I like words.

I like the sound in my ears.

I like the way they fit in my mouth.

and dance on the page

and create pictures in my head.

I never knew that about myself until recently. I guess it's like a little kid who needs glasses who never knew what they were missing until one day when someone plops a pair of glasses on their nose. Suddenly the world opens to a startling clarity. The child believed until that very moment that everything was viewed exactly the same by everybody.

So I was for me and reading.

Once I mentioned how I remembered something I had read as a youth. I think the discussion was about "Gone With the Wind". The title is not important but the concept is... I saw the book... It moved then and still does; like watching a video. My friend looked at me as if I had uttered an obscenity. I described the colors that surrounded the characters, the facial expressions, the variation in conversational tone. I even described the weather. "You must have seen the movie," she said. "Of course. And it was a disappointment compared to the book." I said.

It's that way for most books. I always expect more from a movie. It's a medium constrained by time (and the average person's attention span) that proves lacking. Don't misunderstand me, I like movies. They can be very entertaining. They lack depth for the most part. And it's the depth, the between the lines stuff that I crave; the unwritten intention and continuation implied by the text. The continuing development and improvement in CG techniques has actually brought movies much closer to what has already existed in my mind.

The irony is that I struggle to clearly express myself in the written word. I assume that others can "see" the unwritten portion floating seemingly randomly in my thoughts negating the need to spend time and energy actually put it all down in words. I assume that the readers are somehow clairvoyant and just "know" what I mean. So I will try to explain and forgive me if a bit of redundancy creeps in. It's not simply that the words create pictures in my head... the words ARE pictures in my mind. I see, not read, most of the time. Because of that, I can read a book out of order and still put it all together cohesively and accurately. I usually read the first chapter or two, depending upon the length of the book, skip to the end, and then pick up sections from the body of the work rather piecemeal. I ALWAYS read good books more than once. I am still rereading books from high school. lol.

To be honest, I used to have a trusted friend who would "recommend" books to me. I have missed that over the years. I'm much to lazy to waste my time on a "bad" book and finding a "good" book takes more time than I seem to have available. I would be glad to try any suggestions y'all might have for me. Not interested in romantic novels.