Reading to Transport

When I wrote 15 Reasons to Read,  I failed to mention one of the most important:

to be transported

Roald Dahl mentions that books 'transported' Matilda 'into new worlds' from the comfort of her home in an English village, however there is also the very physical transport of reading while travelling.

By this I don't just mean in the metaphorical sense but in a very real sense. The very movement from one place to another and the time it takes to do this, as well as the more figurative transportation into other worlds. I have just come back from a visit to my Mother on holiday in Spain which involved the physical journey starting at 3am with a taxi, then coach, then a walk around an airport, to a plane to Spain, and another walk around an airport, then a minibus and finally the short walk to my mum's apartment, arriving around 9 hours later.

This would have been a tedious journey without, every step of the way, having an audiobook playing in my ears. While I waited in line for the bus, or made my way through the airport, or was held up in security, or on all the journeys when I could close my eyes and be transported while being transported.

Nine hours of travel gave me, not just the opportunity to get somewhere else but to get immersed in another world and take a journey unbroken by the usual day-to-day issues which have us resorting to bookmarks in or turning over the corner of the page, until we return to the book or not and oft times  means we meet the books we are reading at a surface level like a stone skimming the water.

My Journey & Transportation

To Spain (Book 1) Audiobook 1: I read Second Life because it was the second novel of S J Watson, who wrote the psychological thriller Before I Go to Sleep. Most of my family read and loved the first, however the second turned out to be predictable and in its attempt to create the same kinds of twists and turns as his first book, it doesn't quite make it. The plotting has the shape of a snake swallowing its own tail and regurgitating it again.

In Spain (Book 2) Paperback: I read The House at Riverton by Kate Morton because my Mum, recommended it to me one day and the next we found it in a second hand stall for a euro (in English in a Spanish market!). If that's not a sign I don't know what is. So I began the daunting 599 paged saga and found it an easy read. The main character Grace Bradley, aged 98, tells her story of being a housemaid in the 1920s at Riverton, and I enjoyed following her into her Upstairs Downstairs world of the past and present.

In Spain (Book 3) Kindle Edition: I read We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler for a book group session I was going to miss while on holiday, but felt guilty enough to read anyway. I was glad I did - I loved it. It was a book which had a foundation in the writers life experience growing up with a psychologist as a father, which was backed up and drawn out and elucidated with research giving it a great sense of place, time and occasion. It was a story only the author could tell and all the better for it.

To London (Book 4) Audiobook 2: I read The Sins of the Fathers by Lawrence Block because my partner recommended it and it was shorter than the previous 300+, 400+ and 599 paged previous books. It made the journey home enjoyable. I was quite tired and between naps and the voice of Alan Sklar, I had a thoroughly therapeutic travelling experience. When I couldn't find my passport or the alarm went off at the airport or the child behind me kicked my seat on the plane while her grandparents moaned about the service of the budget airline, I fell in and out of sleep and let the story of ex-cop Matthew Scudder transport me to another world. Yes it may have been a world of murder and mayhem but in the mind of Matthew Scudder, we see a world where mysteries are solved, justice is sought and achieved and knowing right from wrong is a comfort in an otherwise disturbing world.

So from London to Spain and back again I was transported, physically and figuratively and through time between London, Paris and Berlin, a 1920s English Country House, the world of science and psychology and New York's Greenwich Village.

Sometimes I wish I lived farther away from my work just so I could read while I travel there. Maybe I'll just pretend I do and take a bus or train or walk just to have a read and be transported.

15 Reasons for Reading

'The best moments in reading are when you come across something - a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things - that you'd thought special, particular to you.

 And here it is, set down by someone else, a person you've never met, maybe even someone long dead. And it's as if a hand has come out, and taken yours.'

 Alan Bennett, The History Boys

15 Reasons for Reading: ART LEARNING INTELLIGENCE EXPLORATION HOPE COMPANY COMFORT EXPERIENCE IDENTITY SENSITIVITY EMPATHY ESCAPE PORTABILITY MAGIC WRITING

Art, Learning & Intelligence

Art: 'A written word is the choicest of relics. It is something at once more intimate with us and more universal than any other work of art. It is the work of art nearest to life itself. It may be translated into every language, and not only be read but actually breathed from all human lips; -- not be represented on canvas or in marble only, but be carved out of the breath of life itself.

Learning: 'How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book.' 

(David Thoreau, Walden)

Intelligence: 'If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.'

 (Albert Einstein, cited in Neil Gaiman's lecture , Guardian, 2013)

Exploration, Hope, Company and Comfort

Exploration: 'The books transported her into new worlds and introduced her to amazing people who lived exciting lives. She went on olden-day sailing ships with Joseph Conrad. She went to Africa with Ernest Hemingway and to India with Rudyard Kipling. She travelled all over the world while sitting in her little room in an English village.'

Hope, Company and Comfort: 'So Matilda’s strong young mind continued to grow, nurtured by the voices of all those authors who had sent their books out into the world like ships on the sea. These books gave Matilda a hopeful and comforting message: You are not alone.' 

 (Road Dahl, Matilda)

Experience, Identity, Sensitiviy and Emathy

Experience:  'You forget everything. The hours slip by. You travel in your chair through centuries you seem seem to see before you, your thoughts are caught up in the story, dallying with the details or following the course of the plot, you enter into characters, so that it seems as if it were your own heart beating beneath their costumes.' 

  (Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary)

Identity: 'My life is a reading list.'                                                                      

 (John Irving, Prayer for Owen Meany)

 
Empathy: 'Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly -- they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.' 

(Aldus Huxley, Brave New World)

Sensitivity & Empathy:  'I think the act of reading imbues the reader with a sensitivity toward the outside world that people who don't read can sometimes lack. I know it seems like a contradiction in terms; after all reading is such a solitary, internalizing act that it appears to represent a disengagement from day-to-day life. But reading, and particularly the reading of fiction, encourages us to view the world in new and challenging ways...It allows us to inhabit the consciousness of another which is a precursor to empathy, and empathy is, for me, one of the marks of a decent human being.'

  (John Connoly, The Book of Lost Things)

Escape, Portability, Magic and Writing


Escape: 'To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life.' 

 (Somerset Maugham, Books and You)

Portability & Magic: 'Books are a uniquely portable magic.' 

 (Stephen King, On Writing: Memoir of the Craft)

Writing:  'For once the disease of reading has laid upon the system it weakens so that it falls an easy prey to that other scourge which dwells in the ink pot and festers in the quill. The wretch takes to writing.' 

(Virginia Woolf, Orlando)

ART LEARNING INTELLIGENCE EXPLORATION HOPE COMPANY COMFORT EXPERIENCE IDENTITY SENSITIVITY EMPATHY ESCAPE PORTABILITY MAGIC WRITING