After the first few weeks of the new year, I began to think about what I wanted to say to my husband. I was curious about how he would respond to my questions about the new year, so I began to write down some questions I had about the new year. I wanted to try to get a sense of the way he would respond.
My husband is a great reader and I couldn’t have asked for a better reader. He’s a guy that we love to read, and I’m very good at finding what he needs to do in the event of something bad happens. He’s a super-intelligent person and has a lot of questions that I’m more likely to answer than answer for him.
My husband is a great listener, he can take in anything and not give a crap what you have to say. He can also be a really good listener if you ask him to. He makes me so proud.
I am not one of those people that likes to read all the time. I like reading a little bit about a subject and then trying to take a step back and just read a book or watch TV a little bit, that kind of thing. I have been reading a lot for a while now, but my interest has only recently picked up. I find that reading is a lot like being on a hike, you are just out there with your own thoughts and you just don’t think about anything.
That is the same way I approach reading. I take a small piece of a story and I read it just like I would a novel. I’m not trying to “imagine” or “create” the story. I am just reading it, and I am just reading it, and I am just reading it.
The interesting thing about books is that you can read them in a different way. Unlike with TV, you can do this with all kinds of books. Some are too short, some are too long, some are too complicated. Some are written in a way that makes them flow. Others read more like poetry and others like essays, and still others are all about the same thing. You can probably tell just from the titles that I am talking about.
This is an interesting point. Books are a great way to learn how a story is constructed. In a book, the reader can walk through the story in a different way than the author intended. I like to read books in a similar way to how I walk through a movie. I am very interested in what the author had in mind, how they wanted the story to be told, how all of the characters fit into its structure.
I think the thing that differentiates books from movies is the way they tell the story. I’m not going to try to explain this here, but my favorite movie is the one that follows up on The Lion King with a series of flashbacks that take place over a week in the life of Simba and his relationship with Nala. I will go into more detail in a later post about why I think these flashbacks work so well.
The thing that sets books and movies apart is the way they tell the story. We’ve all seen movies that are over six hours long, with a lot of set-up, exposition, and exposition. You know how in the first five minutes of The Godfather Part II, you get a brief glimpse of how the characters all fit together? That’s how I think of book storytelling.
Now that the last half of the book is out, we have something to look forward to.