Nice essay on what it feels to finish a book or audiobook that you loved. The deepness of the engagement is driven by the reader or listener:
"What the author or writer does is provide maybe one third, but we ourselves, as we engage in that, we provide two thirds. Because what we're being offered are not descriptions, they are suggestions which we then take up and imagine for ourselves. And our emotions are our own as well,"
The favorite books of my childhood were always about escapism - another world, another time, another culture in some combination. Here and now had absolutely no appeal to me. I sought escape from my small town existence, the complete lack of excitement and change that made all the days of the week, month and year turn to an an amorphous blob. There were things of redeeming value - the smell of rain on dry earth, dry brown bleeding into vivid shades of green, the mynahs and parrots on the mango tree, the smell of chai and so on. But none of that offered the ultimate escape books did.
That ability to escape to another world has long disappeared. I don't like reading stories of imagined and fictive lives anymore no matter when and where they are set. A well-researched and thought-provoking work of non-fiction is the only kind of reading that keeps me engaged. And those are hard to escape into no matter how well-written the content and how passionately the author cares for their subject.
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