The Transformative Power of Narrative Fiction

Amazon has a great feature in allowing the browsing potential buyer to read the first chapter or so of each book you consider buying. Do you do this? If so, do you find that with a very few writers the words seem to explode off the page, drawing you immediately inside another world, inside another mind, some where else.

What brings me to comment? I picked up Crow Road by Ian Banks from my bookshelf this morning. I had purchased this British paperback version at Waterson's near the Water Tower on Michigan Avenue some cold January in the last century along with a couple other books. The black bound tome had rested, waiting, on the shelf upstairs, in the Ian Banks section, next to the Ian M. Banks section, for more than a decade. My books do that. They wait for me. I am not sure in the randomness of my life if there is a plan for when my books are read, but they are, eventually. Each one takes me back to where I was when I purchased it, my frame of mind and the why of the choice of author or subject.

This is a draft beginning of an unfinished entry Sphere: Related Content