Reading, Not Writing

Well, there is a time and a season for all things, and this is my time NOT to write. There is just too much going on, and I can’t wrap my head around creativity.

In fact, last night I was pondering my own story - which is a long journey involving health (physical and mental) and spirituality - and while I realized this was a good basis for a fictional book, my own internal dictation involved no actual PLOT. So it needs work, and maybe this is a mull-it-over scenario for now.

BUT I have been reading, a lot. Last night, I reached a point in my current novel documented atrocities and I realized that most of the novels I’ve read in the past year have included this. Perhaps it’s because I prefer historical drama, and this sort of thing makes the best historical dramas, but here’s a list of what I’ve read, with a star beside the fictional books that included genocide, torture, or such events:

The Historian*
Bee Season: A Novel
The Witch of Cologne*
The Birth of Venus: A Novel*
Water for Elephants: A Novel
A Thread of Grace*
The Bastard of Istanbul*
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Book 7)

Feels like I read more, wonder what I’m forgetting? I got to thinking about this a lot, since I am NOT a person who can stomach or in any way see the logic in purposefully inflicting pain on others. In fact, my tolerance for pain is so low, and my imagination is high so reading this stuff is torture for me. Now, outside of thinking myself a masochist, I wondered why it so happens that half (or more?) of my reading list looks likes this.

I do like seeing characters put into impossible odds. And to be fair, I didn’t foresee such circumstances in each book (Bastard of Istanbul, for example). But, then again, perhaps it’s just the eternal, “what would I do?” that captivates all of us as fiction readers.