Belinda Castles

wanted to immerse myself in.

I just wanted to be inside it.

So I did a slightly dangerous thing of revisiting it much later on to try and reconnect, I guess, with what made that feeling for me.

And I was thrilled to find actually that in some ways I could put my finger on those things, even while leaving a bit of space for magic and mystery and something that happens in the reading process that we don't quite understand.

I love, too, the idea that you can reconsider a book.

I think that's clear in Deborah's chapter, actually, the return to Snake over the years and the return to Deborah's original review of it.

And I love the way that a student can say something or ask a question that you hadn't thought of.

And a whole new avenue opens up.

You just never really touch the surface of a good, complex, rich book.

It's just another outing in that conversation.

Well, I was just going to say something that Gillian Van Loon says in her essay in the book.

She's tapping into an idea of Kim Scott's when he talks about that dead man dance.

And Julianne talks about novels or stories as a blueprint for thinking.

And I've been wondering what reading does through this whole process a little more consciously than I usually do.

And I think

Reading stories in particular gives you a way to escape.

Yes, you get some removal and distance from your life, but it also does what I think Julianne is talking about here, which is gives you a way to think through things.

You see people that you don't know.

responding to a set of circumstances there's a kind of emotional logic that you're involving yourself with so stories give you a way to think through the questions that affect all of us in our lives it doesn't give answers it just gives you possibilities or methods or sometimes warnings

that are distanced enough from yourself to be manageable.