Literary agent Rachelle Gardner asked on her blog what purpose books serve.
A few months ago, the subject came up between E and I on a long drive to the Naval Hospital in Bremerton, where she was going for eye surgery. I asked what novels are for, because I wondered how difficult it would be if my eyes were out of commission–how soon I would miss reading, and what I would miss about it most. E is a good person to bring your big questions to, because she never convolutes the answers.
Books are a form of entertainment. To writers, books are more than that–or at least I wish they were, but when I try to make them too much they get, well… convoluted. The conversation left me wishing for a deeper definition of entertainment, but really, we have the penny romances that fed gossip-hungry 18th-century socialites to thank for the market that later gave us Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Mrs. Dalloway, Lolita, 1984, and all the rest. Your thoughts?
1711 title page.
Tags: books, miscellany, Writing
I think we read to experience things we don’t get to do or see in our own lives. We test our powers of deduction when we read mysteries to see if we can figure out “who done it”. (Yes, I know you hate it when quotation marks are used but I like using them!) Reading is an escape from our ordinary lives. That’s just a few of reasons I can come up for why I love to read.
We read to know that we are not alone. I think we write for the same reason. We want to be connected in the deepest possible ways to each other, but it is scary to do it face to face. Reading a novel is a safe and fulfilling way to look into someone else’s soul. And when it is so well written, we feel connected to the whole universe while we are reading it.