Ever since I was a teen, biographies and memoirs are my absolute favorite books. Thanks to the archive website, I was able to read several from my favorite figures and events in history. Every now and then, I would try to read a novel with varying degrees of sucess, but more often than not I found myself getting annoyed at the characters, or the way the book it was written, and often would give up without finishing it. Some of the novels that I had loved until then were Out and Grotesque by Natsuo Kirino, and Pachinko by Min Jin Lee. Some of the ones I really disliked included Florida by Lauren Groff and Leave The World Behind by Rumaan Alam.
Last year though, by complete chance, I picked up Heaven and Earth by Paolo Giordano, and it quickly became my favorite book of all time. I read a short, one sentence description online and when I started actually reading the book, I was hooked from the first paragraph. This never happened to me with a novel before, I loved the way the story was told, the way it was written. Just like the main character Teresa would count the days to go and stay at her grandmother's villa in Speziale every summer, I waited impatiently for night time when I would close my bedroom door, hop into bed so I too could lose myself in Speziale. All of the characters are deeply flawed, and the imperfect ways in which they reacted to themselves and to their stories felt so realistic. Sometimes I find the dialogue in novels to feel so contrived, but in this book I didn't got that impression at all. I became so invested in these characters' stories, they felt real to me and I wanted so badly for the main character to "win" and get her happy ending for the both of us. The ending left me devastated, I cried a lot over it for the first couple of weeks after finishing it, and to this day I still get emotional when it crosses my mind.
Despite this, as soon as I finished reading, all I wanted was to read it again, which was another first for me. I felt such a deep longing for the places in the novel. I wanted to join the gang in the masseria, to go with them drink at the piaza in Ostuni, to eat at the Squalo. And yet, I tried to read it again twice, but always stop during the happier portions of the story. It's like I'm keeping those characters safe from the fate that awaits them, as stupid as it sounds. I finished it during Christmas week, and now it's almost september and I have only fully read one other novel, The Baron in the Trees by Italo Calvino, which is the favorite book of one of the characters in Heaven and Earth. I feared that if I started reading other novels so shortly after, I would keep making unfair comparisons between the stories and the characters. I considered reading other works by Paolo Giordano, but I think that would make these comparisons even worse. Somehow, I have also not even read one full history book this year.
I've been meaning to read Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver as my next novel, but I'm still struggling with feeling almost unnaturally attached to Heaven and Earth. I'm curious if anyone else ever dealt with this before, what books made you feel this way and what were the things you found were helpful to snap out of it?
by BricksHaveBeenShat