Reading does something strange and intimate to the mind. It doesn’t ordinarily tell a story, it moves in, rearranges the furniture of your thoughts, dims the lights of the real world, and asks you to stay awhile.
Since I started Dead Med by Freida McFadden, I have felt like I’m carrying one secret universe around with me. I’ll be physically present, phone in hand, room quiet but mentally, I’m elsewhere. Elsewhere walking hospital corridors that don’t exist, hearing footsteps that aren’t real and holding my breath for plot twists my body reacts to before my brain can catch up.
Same way I love the magic of Christmas, I absolutely love the magic of reading: you’re not watching the story, you’re hosting it.
Your imagination becomes the director, your memories lend faces to strangers, your fears give weight to silence. Every sentence flickers like a scene and the paragraph edits itself into motion without budget. No casting, no screen. Just your mind doing what it does best, creating vividly, recklessly, beautifully.
And the feeling afterward?
You know that quiet daze when you close the book but the world hasn’t fully returned yet. That feeling when reality feels thinner than the story you just left, when you realize you didn’t escape life but you expanded it.
People say reading is passive. I like to think they’re wrong. Reading is a collaboration between the writer’s words and your inner cinema. Collab between ink and imagination. And once you feel that, like truly feel it, you understand why some of us will always choose books. Because nothing compares to watching an entire movie unfold inside your head, frame by frame, heartbeat by heartbeat.