Take a look, it's in a book!

How I adore a good book! For me there is nothing like the adventure of jumping into hundreds of pages of prose. I am very selective about my books. I won't read just anything. So to think that in the past couple of weeks I have read 2 very good books that I have just loved, for very different reasons. Although both novels were written by British women, the tone, imagery, and overall feeling of the two volumes were drastically different. The first book to be loved was The Nightingale by Morgana Gallaway. I was transported to Iraq and "saw" the life of an Iraqi woman. I lived through Leila as her life unfolded to me page after page. It was intense. I was afraid with her, happy for her victories, devastated as tragedy struck and her life changed forever. She became almost like a friend, who at any moment would walk into the living room and sit down and chat with me.

The writing of the book seems simple, very modest, which is kind of interesting as that parallels the modesty required of women in the Iraqi culture. There was nothing really fancy or showy about the style or execution of the prose. It was simple and I enjoyed it thoroughly.

As I finished mourning the end of one book, I sought comfort in the pages of another, The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield. In a word: captivating. I have struggled to put myself to bed, knowing that finishing another chapter isn't worth being exhausted tomorrow, but secretly believing that it totally is! Depressing though it was that, after being told that I wouldn't be able to foresee plot events, I found myself one step ahead of the narrator, I didn't care one bit. The carefully crafted, sophisticated, intelligent prose of the novel engrossed me and I found myself traveling with the narrator from small English cottages to vast libraries in sprawling estates, frantically piecing together the mystery of a life.

It is only after finishing the novel tonight that I can appreciate the fact that I spent the first half of the book wondering what it was that I was supposed to be figuring out! I was barely conscious of my fictitious surroundings, only that I knew that I didn't want to leave. Ever. Now that it's over, I grieve that my journey is over.

But the grief leaves and I am content to have experienced a new world, met new people, and completed a journey courtesy of a fictional being. My relationship to books is symbiotic--they need to tell their stories and I need to read them. Not to escape my own life, which is lovely, but to bring a richness to my own experiences by opening myself to the perspective of another. I feel cultured, and that is a good thing.

So go to the library!