Why we love certain books

There are books that speak to my soul and feel as if the author knows and understands me. Here is one explanation of why we love certain books. In the plot, we move from one important moment directly to the next – whereas in life there are endless sub-plots that distract and confuse us. In a story, the key events of a relationship unfold across a few dozen pages: in life, they are spread over many years and interleaved with hundreds of business meetings, holidays, hours spent watching television, chats with one’s parents, shopping trips and dentist’s appointments. The compressed logic of a plot corrects the chaos of existence: the links between events can be made much more obvious. We understand – finally – what is going on.

Writers reveal people’s secret thoughts and motives. The characters are much more clearly defined than the people we actually encounter. On the page, we meet purer villains, braver more resourceful heroes, people whose suffering is more obvious or whose virtues are more striking than would ever normally be the case. They – and their actions – provide us with simplified targets for our emotional lives. We can love or revile them, pity them or condemn them more neatly than we ever can our friends and acquaintances.

We need simplification because of the complexity of our lives. The writer, in books that get us, puts into words feelings that had long eluded us, they know us better than we know ourselves. They seem to be narrating our own stories, but with a clarity, we could never achieve. 

So often we feel lost for words; we’re impressed by the sight of a bird wheeling in the dusk sky; we’re aware of a particular atmosphere at dawn, we love someone’s slightly wild but sympathetic manner. We struggle to verbalize our feelings. Feelings that we see as too complex, subtle, vague and elusive for us to be able to verbalize. The best writers home in on the angle of the wing; the slow movement of the largest branch of a tree; the angle of the mouth in a smile. Through the writer’s words the nuance of life, become more visible.

When the book touches us, the writer builds bridges and cut through to the common core of the experience. By selection and emphasis, they reveal the important things we share. They show us where to look. They help us to feel.

In the pages of a story, we meet someone, perhaps a person who is very beautiful/handsome, tender, sensitive, young and/or dying; and we weep for the character and all the cruelty and injustice of the world. And we come away, not devastated, but refreshed. Our emotional muscles are exercised and their strength rendered newly available for our lives.

The task of linking the right book to the right person at the right time is not easy, but when we happen to come across the ideal book for us we are presented with an extraordinarily clearer, more lucid, better-organised account of our own concerns and experiences: for a time at least, our minds become less clouded and our hearts become more accurately sensitive. Through authors words, we become a little better at being who we always really were or wanted to be in life. Enjoy. My thanks to Ronnie at Time Goes By for the link.