Sunday Salon - October 2

As part of Banned Books Week this past week, BookBrowse.com offered these thoughts on reading:

9 Things That Happen When You Read

In a series of lectures, Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk ruminated on what goes on in the mind of a person reading a novel. His thoughts are summarized by Susan K. Perry, Ph.D. below. Do these match your experiences? The point about finishing a (great) novel and feeling that it had been written just for me particularly struck home - it maybe irrational but it's so true!

1. We observe the general scene and follow the narrative. Whether action-filled or more literary, we read all novels the same way: seeking out the meaning and main idea.
2. We transform words into images in our mind, completing the novel as our imaginations picture what the words are telling us.
3. Part of our mind wonders how much is real experience and how much is imagination. "A third dimension of reality slowly begins to emerge within us: the dimension of the complex world of the novel."
4. We wonder if the novel depicts reality as we know it. Is this scene realistic, could this actually happen?
5. We enjoy the precision of analogies, the power of narrative, the way sentences build upon one another, the music of the prose.
6. We make moral judgments about the characters' behavior, and about the novelist for his own moral judgments by way of the characters' actions and their consequences.
7. We feel successful when we understand the text, and we come to feel as though it was written just for us.
8. Our memory works hard to keep track of all the details, and in a well-constructed novel, everything connects to everything.
9. We search for the secret center of the novel, convinced that there is one. We hunt for it like a hunter searches for meaningful signs in the forest.

Yesterday kicked off two things; National Reading Group Month and my month for Fall Feasting, a month devoted to reading books about cooking and food.  Oh sure, National Reading Group Month has all kinds of gatherings and famous authors but I'm not going to get to go to any them. So I'll be looking forward to reading and talking about food. I just got a new refrigerator and swapped out my deep freeze with the old refrigerator so I've really taken stock this weekend of the food I have on hand and my mind is racing with the possibilities. Can't wait for the books to give me the final inspiration to get in the kitchen and make some delicious meals.

What are you looking forward to reading?