Good books set the right parts of the brain on fire. If the prose is electric enough, if the words are smooth and flow like silk, you better believe they’re going to touch that bit in your head that releases melatonin and other stimulants.
If this description is sounding increasingly sensual, then you’re reading me correctly. Simply put, books are the best kind of brain-sex. (Cheapest, too, if you’re willing to rough it with used paperbacks.)
Think about it like this: books are a form of connection, like sex. They’re chiefly tools of conversation between two people, like sex. And every writer knows it.
Stephen King himself once wrote: “Writing is telepathy.” The author conjures an image in his mind, and puts it on the page. You read it, and poof, whamo, alakazam: the image is there in your head.
An example: in 1997, a young writer in England wrote a story about a magical school. Somewhere right now, a young kid is reading Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. A 17-year-old image from the mind of J.K. Rowling is now transposed, through magic, into the imagination of a child.
Sure, it might not be the exact same image of Hogwarts as Rowling envisioned it. But who needs that? We each add our little variations to the story. A 30-something male protagonist might look like your father when he was a younger man. A love interest might be the person you had a crush on in high school. A character that exudes authority and menace might be your college editor-in-chief.
These little mental tweaks in characters are our way of participating in the act of creation. If reading is sex, it is also birth.
Stay with me: everyone has procreative sex in the same way (speaking very generally), and every combination of genes gives birth to a unique individual. Everyone reads the same way — by moving their eyes horizontally across a page — and every reader gives birth to a unique story in their own mind.
But there’s more to it than mere telepathy (or even sex). When you pick up Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses, the first sentence isn’t just something to get the novel started — it’s the first few tugs of a relationship. It’s a contract. A wink from across the bar. A first touch. A question. A “So, how about it? Feel like tagging along with me for a while?”
Because that’s what you’re getting yourself into when you start any novel: a relationship. A long-term relationship and a long, time-consuming book have similar features concerning what’s given and taken.
Demanded from you: your time, your energy, your empathy and your undivided attention. Given to you: a good time, something to think about and mull over, a connection that stays with you and the feeling of not being alone so much.
And perhaps that sense of companionship is why people who’ve read the same books can relate to each other more easily.
Someone who has strolled along with Joyce’s Stephen, danced with Auden, or Larkin, or even glanced with Lucifer at God’s “wild abyss:” to meet someone like this, who has traveled in the same, yet slightly different, pages of a dusty tome, is, by that experience alone, worth the trouble of looking through a book. When one reads, one never reads alone.