How to read a novel

"....like reading a person..."

I have decided that reading novel has a different meaning to me. It felt like getting to know someone from the beginning up till the end, and this someone gives you his or her trust in you, and willing to share everything. Reading a novel really feel like getting to know a friend. You may say finishing a good book is like losing  a good friend, but then this means you start looking for another "good friend", and this goes on, at the end of it, u r looking for "someone" that feels and thinks the same way as you,and to be related to them in some ways.

I want to reference a book I read recently, "nothing to lose",which states that "...life has no narrative, it is random and inexplicable and formless, and that's why people want to believe in something, because it makes the unbearable meaninglessness of it explicable. Fiction does that: it soothes a deep searching part of you, because you can take the chaos of the world and give it shape, give it sense." This sums up nicely as to why I can feel "related" to the story I read. 

"Nothing to lose" is a story about Maude, a ghost-writer facing her guilt and regrets over the death of a young boy caused by a car accident involving her, given that she was not charged for that act, as approved  by the court. You can imagine how one could be engulf by such thoughts and almost breakdown a normal way of living one's life, until one day, a stranger's knock on the door and an unlikely escape to Scotland begins to convince her that, almost in spite of herself, that she may have something to lose. To keep this short and not to give too much away, it's a story with a happy ending.

In "nothing to lose", the superb writing style of the author is able to let me find traces of me in it, especially when facing one's fear, one's guilt, the power of the "narratives", it makes sense and it shapes up things, it helps me see the source of all the problems and then see how to go forward from there. The ending though is a happy one, does not often mirror how it looks like in real life. But then life does not stop there but in novel, in movies, it stops. That is the point where you "lost" a good friend. The important thing, however, lies in how the good friend get to that state. It's the direction, it's the journey the good friends take. The ending or rather the final destination, may not be as perfect as those in real life, but we are our own writer/director in the reality and only we know what makes us happy. The novel or movie only gives as an ideal and perhaps that is good enough as a source of "hope", all else, it's up to us to write our own "happy ending".