unpredictable

"Every book worth reading is a meeting place."

I love having friends who read books. I especially love talking about books, the ones I've read and the ones I haven't read, the ones I really like and the ones I'm not so sure about. every once in a while I find someone who has loved the same book I have loved, and that is exciting. and every once in a while someone gives me the title of a book they love, or an author they love, and it spreads.

right now I am nearly finished with The Eyre Affair, by Jasper Fforde, in which written manuscripts literally become meeting places, via an ingenious contraption known as the Prose Portal. it's powered by bookworms, who are fed leftover prepositions from the newspapers. in the story there are also a few extraordinary instances of characters from books slipping from their pages into the real world (and vice versa) without the aid of bookworm-technology. that is how the heroine (her name is Thursday. how cool.) meets Mr Rochester.

I don't know what's going to happen next. Jane Eyre just got kidnapped from her own book, and who knows what the horrible villain (his name is Acheron Hades. how ominous.) is going to do to her. the whole country is massively worried, having temporarily lost this literary treasure.

me, I didn't like Jane Eyre that much, so I might not mind if she got kidnapped. the ending bugged me. first-person narratives are always iffy.

but for some people, a first-person gothic romance is exactly what they like. that's good. someone needs to love those Brontë sisters.

for some reason (perhaps having to do with Chris's only recently made-up-fof lack of blogging in the last five months) I was reading through old blogposts and found a few all about the worth of literature. it inspires thought, stirs emotion, and... so what? what is it that gets us so attached to certain stories? what makes them resonate?

and what makes it so tricky to explain the connection?

I don't know. but this brings us to the rest of my opening quote:

"... a meeting place. Some would call it a battleground: are the writer's ideas or the reader's preconceptions to survive?"

friend Sarah handed me this quote, and I wish I knew who to attribute it to, but neither Sarah nor google could tell me the author. it's interesting though. these words and phrases and characters come up against us, offer a challenge, and leave us different people--though it's very hard to pinpoint exactly how.  as voracious readers we return to these battlegrounds as often as we can. even if we don't end up in love with a book, we'll at least meet some interesting ideas.

{ the borrowed image of Rochester and Jane is probably copyright the folks at Masterpiece Theatre. they remade Jane Eyre in 2007. my roommate Bekah is obsessed with it. I like it too. its ending was much better than the book's. }