Re-Vision In When We Dead Awaken, By G. Wells

It allowed me to connect with the author’s thoughts and thoroughly understand the story or novel. Because of this, it caused me to enjoy reading, which I was not particularly fond of before.

Somebody's novel can have “echoes or refutations” of a book they have never read before.

Digging into a chapter and realizing that each one is a different event in her life, is thrilling. The reader forms opinions and creates a vision in their mind about the characters and scenery. There are times where I found myself asking questions and wondering what

To truly understand a great novel and its author, the reader must dig deep inside the life

I have never been as comfortable with people made of flesh and bone than I have been with those made of words. Whatever information I lose in the contours of the human face, I have no trouble locating in the unchanging, permanent text of a book. There is something about literature that felt safe to me; the worlds created within far more welcoming to little girls with problems fitting in than the one outside the pages. For this reason, fiction, from Harry Potter to The Book Thief, has remained my greatest passion ever since I learned to read.

The thin rustic pages scrape past my loose fingers as I sit engaged. My heart pounds harder and faster with every word my eyes pass over. My ears hear nothing, even within booming noise. My complete focus is on the book that lays in my hand with a laminated cover, and I have no choice but to submit to the content. My breath tastes of spearmint and the aroma of fresh paper floats past my nose. I couldn’t resist but delve into the worlds and mysteries that books hold. Once opened, everything around me becomes a distant blur. I am hooked. Books have always created an escape for creativity and fancies to run free. Books are used as a medium for reason. Books are formative to the development of human beings. In my instance, books changed my life.

In other words, reading literature goes beyond just the words of the author. As readers, we become more aware of what the narrator and of what the characters might be feeling. There are feelings that form our underlying base of who we are and a lot of the times we avoid them because they’re a constant reminder of what’s real versus what we want to think is real. From time to time literature may make the readers thing of something personal that gives us a sense of reality. Through John Updike’s Rabbit Run, Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire, Margaret Atwood’s Happy Endings, James Joyce’s Araby, Patrick White’s The Vivesector, and Jorge Luis Borges’ Pierre Menard, Author of the ‘Quixote’ readers come to find a sense of reality within the characters portrayed through these works.

Literature is susceptible to misconception. At times, the presentation of content, enticing details, and storyline take away from the morals and ideas being presented in a piece of text. Most times, as a result of focusing on the distracting elements of a novel, audiences fail to recognize the deeper meaning or purpose of why the author choses to include certain sections of a novel. A book’s intention is to accurately express an author’s thoughts, but, many times, the delivery of unfamiliar content results in fear and a lack of understanding from the reader.

When people read a book they normally read them for fun, or for homework. Books sometimes have a good plot and we cannot put it down, or people are just trying to pass the time. After reading “How to Mark a Book,” by Mortimer J. Adler, it changed my way of thinking and my way of fully understanding a book. Adler says, “I want to persuade you to ‘write between the lines.’ Unless you do, you are not likely to do the most efficient of reading” (Adler 1). People normally do not receive everything the author says when they just read a book. If the reader analyzes and writes down their thoughts, they can get more out of the book.

Fiction is a powerful genre. In McMahon’s “The Function of Fiction: The Heuristic Value of Homer.” She says “(F)iction gives individuals the opportunity to explore a greater range of experiences than are actually available.” This is true on so many levels, fiction can take us to another world or realm or it can alter our reality here on earth. Fiction can pull you out of your day to day and put you somewhere more enjoyable, more exciting, more exotic than that of the four boring white walls of your dark apartment. In films and literature writers take us on adventures to millions of places, they take us to the Wild West for an exhilarating quick draw gunfight, they take us to lush rainforests filled with snakes, apes, and jaguars to find hidden treasures, they can even take us to a faraway castle where we can learn magic and go on ridiculous adventures to fight off an evil dark wizard named Voldemort. These are some situations that we are most likely never going to experience in real life ourselves but we are able to because of fiction. A favorite fiction of roughly 400 million people is the Harry Potter books and movies. This series prompts its readers to live in a world that is much like our own but with a little twist, Magic.

Not all stories are made for restoring one’s thoughts or experiences but also giving people entertainment. In modern culture, specifically in the young adult generation, there are many dystopian literatures that have made people more interested in reading different worlds, mainly alternative universes. Dystopian books are pieces of literature where “society is characterized by human misery, as squalor, oppression, disease, and overcrowding ” (Dictionary.com) Those made up worlds are written to be pleasing to the reader. (Black)

When exploring a fictional book that you love you can run with it. With the right book you can go anywhere. You could slay dragons or get trapped in a castle. You might be on a wagon train headed out west or a princess in a foreign land. It gives you a place to escape no matter where you are.

You know writers have the advantage of bringing us into worlds we would otherwise never have the chance to get to know. We open a book and we start reading and right away it is like stepping over the threshold into another world.

According to Micheal C Mc. Kenna, an educator in Georgia Southern University describes the effect of reading as“if one reads a book by a relatively unfamiliar author and is pleasantly surprised, one’s attitude toward reading that author’s works is positively altered, whereas further up the hierarchy, one’s attitude toward reading maybe altered only slightly” (127). Here he argues that positive reading of an author’s work cannot change one’s perception towards reading books as a whole. As an enthusiastic reader I completely disagree with Micheal C McKenna’s comment, I do not think people read books to find satisfaction in an author’s work, they read books to find themselves and to satisfy their own needs. For example when I read “Between the shades of Gray” by Ruta Septeys I was able to realize the predicament of the hundreds of innocent people in Lithuania during the World War II who were deported to Siberian gulags for the anti-Soviet activity. Similarly upon reading “A thousand splendid suns” by Khaled Husseni I explored the suffering of an Afghani woman from being born as an illegitimate child to living with an abusive husband. After reading these two books, I was equally moved by both the writer’s work which has not only slightly altered my attitude towards reading books but drew me closer to books. As a keen reader I am drawn into the experiences of life depicted in books to gain broader knowledge about the other side of the

you to envision the book in your mind and to picture what it might look or feel like to you.