I’m reading Lover Unbound just now, and still mourning the separation of Butch and Vishous. Makes it hard to engage with V’s woman, but more about that tomorrow….
Coming back to the book after my evening of class and choir, I had this odd feeling like I couldn’t remember what had happened so far. How the characters had come to be where they were in the book.
I started to panic just a little, book nerd that I am, hoping I would still be able to be inside the story, even with my curious case of amnesia.
It got me wondering: is reading a story like learning the alphabet? You have to forget it all over again in order to read the whole. If a character and their journey is truly well-drawn, does it matter whether you remember the particular events, as long as you intimately know the character as they are now – as a changed, transforming thing?
I think this is what agent Donald Maass is talking about when he writes:
A true journey is not just all that we experience but how we understand it: our minds in nova, our hearts seeking peace.