Lost in a Book

In her memoir Ex Libris, Anne Fadiman tells the following story:

We’ve all heard stories like this one: stories about passionate readers getting lost in their books. These readers become so absorbed in what they’re reading that they seem to leave behind their everyday world and enter a new one, a world that's radically different but that, to them, seems more real. The experience of losing oneself in reading is a staple of memoirs of socially awkward children who don't feel at home in the shared world but who seem to access another, more compelling world through books. It's an experience that's been humourously dramatized in Jasper Fforde's comic novels about literary detective Thursday Next. In Fforde's novels, reading quite literally transports people to a different world— the BookWorld— where Miss Havisham belongs to an intelligence agency called JurisFiction and the plucky Next manages to change the ending to Jane Eyre. Fforde's novels are madcap comedy, of course, but they appeal to readers because they take fantastic liberties with an experience that is very real. Many common readers report that books carry them away to a different realm, and while this is obviously a clumsy metaphor, it's a way of giving voice to experiences that are hard to describe but no less powerful for that.

In the last chapter, I suggested that reading is paradoxical. It is, I claimed, a complex activity whose different features are sometimes in considerable tension with one another. Many of the most interesting and widely discussed paradoxes associated with reading concern the topics of selfhood and subjectivity.