Aren't Books the Greatest

Yesterday I read a book. I picked it up at lunchtime as a side dish to my sandwich and I closed the back cover at 10:30pm. Somewhere in there I took a break to mow the lawn. In the morning I sent out three proposals and spoke to very organized bride on the phone, and then I saw it there while I smeared mayonnaise on a slice of bread, the book Brett suggested I read along with him after he read just the first chapter and squealed and squirmed about how good it was. I picked up the book and carried it from room to room for the rest of the day. I ignored my dogs, waved insincerely at Brett's homecoming, and halfheartedly fried snapper for dinner.
Today, I feel like I was out of town yesterday. I went on an adventure to the outer banks of North Carolina in the 1950's. I was a tall, tan, marsh-dwelling girl with black hair, which is admittedly not so far from the truth, but our paths would diverge quickly and I'd become engrossed in a life I'm so familiar with but have never lived.

Rare is the day that I get lost in a book. I'm a tough critic. I don't love Fiction. My haunches go numb if I sit for too long.
Brett grinned at me when he came home and I was on my belly, lazily turning pages.
"Is it good?" Don't tell me! What happens?"
It is a guilt producing indulgence to read during the day and since I'm not usually lured in so easily, I move through books a chapter at time, week by week. I can think of only three books I've read in under 48 hours: the second Harry Potter book, a Dean Koontz sci-fi thriller, and one about the remarkable existence of Louie Zamperini. Now I'll add this one to that prestigious collection. When I told this to Brett, I realized that all but one of my Record Time Reads are fiction. So that's proof right there that I probably don't know what I'm talking about most of the time.

Two main things pull me through a story; 1) feeling a connection to the main character or 2) any kind of suspenseful tension. Among my favorite books, you'll find writers that concisely conveyed a thought I figured no one else had thought before, be it shameful or insightful or funny. When a writer reaches out and takes your hand as you read, that book winds up on the top shelf. Among my Record Time Reads, you'll find writers that leave a candy trail through a dark forest and the fear and curiosity is so much that you've got to get through that forest as fast as you can. Later you'll go back through and pick up the candies.
Sometimes a book does both of these things well and also sprinkles in other delights like humor and education and you're not really even aware that you aren't actually a by-standing character in that book.

Most of the time though, I finish a great book and marvel at the mind of the writer. I appreciate and love the characters and story arcs and conclusions but what I really want, is to meet the person that came up with those goodies, peek inside their mind, find out how they came across that feeling that I thought only I knew. What happened to them? Why do they know loneliness so well? Where did they learn the tiny nuances of an eccentric scientist? Who showed them what heartbreak felt like? Surely they wrote that hilarious and humiliating bathroom scene from experience, right? Sometimes I wonder if I only think a book is great because it made me imagine wild and interesting possible lives of the author.

Today I've thought about yesterday's marsh book every hour or so for a different reason or memory or idea each time. I'm still mentally wading through a marsh at the end of dirt road on a muggy summer day, a grubby marsh girl. That's a fun gift.
Aren't books the greatest?

 Here is a different kind of marsh girl who became determined to climb to the roof.