Blog Post #2

A Book is a Canvas

What is a book? A book is a canvas. An empty one to be specific. You have the freedom to paint the picture as you please given the story line. When reading the book, you develop images in your mind of what you think you are reading. In essence, what the movie scene would look like. The book itself tells you what to paint. How you decide to do that is completely up to you. Imagine you’re a famous painter known all over the world. You have a request to paint a picture of a park. There are millions of parks in the world that you could base your painting off of, or you could always just make up your own. Now come back to reality and focus on the book in your hands. The book is your request, your script, your empty canvas, and you have the power to paint the picture however you choose. No one else is going to have the exact same painting as you do, it will be uniquely your ideas, your creativity.

One of the opinions that I really agree on of the authors was how the physicality of the book is important. I hate the idea that books someday might be hard to get hold of due to Kindles, iPads, etc. When Tom Piazza comments on how a book has weight, he’s absolutely right. There is an obvious difference between a 200 page short story and a 1000 page novel. The sense of accomplishment that I get when I read a longer book feels good, and I like to put it back on my shelf with a little wear and tear. I also agree with Nancy Jo Sales when she talks about the history of a particular book, and how it could have been passed down through generations, with messages in the margins intended for great-great-grandchildren. That quality of books is important to me because I have some books in my possession that have been passed down to me and when I eventually have kids, I’ll pass them down once again. I don’t agree with Joe Meno when he compares books in any form and says they are all similar in the way that they are a “place”. To me, it is extremely different to flip actual pages in a paper book than to press a button on a screen that says next. I get more engaged in the book and as the amount that I have left to read gets less, I can see that and it makes me more excited to finish the book. I know that the words in a book are the same no matter what form they come across in, but books are in some way “magical”. They take you away from reality for the time you read, and allow you to escape into a world that’s not your own. The feeling of curling up with a good book and a blanket, with the smell of the fresh pages, is something that always makes me more relaxed.