I read a lot of books. I love novels. By the time I was in kindergarten I had read every children’s book in the library near our house. I graduated quickly to teenage appropriate books and, before I was a teenager, I was reading adult literature, virtually anything I could get my hands on. My parents never censored my reading so when I was twelve I read Portnoy’s Complaint. I didn’t understand the big controversy, I understood the words, but much of the book was over my head. Luckily I get to brag about reading the book when it was a controversy, so few books are socially shocking these days. I went through a mystery phase, a science fiction phase, a romance phase, a fictionalized history phase, and a biography phase (which is almost fiction because no one really knows another person’s life as it truly was). Today my favorite genre is Young Adult (books for teenagers) because they are exciting and pure entertainment.
I also read nonfiction. I have probably read hundreds, if not thousands, of business books, self-help books, and how-to books. I usually read these when I am struggling with something and think some author can fix it. They usually can’t fix anything but it gives me a diversion from whatever issue or problem I am dealing with at the time. Here and there I may find a nugget of wisdom that I can apply to everyday life or I see something I already know, worded in a way that makes sense for the moment.
Cookbooks are also fun to read. Not that I follow recipes, I just like to think about them and then I cook the way I want to. I love the ideas of the different combinations of flavors, I love the pictures, and I love that international food cookbooks can transport me to another place on the globe.
Books have a focus. For 300 or 500 pages, they keep to the topic, veering off and coming back, creating subplots, but always having a point. Business books and self-help books are even more focused. They rarely move off point but steer you straight to the place they want you to go. Even the occasional book of short stories have purpose, they are all about travel, or they are all uplifting, or they are all science fiction.
Life isn’t like a book. It is not that life doesn’t have a plot, but everything is so interwoven between the veering off and coming back, between the subplots and subsubplots, it is really hard to see what the point of the story is when you are actually living through it. Just like books, there are cliff hangers and a question as to who is really the villain. Unlike books, you can’t skip to the last few pages to see what happens. You probably wouldn’t want to, it’d be kind of creepy. The author of life is so skilled that you rarely, if ever, guess what is going to happen next. You may think you know what is supposed to happen, based on all the other books you have read, but those books were written by flawed authors and consequently those books are flawed. Our life is perfectly written, whether we know it or not.