Do you believe in Magic?

When you have to choose a book to read, how to you choose it? By its cover? Its title? Its author? Or is it the topic the story discusses that you’re fond to know more about?

‘The Psychology of the Novel – Thirteen ways of looking at the novel’ inspired these questions that I began to ask myself. The narrator says that “the basic substance of imaginative literature is not reason but emotion, which is expressed not by the denotation of words, nor the grammar of the sentences, but through the connotations and colorations of the words as employed by the author’s style.” When reading a book, it isn’t the word choice that makes me relate to it, even though the word choice is important for a better understanding of the story and the novel itself. It is the emotion that I can relate to, and that I can feel myself while reading the book. That doesn’t mean that if I’m always depressed, I’m going to read sad books because I can relate to it, no! It simply means that the words of the author help me relate to the characters in the novel because I can feel the way they do and understand what they’re going through just because the author has the ability or provoking emotions in me with words.  Fictional books like Twilight by Stephanie Meyer or Harry Potter by J.K. Rowling are hard to relate to in the sense that they’re not at all realistic, but they are easy to relate to in the way that they are written in a way that makes us want to be in the place of the main characters. Millions of people on earth love these books because they describe their personal Utopia with all the magic, the mysteries and the love.

The cover and the title of a novel/book are important to me. When I walk through a bookstore, I won’t stop at the stand with the books that possess a boring cover and an even more boring title. What is even more important though, is the author. When we like a certain author that has qualities of the voice that we appreciate, we are more likely to take his new novel than a novel written by someone that we know writes in a very arrogant or self-obsessed tone, that lets us feel indifferent and does not move us in any way. “The reader perceives and reacts to these qualities instantly, without thinking”.

Some authors of playwrights for example, like Brecht, are trying to do the exact opposite. Brecht, in this case, doesn’t want his audience to relate to the characters and therefore not connect with the emotions the characters are presenting. He was constantly trying to break ‘the forth wall’ by pulling the audience out of their comfort zone. The spectators were supposed to leave the theater thinking and arguing about what they just saw. He wanted them to be mad and shocked about what they had seen. The theater was supposed to go on, even though the play was over. This can also occur in books. Books aren’t supposed to give you the ‘aww-that-was-a-cute-story’ – feeling. Authors are trying to pass a message, to make their readers think about a topic they care about, or something like that. In the “Psychology of the novel” it says also that the point of view of the author or the narrator is like the perspective in a realistic painting – it changes the size and shape, the nature and identity, of characters etc. A novel must have action and point of view, as well as suspense and reflection, because that is the way life is.