Reading is bliss
If you need a longer vacation than a ninety-minute film: read a book that you cannot put down before it is finished.
For a while ago I spent two beautiful, delicious, totally carefree afternoons with the critically acclaimed detective story The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair by Joël Dicker.
670 pages of blissful escape.
They are making a movie based on the book and I am not surprised. The story is unique and the it will hold your attention until the very last pages.
The novel is set in a small coastal town in New Hampshire, USA. Marcus Goldman is a successful young novelist who has been suffering from a writer’s block and needs inspiration for his next book.
As the deadline approaches and he is still unable to write, he heads to New Hampshire to stay with his college professor, Harry Quebert, who has been his mentor since his early days as a writer.
When the body of fifteen-year-old Nola Kellergan is found 33 years after she went missing, and Harry Quebert is accused of murdering the girl, Marcus starts working to uncover the truth – and finally finds a topic for his next book.
Isn’t it funny that no matter how much you read, you never feel like you had read too much. Finishing a good book feels like leaving a great art exhibition: you feel smarter and wiser than before. You say to yourself: I should do this more often.
The following quote is from Nora Ephron’s book I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman. You should read that one too, Ephron has a point on so many things considering life, parenting, aging, cooking, eating, writing and, reading:
“Reading is everything. Reading makes me feel like I've accomplished something, learned something, become a better person. Reading makes me smarter. Reading gives me something to talk about later on. Reading is the unbelievably healthy way my attention deficit disorder medicates itself. Reading is escape, and the opposite of escape; it's a way to make contact with reality after a day of making things up, and it's a way of making contact with someone else's imagination after a day that's all too real. Reading is grist. Reading is bliss.”