A friend presses a book into your hands. “You must read this!” they say. “It made me cry!” Why would I want that? you ask. I hate crying. Just read it. You have to. The book sits on your bedside table for a week, then a month, then a year. Eventually you run out of other things to read, and you open it. At first in seems flat and inaccessible, but the further in you wade, the more you can feel the current. By the half-way mark, you’ve forgotten all about the real world. By the end, you’re in tears. When you finish the final chapter, you turn the last page over, looking for more, and stare numbly at the About The Author section for a while. Not long after that, you find yourself buying the book for a friend. “You have to read this!” you tell them. “It made me cry!” And they look at you with great suspicion. Because who in their right mind would choose to be sad? If non-fiction books are designed to deliver information, novels are designed to deliver emotion. As readers, we get to leave our own lives behind for a while and feel what someone else is feeling. So we seek out books with “uplifting” or “hilarious” in the blurb – but the books we are compelled to share are the ones which made us grieve, or tremble, or grit our teeth with rage. When people talk about getting desensitised to violence – or horror, or death – they talk about it as though it’s a bad thing. We don’t like the idea of becoming indifferent to pain. We’d rather rid the world of it altogether. That’s a noble goal, but pain is inevitable. At some point in your life, something awful will happen to you. You’ll be injured, or get sick. A loved one will die. And eventually, the world will expect you to get over it. If you’ve never experienced fear or sadness before, moving on is almost impossible. But if you’ve tasted these emotions – just a hint of them – on the pages of a book, you can probably get through it. Novels are the flu shot that helps you survive the outbreak. Chantelle Griffin, author of the Legacy of Zyanthia series, recently sent me an email about my forthcoming novel Ink, Inc. She said it was “a fantastic story with some very thought provoking ideas and an absolutely brilliant ending… it tied the pieces together beautifully and made me want to cry.” I’ve quoted her on my website, but I’m not sure if I’m shooting myself in the foot. On the one hand, it’s high praise. The book made the reader feel something, which is exactly what novels are supposed to do. But on the other hand, no-one likes crying, no matter how good for you it is. I can only hope Chantelle buys a copy for a friend. (Source: jackheath.tumblr/post/68315355426/a-friend-presses-a-book-into-your-hands-you-must )
Posted on: Thu, 28 Nov 2013 01:08:31 +0000
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