I have a love relationship with books. Sometimes it is a superficial love where the title or the cover attracts me, like love at first sight. This can end is a very short reading relationship that can fizzle before Chapter One is concluded. Sometimes I give words more time to grab me and depending on the writers style I may make it past the first few lines. I literally have to be sucked into the authors story. Sometimes it is a love/hate relationship where the author takes me through many emotions but there is enough there to make me want to read more. Sometimes it’s like a relationship about to hit the rocks, I fight through each chapter and I’m left empty and unfulfilled.
However, nothing beats buying a new book, feeling it’s hard smooth cover and fanning the pages to get a whiff of new ink on paper! It’s a delicious experience!
I have a little confession. I read Harry Potter. Yes, I own all the books, attended 2 of the midnight releases and read till dawn.
So why does an adult like me read Harry Potter? Since a young girl I have had a facination with fantasy. I truly believed in faeries, elves and hobgoblins. I honestely believed I could live in the stump of my apple tree at the bottom of my garden and eat mushrooms as my staple diet! I still like to feel ‘the magic’. This is probably why Christmas still evokes these fantastical feelings!
I love reading these sorts of books because I like the way the author has imagined something not seen in our world. The author has had to use a selection of words to evoke a response from the reader to visualise something which they have nothing to compare it to.
I would love to have a bottle of ‘butterbeer’, ‘pumpkin pasties’, go to a school where the food magically appears on the tables and look at photographs that move as described by JK Rowling in Harry Potter. Can you imagine walking into the woods to magical tree called “The Faraway Tree” and having amazing adventures with magical folk, as different ‘lands’ appear at the top of the tree! Enid Blyton would have me wishing I could chew on toffee with Moon Face and whoosh down his slippery slip on a colourful cushion!
It’s escapism at it’s best. To go with your imagination to a world that has been created and one, which you the reader, needs to identify with and experience through the words and chapters.
Fantastical Fantasy – my little ‘drug read’.
Twaddle & Twak 