I’ve always been a reader, someone who would much rather be absorbed in another world than the one I am actually sat in. It used to be that reading was the thing that made me happiest. However over the past few years, as I’ve had to spend more time studying for school and uni, I’ve lost the time to read.
Last week my mom and I escaped to a small harbour town in Majorca for 5 days of sunbathing, swimming and relaxing (look out for a post on that coming soon). Our short break gave me the perfect opportunity to get back into my old habits and I managed to read 4 books in 4 days – possibly a personal best!
The One Memory of Flora Banks by Emily Barr
Everything, Everything by Nicola Yoon
What Light by Jay Asher
The Worst of Me by Kate Le Vann
I could sit here and type out a review for each, but I feel that may spoil the books for you (add them to your summer reading list – please!). What’s more, I want to discuss a strong pattern between the storylines in each book which somehow had never occurred to me before. Steven James describes this as “an origination, an escalation of conflict, and a resolution” – and it must be a well known secret between authors in order to formulate the perfect stories.
Arguably this formula creates the basis of all storytelling, for many centuries past and many more to come. Obviously some elements will be changed, for example exchanging the love interest for one of the same gender or the obvious happily/not-so-happily ever after. But the concept stays the same, potentially through the billions of books which have been published worldwide.
While I used basic terms influenced by the main genres and styles of books I read; Tzvetan Todorov described the concept far more eloquently and academically.
More than anything else, this concept fascinates me. Each author starts with the same basis timeline – even if they try not to, it is unavoidable. Yet every one of them creates a new world for me to lose myself in which still feels different to the last.
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