Fiction is baby 🥰

 I was discussing the book I just finished reading - American Gods - with a friend and she said something along the lines of it being good that I had managed to keep up with my reading.

Then I told her the actual truth, I had managed it only because I was avoiding all other responsibilities in my life and reading is the best form of escapism. It's so true.

No matter how good Factfulness or any other non fiction book I've recently read may be, FICTION IS BABY. 🥰

The enjoyment of getting lost in someone else's head in some other time is oof. It doesn't even feel like work! It feels like imagining or.. or doing panchaat. Because you know, what else do you feel when you're on a page turner? Or you reach that perfect inflection point that had been promised to you from page 1? You have that itch and you cannot not know what happened to them. 

I was reading another article about why reading fiction is good for you and one of the reasons was that it helps to cultivate empathy. When you read fiction, you are in someone else's head and you can understand life from their eyes. That's what books do! On paper, the character might come across as despicably evil to everybody else but YOU WILL KNOW. You'll know his/her back story and insecurities and prejudices. And when you find yourself nodding vigorously (in your head of course because eyes are the only things doing the physical movement) because you identified with a feeling and you saw what you've thought that once on a page. Or an answer to a question you were agitated with. Or maybe just a cool new personality trait to copy. Haha. Have you ever been able to see yourself on a page and changed how you thought of yourself because of it? Sounds loopy but completely possible! Reading is an absolute privilege.

The best part though, in all of this, is when you finally finish a book and you sit with it and stare at its cover and keep rubbing it lovingly because your head is still abuzz with whatever the pages had to say. Maybe you even go back to the favourite part or the complex part, just to marvel at the way the words were put together. Me? Sometimes I cross check the plot points or the tiny details I didn't pay as much attention to because of the hunger to know what comes next. There's still a slight hum of the author's voice in your head and you smile because you know your world view has shifted just a smidge.

So what am I thinking about? Firstly, writing might be hard work technically but the creativity that goes into it has me in complete awe. Especially for authors that create a semi surreal kind of atmosphere not despite but because of how casually and normally they speak of magic/fantasy! Imagine going on a road trip, seeing a road side attraction of a huge carousel and thinking this is a good meeting place for Gods (this is not a spoiler by the way). Such a gift to be able to create universes with just words! Second (post AG), I am very taken by the idea of people having personal Gods. I think it's quite cool. Theoretically not even impossible - Gods are anyway birthed with the belief of people and are symbols of our imagination. 

If you had a personal God, what do you they look like and how do they behave? :)