January 7 was the day of the year that George Gershwin completed his Rhapsody in Blue. I had been taking piano lessons since I was seven, but when I learned that piece at the age of fourteen, suddenly playing the piano really mattered. I remember practicing it for hours on end, really trying to understand it, to get it right, to dig under the surface. I had always liked the piano, but after Gershwin, it was true love all the way.
The first book that had that kind of effect on me was The Once and Future King by T.H. White – which made the saga of King Arthur more accessible to modern readers. When I was twelve the kids in our class at school were assigned, on a Friday, the first few pages of it to read by the following Monday. I started reading, and kept reading, and didn’t sleep, and kept on reading, all through that weekend. By Monday morning I had finished it, all 632 pages. I showed up to school that Monday completely bleary eyed and overwhelmed, having just lived through the life and death of King Arthur, the wars, quests, loves, betrayals of a lifetime. And I couldn’t really discuss it with the other kids, because they had all read just those first few pages. They had no idea what was coming.
Has anything like that ever happened to you?
It happens to me each time I read a good book. If it’s good, usually I finish it right away, forget to sleep, exactly as you described. Apart from a few books in French, the last one that had this effect on me was “Anansi Boys” by Neil Gaiman.
One book that really enthralled me as a teenager was “Fermat’s Last Theorem” by Simon Singh. I just couldn’t stop. And I can remember that I really got on my friends’ nerves after reading it. I just couldn’t believe that these short mathematical questions weren’t necessarily as fascinating for them as they were for me 😉
Maybe the first book that didn’t go out of my mind – literally – was a children’s book that I had when I was maybe 2 years old. My mother had to read it for me over and over again, and after a while I started “reading” it by myself. I knew the book by heart – and knew when I had to turn the pages.
Kids do have patience when it comes to repeating things, don’t they? 🙂
I feel that way about life. I mean, we all are kind of doing that at different rates all the time because we all experience things differently and experience different things. Yes?
The same thing happened to me when I read A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens for the first time. It’s such a moving love story told against the backdrop of the French Revolution. It’s pretty much how I read any book when it’s great. I don’t want to lose the world it creates for me. If I’m interrupted, I always think about getting back to the world that I left when reading it…Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, the list goes on and on. Atonement was the most recent book that I could not put down. I see it has such a gift from the author that I feel obligated to read it through without putting it down!
East of Edan did that to me. I worked all day and read all night for several days. I stopped riding my bike into the city for those couple of days, so that I had half an hour to read each way on the train (it helped that I was generally too tired to ride five miles each way, having mostly skipped sleep.)
When I was done, all of the sudden the people of my world were divided into two distinct categories:
Those with whom I can discuss the book, and those with whom I could not.