I find, sometimes, when I'm reading a book with a really detailed, interesting, and crazy character study that I start taking on some of the symptoms of the character. Not always, and it depends on my own state of mind and psychological health, but it's definitely happened more than once. I don't get that sort of impact from a film; movies are too short and never as involving as literature, and music is just a garnish to my mood, never a causal agent in of itself.
It's not always bad; I find myself highly inspired and enthusiastic about life/work/everything when I read a book where there's a great triumph and success and uplifting conclusion. One odd example of that comes in Clive Barker's
Sacrament. It's not a happy book, and not an especially good one (brilliant, and brilliantly-written, but the story/plot is lacking), but the ending has a character in a long coma, nearly dead, until he comes out of it with a sort of refreshed, "now I shall conquer the world" attitude. I've read the book several times over the last 15 or 20 years, and it always gives me a boost.
On the other hand, I read
the first trilogy of the
Thomas Covenant series earlier this year, and damn near took my own life. I have never waded through such a long, detailed, and deep portrayal of a depressed, beyond-suicidal narrator/protagonist.
The first novel is the best/worst in its portrayal of the indescribably broken, beaten, and wounded Thomas Covenant.
He's so down and crushed, emotionally, physically, mentally, and the author dives so deeply into his psyche that I would not be at all surprised to learn that people have killed themselves while reading the novel. Not that it's going to drive a healthy person to that, but for someone who was already contemplating and feeling beaten by life, it could be the final straw. On the other hand, someone reading it who had their own problems could find a role model in Covenant, who keeps on going no matter how horrible things get. Furthermore, no one's life can be that bad, when compared to Covenant's, so maybe it would act as shock therapy for someone who was suicidal?
I started reading the Covenant series when I was feeling pretty shitty already, and after 2 straight days in the gym, burning through my cardio while Thomas Covenant slogged through his hellish version of Middle Earth, I actually had to take a couple of hours at home to read the rest of the book and clear my head. The novel has anything but a happy ending, but at least it provides some closure. It wasn't that I was all that caught up in the story; I didn't really care how it turned out. I was just getting pulled into a very dark place, the sort of mental prison occupied by Covenant himself, and didn't want the experience to stretch on indefinitely.
More recently, I found myself feeling somewhat depressed and gloomy while reading the narration of the
eternally suffering Byron in
Lord of the Dead. Following that up with the first person insanity (literally; the narrator is a paranoid schizophrenic experiencing a mental break) of
Raveling wasn't a great idea either. Happily (literally), events in my personal life, which was quite depressing a week ago, have improved since then, and thus my mood has brightened for reasons unrelated to
the book I'm currently reading at the gym.
Musical selections tend to go along with mood, as well. The difference, for me at least, is that music doesn't really affect my mood, though it can enhance it. So for a few days when I was (kind of enjoying) feeling really depressed I was reading a book narrated by a depressive lunatic, my only face-to-face human interactions were scowling at the front desk guy at the gym, and while driving there and back I was listening to nothing
but this song. (Literally. It's about a 7 minute drive to the gym, and that song's 6+ minutes.)
Pity I couldn't channel that mood into pussy, profit, or something more productive than an uninspired blog post a fortnight after the fact.
Labels: books, personal
