So yesterday I started reading my first fiction book since I graduated college. It's been a long year and a half. Lest you think I'm a bad English major, let me assure you, I am so good of an English major that I couldn't stop being an English major. When I tried to read something for fun, I analyzed the guts out of the first chapter, got those familiar headaches again, and couldn't enjoy a single thing I tried to read. Fortunately reading nonfiction did not elicit the same habits, though I have wished so intensely the last eighteen months that I studied nonfiction, so. I guess there'd be no solving anything in any dimension.
So I'm reading this book, and I really love it so far. And I realized last night as I read this one sentence that sometimes there are good things that come out of being an English major when you're reading for fun. In this case, the good thing is that I deeply appreciate sentences like this:
"He has the strangest expression on his face - the emotive equivalent of 404 Page Not Found."
It is sentences like this one that make me fall in love with language all over again. And make me incredibly jealous of writers who have such a way with it. I cannot stop thinking about this sentence.
I cannot emphasize this more: I would die just to come up with a single sentence as wonderful as this. One in which you know exactly what the writer is drawing up simply by the clever and perfect combination of words on the page.
(But there's no getting to the point of offering up my life if I don't first entertain the idea of writing fiction again.)
(Yipes.)
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