In Which I Read

"The act of reading is a partnership. The author builds a house, but the reader makes it home." ~from Between the Lines

I thoroughly enjoyed reading Between the Lines and Off the Page by Jodi Piccoult and her daughter Samantha Van Leer. I was completely swept up by the story and felt like I jumped right into the book and lived the adventure with them.  They are not "Christian" books but the spiritual undertones are rich and surprising.  

What captivated me most was the idea of authorship.  In this world, an author wrote the story, but once it has been read it cannot be changed. The author is not all powerful because it is the reader who brings the imagined world to life.  It made me think of how God created the world and invited mankind to work in the garden and name the animals. (The difference being that God is all powerful.) On another level, the characters in the story all recognize, simply because they exist, that there must be an author...   

"Yet we all agree that someone, somewhere else, was living in a totally different place and time when she wrote this world for us to inhabit, right? ... After all, we've never met her, and yet we're all here. That proves that there always has been a second world. ..."

Then again, maybe a bunch of letters appeared on a blank page and randomly bumped into each other until a complex and coherent story appeared on the page.  Hmmm. 

In Off the Page (the sequel), Oliver (the fairy tale prince) realizes that Deliah (the reader/real live girl he loves) must also live by the rules of her world.  Her world may be a great deal bigger than his, but she is, in different ways, just as boxed in as he is.  He wonders if maybe there is an author - fate, destiny, the stars, whatever - writing her story too. 

God, Elohim, is the Creator, the author of life. He imagined this world, rich with wondrous details and spoke it into being. He declared it to be good - perfect and complete. Then he invited humanity to share in the story, to inhabit the world and make it home. But he went a step further than other authors (because he is God and he can!). Instead of dictating every move for us (though he certainly knows what they are), he gave us free will. We get to choose how and when and why we will participate, even to the point of rejecting him. We take it for granted, but these books reminded me that free will is really an amazing gift.