Thick fun in the summertime

I read an article recently that piqued my interest. It seems there’s a very recent trend to dive into “big, thick books” this summer, and the writer dissected why that might be. And since I write big, thick books, I thought about my own attraction to that type of novel.

If you’ve been letting your reading lapse, researchers have discovered two fantastic reasons to revive it:

In a study by Yale University of over 5,000 participants, it was shown that people 50 years of age and older who read books regularly have an increased survival rate of 20% over the ensuing twelve years! That’s good enough for me Reading, along with other brain-stimulating activities like doing puzzles and playing games, prevents long-term cognitive decline in older people.

Having watched several people who I know well, all now over the age of 50 in varying degrees, I’ve seen firsthand both extremes – those who are showing decline even in their seventies, and those in their eighties and nineties who have kept as sharp as possible.

So what happens to writers of lengthy tomes ? Hopefully even more benefits.

I’ve always loved settling in to read a good, hearty book, as I like to think of them. Actually, I like most things that could be described as hearty – a great bread like sourdough that you can really sink your teeth into; a rousing, robust cup of tea; a warming, tummy-filling meal when the temperatures drop in autumn.

Novels with several hundred pages promise a richness that a short fluff book just can’t deliver. I read Gone With the Wind, my mom’s favourite novel (and movie), when I was nine. And Lord of the Rings when I was thirteen. Longer books, the kind that are best turned into series rather than movies, have the room to include details I want to read – background, scenery, mythology, and enough action to really bring the story to life.

According to the article, “People are looking to heal their attention spans, to be absorbed in something long term again.” That sounds like a very worthy goal in today’s society, where our attention is so fractured and clipped. There’s something magical about curling up in a chair or a favourite corner of a couch, making a cup of tea, opening a great book, and settling in for a good read for a couple of hours. We need to take that kind of break from the world. I don’t know why our society likes to engage in ‘doomscrolling’ (‘excessively consuming negative news and information online’) – I’d much rather lose myself in a wonderful adventure for a while, something that makes me smile, gasp, clutch the pages, and wish I didn’t have to close the book at the end.

And how much better our cognitive improvement must be when we engage with a detailed plot that makes us clasp its contents together in our brain, trying to figure out the mystery of who’s to be trusted and who’s secretly nefarious, how will the heroine/hero survive the many-layered odds.

There are plenty of hearty books out there, and I’d like to humbly recommend my own 600-odd page novels if you’d like a little creepiness in your summer – perfect if you’re celebrating Summerween, another hot trend this year (instead of Christmas in July, it’s Halloween in July). They’re great supernatural thrillers, with plenty of adventure and strange things in the shadows. If you start the first one now, you can get to the third and final by October, just in time for the real Halloween!