(this sort of goes with
//www.city-data.com/forum/educa...-freshman.html but I believe is sufficiently different to get its own topic)
I'm current reading Teri Garr's autobiography and I found myself being drawn into her world, her problems. When I was doing psychology, we saw this of the student who might be reading the DSM and then self evaluating that they had the condition that they were reading about.
For a moment, I was thinking was this happening to me? Was it because I was reading an autobiography, with all it's "I's". Or maybe because I'm an actress, a mimic, even an imposter where I learn of other people's worlds and am then able to play them as myself. Was this the reason that I was beginning to wonder if I was suffering the same condition as Teri or Jennifer Ketcham (the book read before).
But then it hit me that such is probably the sign of a well written book. Decades before, I had read Martin Caidin's "Four Came Back" and at the height of turmoil in the book, I had stormed out of the room because the world at large was so reactionary.
But is that what a book should do? To stir us up, to catch us up in the story being told, so at the end, we feel shaken as if we had actually been there? Should we realize that such is the level of reading we should strive to try to reach?
Thoughts?
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