A Good Book

I haven’t written for days, life seems to be getting in the way. The house, my job, friends, the endless circus in my head and more recently a haunting flu have suspended me unable to write, or really unwilling. I want writing to be like rich dark chocolate even when you don’t really feel like it you can squeeze in a block or two. I feel the rambling disconnected days I have been having, hazy with paint fumes, sniffly with a head cold, noisy with road works and boiling with pure anger would not really make for good reading. But having spent a sick day sleeping and reading Elliot Pearlman’s ‘Seven Types of Ambiguity’ it seems general misery makes for bloody good reading. Although over the mid book hump and steadily looking toward the end I am starting to hate the writer who has taken me into such a dark and dirty world, I am finding its grime difficult to wash away. Annie Dillard comments that reading a book is a stretch in comparison to living a tactile life, but I disagree a good book stops being read and becomes like a narrative from your brain, you can smell the story, you can hear the characters voices, you can feel the way they move, and soon you are squirming at the morality of their actions and pitying their lives as if they were real.

A good book is tranporting like nothing else.