I spent the past couple of days lost in a new book. A good book does that to me--binds me to it until it's complete. My focus narrows down to the carefully typed words on yellowed pages; tearing myself away only when necessary for a bit to eat or shower or some other demand that can't be ignored. I'll read by dim desk light until three am when my eyes refuse to focus and the same sentence starts to repeat in my head and I know I must sleep--only to awake the next morning and return to the book's spell as if there had been no interruption and the story was waiting for me at the moment I left it--not racing ahead and through tales as I feared it would when I submitted to unconsciousness. Things that usually seem so important to day-to-day life fade in comparison to the brightly colored world a book offers me--I feel miles from my bedroom and everything that is usually familiar to me seems a shadow of what it once was. But I finished my latest novel last night and slowly this world is coming into focus again. How often I forget the joy of obsessive reading...
CONVERSATION