GUEST BLOG from Jane Buggle: Desert Island Books

 


Time Travel and Alternate Realities

 

I have superpowers. My practice of reading has developed my abilities to time travel and to inhabit alternate realities on a daily basis.  Some nights, I read for hours and on others, I dip in for just a few minutes. Sometimes, one-eyed reading leads to re-reading with a vague sense of deja vu the following night.

 

This habit of mine has brought me on adventures with the Famous Five, right onto the prairie with Laura Ingalls Wilder and Across the Barricades with Kevin and Sadie.  I know What Katie Did and what she did next.  As a teenager, I travelled with Bilbo and Frodo and I inhabited the dark corridors of Gormenghast with its gothic language and array of slippery characters. Later on, I was On the Road and with the Subterraneans and Dharma Bums. I watched out over Bohane with Sweet Baba Jay, and I, too, sat with Siddhartha by the river.

 

I lived through War and Peace, pitied Raskolnikov, and feared the cat in the Master and Margarita. I witnessed a Fine Balance and met Midnight’s Children.  I was with Okonkwo when Umuofia was colonised. Through John Williams, I encountered a virtuous lecturer, the Emperor Augustus and the mass slaughter of buffalo on the Kansas plains.  I followed Lila and Lenu for as long as I could.  I have moved back and forth in time and ages, through countries and worlds and minds.

 

My superpowers have  transported, amused, stimulated, educated, excited, angered, tricked, conned, disgusted, surprised and scared me.   I have loved, laughed, cried, grieved, and worried along with the myriad of characters. All of them have brought about a deeper understanding of the complexities and universality of the human condition. I will never have enough or know enough to hang up my cape or park my Delorean.

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