Making Connections

I think that every author writes a book for a different reason. All of the their reasons are different, but I like to think that there's one thing that many authors share with each other: that their reader walks away with something they learned.

Maybe it's a joke, or a cry, an angry feeling, or a happy feeling. But most of all, maybe it's to make a connection between the book and the reader.

I know how special I feel when I read a book and feel connected to a character. Or when I find a book on a book shelf in a book store and know I want to read it automatically because the title connects to me. Those connections give me pride in a book. It's one thing to just be able to jump into the book, but another to become a character who shares something in common with you.

Over the summer, I played the game "Jax" at camp with my friends, and when I arrived home, I played all the time as well. When one of my friends came over near the end of summer vacation, we played Jax and something came up in which we decided to make a song out of one of the tricks you could do with them. The trick was to place two Jax on one side of the floor, and eight on the other. You picked up the two Jax while saying "two men," then you took your index finger and circled the eight and said, "went around the World." and then you pick up the eight while saying, "in eighty days." That was about four months ago, and I still haven't forgotten the song.

Last Sunday, I was in a bookstore with my dad, and while roaming the bookshelves, saw a book that was titled, "Around the World in Eighty Days." I immediately grabbed the book, and read the first two chapters without, surprisingly, even bothering to yank out my cell phone and call my friend up to tell her what had just happened to me.

I'm enjoying this book so much, even more then I would have if I had just found it out of curiosity on the bookshelf. And all I needed to enjoy it so much was to remember that small connection-- that song we wrote while playing Jax--and use it throughout the book.

Who knew that it was possible to make a connection with a book before you even knew it existed? Now I know that anything is possible when it comes to a book, and all you have to do is jump in and enjoy it.