As the summer comes to a close, and I ramble away my spare time in reading and writing and soaking up the Texas sun, I find myself once again balancing the role of a dreamer and the role of a practical member of society. My dreams haven’t quite started paying the bills yet. But I suppose there are not very many twenty year olds who can say differently.
But as I contemplate my entrance into the “real world”, I find myself wishing to retreat more and more into the fantasy worlds of books and stories. I heard someone say not long ago that we read to escape. “True!” I thought, recalling lovely days snuggled under a blanket engrossed in a book so much that my own life seemed second to the lives of the characters in the story. But then, of course, I had to go and think more about the reason for reading. And the more I thought about it, the more I realized that such an assertion was actually far from the truth.
Perhaps we do read to escape the boringness and the toil of everyday. But if we were really trying to escape, wouldn’t we read books in which nothing bad ever happened? We would immerse ourselves in children’s bedtime rhymes—but then again those don’t always go so well (don’t get me started on Rockabye Baby). Almost every book we read contains a plot much crueler than the plot of our own lives. We revel in characters whose plights are enormously more challenging than our own.
So is the escape simply the dissolving of our own struggles into the denser problems of fiction? A physical escape yes, but hardly an emotional one. Because you see, I don’t think we read just to escape. We read to know we’re not alone.
The great characters are the ones with whom we can relate, the ones whose struggles remind us of our own. Perhaps theirs involve saving the world, but their conquests give us the determination to overcome our own. We read to find someone like us. And in the discovery of them, we discover ourselves.
The right book is not an escape. It is the first page turn towards facing our own world, and knowing that it means something.
Because why else would anyone read?