or is the 'gross' tacked on to any accusation of indecency with a goat wholly unnecessary?
Readers escape into other various other worlds. They can be dark and gritty reflections of the real world, with familiar landmarks seen through a glass darkly; Rebus's Edinburgh for instance, rather less mime and rather more murder than usual. Or they can be like our own but twisted, like Neil Geiman's London. Or they can be magically distorted, like Hogwarts.
The mother load of escapist fiction is science fiction and fantasy, especially where a group of writers create and populate a shared universe or where one writer creates a saga so vast that one feels that the time spent reading it roughly equates to the time they actually spend living in the real world in any one week. Certainly, by the time I finished 'Game of Thrones' I was surprised that I didn't have chain mail ring marks puckering my arse where I'd been sitting on my armour.
Just as fanciful as science fiction is romantic fiction, with the odds of some rich good looking guy falling for the quirky fat girl about the same as somebody developing instantaneous interstellar travel in their shed, although this seems to be the plot of quite a number of novels in each genre respectively (fat girl finding love = romantic fiction, space ship in shed = science fiction, for the avoidance of doubt. Geeky guy finding love with quirky girl = plot of the sitcom 'Big bang theory'). Guys read books about space ships in sheds because they would like to live in a world where they could look out of the shed window and see the rings of Saturn rather than a compost heap, presumably women read romantic fiction because they would like to live in a world where lots of dairy in the diet and romantic perfection are not mutually exclusive.
Labels: Book, Books, Fantasy, Fiction, Science fiction
1 Comments:
This has nothing to do with your post really, but at this point you must know you serve as some fictional-yet-supposedly-real person who actually exists and is forced to read what I write...
So, the other day at work there was a girl who was speaking of a book "based on that movie"...which obviously led to uncontrollable laughter on my part in thinking what a hilarious concept a "book based on a movie" might be.
For example, I show up at a publisher's office with about 75 different manuscripts all based on my favorite movies. "Oh yes, this one I call 'Top Gun' and here I have shortened the make-out scene as I figure all of that foreplay is truly unnecessary...and yes, chapter 23 is where I got up to get more popcorn and had to deviate even more from the movie, but you get the picture"...etc etc.
Post a Comment
<< Home