So this month is all about gratitude and being grateful... I believe that it's because of the US holiday of Thanksgiving, why this is the theme? However, I'm a huge fan of Muggle holidays and Thanksgiving - so I'm happy with this one.
Anyway rambling a bit, back to the task at hand. I couldn't really settle on something until Nox and I had a discussion and then, finally, I settled on why I'm grateful for books. This is something I have never really thought about before but this has given me the opportunity to think about that.
Why am I grateful for books?
Books, to me, are a way of escaping the world we live in and are a way of being transported to another world where the only thing on my mind are the problems and emotions of the characters involved in the story. Nothing really matters except the world that I have been sucked into. It's like being transported to another world where, in a sense, I become a witness to what is happening. Sucked into the plot and losing all sense of reality and any problems that may have been plaguing me.
The great thing about books is that there are so many different books out there... endless worlds that I could be entrapped within! Whilst I do tend to stick to the same books, even though I say I'm going to try new books, they feel almost as much of a home as Hogwarts and Malfoy Manor do. Its that warm and comforting feeling of returning to a world that I know almost as well as the world I live in. That feeling brings comfort to me.
I love being able to pick up a book and be carried off to different places and doing so many different things. I can pick up The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien and I'm off to kill a dragon with Bilbo Baggins and the Dwarven Company. The Lord of the Rings, also by Professor Tolkien, I'm crossing Middle Earth to destroy a ring and save Middle Earth from Sauron's wrath. In the His Dark Materials series by Philip Pullman, I follow Lyra - who will change the world as she knows it. Or I even enter a magical world with different children in The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis. Returning to these worlds over and over still gives me the same magic that I had the first time I read them.
Books are a way in which I use to cope with things. Sometimes life gets too hard and I can't think clearly, so I pick up a book and get lost within it for a while. This allows me to calm down and clear my head so that I am able to figure out how to solve my problems. You see, books can often be seen as a doorway to another world. Even books set in the world we live in can seem so different from the world as we know it. Every book can have some sort of magic, proper magic like in Harry Potter or some sort of magic that a person has inside of them that they do not know they have.
Books can also give possible solutions to our own problems that we do not know or have even thought about. The problems faced by characters can often be problems that we face every day. Authors sometimes take their own problems, insert them into novels and then figure out a way to solve them all at the same time. In some way, authors are magicians in their own rights. To be able to transport someone into another world just by using words is a very magical and amazing thing to do. I hope to become an author one day and allow my books to have the same effect.
Some authors, such as Professor Tolkien and Mr. Lewis, have even gone into so much detail and created timelines and complex histories for their novels. I find that can also help immerse me in their worlds. Though, sometimes just reading a novel can often transport me into another world. However, the more understanding I have of their world, the more I can get fully lost in the world that the author is trying to transport me to. Picking up a book often helps in times of need and when things are rough. Sometimes I just want to be transported to another world and get lost in it because I have the time. I really do need to read more, I know I do but I have to be able to concentrate on the word that I am entering. There isn't much point picking up a book to read if I cannot get lost in the book. To me, it just feels like I am reading empty words. I want to be able to see the world I am in, feel the characters emotions. Sometimes I really do just want to feel someone else's emotions... even if they are similar to mine because everyone reacts differently to the same emotions and that is something we all know.
When I was younger and read the books, I never appreciated just what an impact that books could have on a person... Well, on me. It was only when I hit the latter half of my teenage years that I began to realize just how much books can do. They no longer were a pile of paper made up of just words: they became words with meaning, with messages, and that doorway to another world that I have told you about. Books are magical and I wish that I'd discovered that sooner because being able to read books is something that we should never take for granted. Without books we wouldn't have had some of the great classics that have spanned for generations. Some books can be a way of understanding the times our relatives grew up in. The Malory Towers books by Enid Blyton is a series that I love to read, and they were first published between 1946 and 1951 (I should add, however, that six more books were published in 2009 written by Pamela Cox), but this meant that my grandmothers and my mother would have read them too. Books aren't just a way of escaping to a whole new world, but sometimes they also connect us to the older generation. Who we seem to struggle connecting with at times.
And that is why I am so grateful to have books. Thank you to the authors who have put so much time into writing their books so people like me can escape and get lost in new worlds or return to places that feel like home.
Until next time,
Adele xx