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What If We’re All Just Characters in a Book?
My Kindle is my most prized device and my most underused.
There used to be a time I would devour books by the dozen. Voracious. Unrelenting. A book monster, if you will.
These were simpler times before social media and shiny apps would nuke my attention span and turn me into a mindless zombie. Back in those days, when I wanted drama, I read a novel.
And I had this experience on the plane last week that tickled me to no end.
Because flying sucks (It does) I often try to load up on things to help me pass the time during the trip. In-flight entertainment isn’t always a guaranteed hit, so I’d usually load up an iPad with YouTube videos and TV shows…
…and never watch them.
The stress of it all would get to me upon takeoff, and I’d always just pull out my Kindle instead and settle into a delightful book. Books are like blockbuster movies where you're the studio funding the film — they can be as bombastic as your imagination will allow. And while I was thumbing through my library looking for something to get into, I saw a book I had bought years ago in a rush of nostalgia, and I smiled and opened it up.
Some context here.
My dad came to the idea that my older brother be sent off to Secondary school in what was the shadow realm back then — a place called Owo.
Owo was not on and popping.
My aunt was head of the school there at the time so, when my dad wanted us to see her and my brother, we would road trip backwards in time to Owo, the land that time forgot.
This place was boring as all hell. Everyone spoke the most aggressive dialect of Yoruba; TV was laughable, and mobile internet wouldn’t be invented for another 7 years anyway. Owo had almost nothing going for it when I was there…except the book collection.
Somehow, the school library had an epic collection of books from the 60’s and 70’s that covered every imaginable. It was there I first read the classic Greeks and Trojans novels about the battle of Troy that blew my mind and the War of The Worlds horror sci-fi. But only one book captivated me to the point of making me laugh.
