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netla

Heightened reading experiences

netla
4 years ago
last modified: 4 years ago

One of my most memorable reading experiences took place in India, where I had plenty of time to read on the trains and came across two books about the Raj era, one about expat life (Plain Tales From the Raj by Charles Allen) and the other about food and how British and Indian cooking influenced one another (The Raj at Table: A Culinary History of the British in India by David Burton). On my second visit, I had a similar experience when I read the novella „Incident on the Kalka Mail“ by Satyajit Ray, while riding that same train. The books fit so perfectly into the landscape and smells and colors and feeling of what I was experiencing, that it heightened my reading experience into something sublime. I can still call back some of this feeling when I reread these books.

Have you experienced this kind of thing? Not just from being in the place a book's story takes place when you read it, but being in some situation, atmosphere or head-space that resonated with the book and heightened the reading experience?

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