“There is more treasure in books than in all the pirate's loot on Treasure Island.” ― Walt Disney
Looked that quote up online just now, where the fuck is Treasure Island?
Anyways… just finished reading Percy Jackson. I know, I know. What the hell is a 21 year old doing reading a book made for teens? A book? Who said anything about a book, I read five of them. So what can I possibly have taken from a Young adult novels saga? A lot of knowledge about greek mythology. Awesome. A huge stream of emotions as well, felt like crying during and after reading it. Felt like crying talking about it. And I thought to myself, could any non-fiction book on greek mythology ever make me feel this way?
Reading
I once read something about fiction from Mark Manson’s website, ‘You can never meet too much people’. I liked that. That was my main motivation to actually start reading more fiction and not only non-fiction and how to change your life books. I’m easily impressed I know and highly gullible.
Moving on to Percy! I immediately became connected to the story, the characters became my friends, and I started rooting and empathising with them. I couldn’t get over the books, I just had to keep reading, to find out more and more about what would happen with the plot. I even wrote a Goodreads review on one of them to show my commitment. I started imagining to myself how everything would play out. Until I reached the end. Poof, no more.
It was at this point that I really got to experience the real impact this had on me. I felt like… I missed reading it. Or was it something else? Was I projecting something from my life in the book?
The awesome thing about it was that I began feeling nostalgic about being a kid or a teen and the lovely period of my life that was. This made me grateful about that time as I have never felt before, and made me want to live, experience, explore and make the most out of the present. I noticed the opportunities and the people that I have in my life right now and that I am not treasuring as much as I should.
Second, imagining the book and the story play out in my head was just a fantastic creativity work out. I may have just been reading words out of a page, but in my mind it was much more than that. It was an easy way to express myself and to create. Speaking of creating.
Writing
Naturally, I’m writing a non-fiction article about fiction, an infiction if you will. Haha, humour (inception + fiction, what a loser this guy). Anyways, what matters is that I have also started to write some fiction. Just imagining the story and creating the characters is a fun way to create a world of your own. Everything there came from your head and belongs to you.
Final Thoughts
Now to end this, let me just clarify something. If this article seems like it was written by a child, then good! We cease exploring the vast world within our own imagination when we cease to be children, so let’s bring that back. A good starting point is reading Percy Jackson. ;)