Portable magic

Books are a uniquely portable magic.

Stephen King, On Writing

To most people in today's world, their phones are probably their idea of "portable magic." It's all there wherever they might happen to be: news, games, movies, instant answers to questions, maps, sports scores, email, texting and, as a last resort, there's the original purpose of that phone — an actual conversation with someone.

For me, Stephen King and a few other holdouts, books are our idea of magic. Consider some of the "magic tricks" books can perform.

They allow time travel — Books take us into the past, where we can ride on a raft down the Mississippi River with Huck and Jim or sit in the same room with Jane Austen's characters in early 19th century England and listen to their conversation. Or they can transport us into the far future where Isaac Asimov's robots must contend with the challenging dilemmas posed by the Three Laws of Robotics.

They make our troubles disappear — Only temporarily, of course. But when we are engrossed in a thriller or some other book we can't put down, those unpaid bills or some nagging regrets are far from our consciousness. 

They allow us to read minds — Fiction puts us into the minds of characters, but nonfiction puts us into the minds of authors. What was Henry David Thoreau thinking about at Walden Pond? What were Ernest Hemingway's thoughts about writing? Without Walden and A Moveable Feast, we would know much less.

King concludes his paragraph about the magic of books by saying, "If I have to spend time in purgatory before going to one place or the other, I guess I'll be all right as long as there's a lending library (if there is it's probably stocked with nothing but novels by Danielle Steel and Chicken Soup books, ha-ha, joke's on you, Steve)." Isn't it fun peeking inside Stephen King's mind?