I borrowed a book from my mother on Christmas Eve - Stephen King's latest literary cinder block "Under the Dome." Steve was probably the first author I was a fan of as an adult, if you can count 16 as being an adult, which is admittedly a stretch. Before I stumbled on an old paperback of his sitting on my parents' bookshelf, I had always been more about reading the book because the book looked interesting instead of reading the book because of who wrote it. I burned through a lot of S.K. through high school and college, and I do not discount the considerable influence he had on my writing during that time. Anyone who has read my 'ghost story' novel from this past summer would likely concur there are still traces of that influence present today.
I gave up on Steve over the past 5-10 years since he reached a point where a lot of what he was putting out just didn't seem all that interesting, and the suspension of disbelief required for the kind of hardcore fantasy premise he works within just became a bit much to swallow. Plus I'd found several other favorite authors I was more interested in keeping up with. Anyway. About a month ago I read a paperback of his I had lying around for a few years that I intended to read someday, "Cell," which I finally read while trying to accomplish my 2009 New Year's Resolution of reading every book in my house that I hadn't read yet. Incidentally - no. Didn't pull it off, but I did get to a lot of books I wouldn't have read otherwise so it wasn't a complete failure. But "Cell" was kind of interesting, so when Mom said she had "Under the Dome" I figured I'd give it a shot.
If you're unfamiliar with the premise, there's this invisible dome that suddenly appears cutting off this small New England town from the rest of the world, and by the 2nd day everything is heading down the Lord of the Flies road at a breakneck pace. For the record, if any smarty pants out there are congratulating themselves right now for noticing the similarity between this story and what happened to Springfield in "The Simpsons Movie," Steve writes in the author's note that he had been trying to write this book since before the Simpsons were even on TV. And trust me - the similarities end with the dome.
But. What I meant to get at three paragraphs back is that with all of my time off from school during winter break, I've been spending way more time than usual just reading. To the point where I've now read... let me check... 868 pages out of 1,074 in the space of five days. It's not a great book and too many of the characters fall back on too many of the clichés that SK writes with, but there's enough to keep me going, and it's not like there's anything else I really need to do these days anyway. So I've read myself to the point where I dream about the characters and the story, and start to think of some of them as real people that I know. But more than that, I've worked myself into a corner here where anytime I put the book down and step outside and rejoin the real world for a little bit, I find myself feeling really depressed and defeated because I expect to see the world falling to pieces all around me, since that's what's happening in the book. And I have to remind myself: No, just a story. No dome. No simmering anarchy, no wannabe despots trying to take over the community and killing anyone who gets in their way. Kind of like waking from a nightmare and taking a few minutes to remind yourself it was just a dream, but a lower grade of that.
This is something I seem to do a lot while I'm reading, and I've always suspected that whatever part of my brain is responsible for this writing need I have only exacerbates this. So seriously: am I the only person who does this, or do other people internalize the books they read far beyond reason?
