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Something about a riveting book just refusing to let you move on? It is common to feel a lull once you finish a good book.
Photo by Pauline Loroy on Unsplash
Something about a riveting book just refusing to let you move on? It is more common than not to feel so engrossed and invested in a work that once you finish it, it keeps lingering on in myriad ways.
I have been meaning to write this for a long time. I wanted to check if this happens only to me or is a universal phenomenon! Every time I finish reading an engaging, stimulating, and beautiful book, my mind continues to live on with those characters.
It absolutely refuses to move on to the next book. It takes a lot to move on. I can’t find a perfect analogy, but it’s like finishing the tastiest biryani off your plate and then refusing to believe that you will taste something even similar to that. I know I know… I had you there!
And it does take quite some time and another wonderful book to bring you back to that mood, where you want to drop everything and rush back to the pages of a book.
It all started with Pride and Prejudice or so I remember or was it Sherlock Holmes? Am not so sure anymore. But in the last chapter of Sherlock homes, when we were given to believe that it was curtain down on the roller coaster ride….it broke my tiny teenage heart! I was angry with God for the abrupt end he had planned for the fearless hero with a golden heart, little knowing that the God I should have been angry with was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
I was devasted but couldn’t cry openly! Or the time when I was exuberant when Lizzy and Mr. Darcy are a couple….so happy that my heart was bursting with joy and all I wanted to do was break into a dance when I had to maintain a decent behaviour lest the others at home consider me crazy!..oh those silly years with those silly troubles!
Shall I share a small secret that no one knows….psst.. most times, even after I complete the book, I still go back to the last chapter. It is like a tragic farewell that you do not want to bid! The book is downloaded onto my kindle and will be available at my fingertips for the rest of my life…..but still…there is that special something about a first time that is neither rational nor can be put into words!
AND then dear friends comes the big ‘LULL’ when no other book measures up to the one I have just completed and inadvertently I seek the same feel in every new book I browse. As I aimlessly browse through multiple titles like an abandoned and parched camel in a desert, the Universe takes pity on me and I stumble upon something interesting and lo and behold without even my knowledge, the wonderful journey manifests itself again!
As Jeanette Winterson put it “Los libros y las puertas, son lo mismo. Las abres y pasas a otro mundo”- which means “Books and the doors are the same. You open them and go to another world. Indeed, I am grateful, honoured and humbled that I experience this pain and this joy over and over! Thank God (and this time I really mean the God!)
May life bestow this special experience, this ‘Lull’ on each one … time and again…over and over!
I am a CA by profession. I love to read and travel. A novice to the digital writing world, I am greatly inspired by Ms. Paromita Bardoloi and Ms. Anandita Nag. Have been an ardent read more...
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