LITERATURE THAT LEAVES A PLEASANT AFTER-TASTE.

My story ‘The Lonely Drifters’, written in my teenage hood by a careless, and yet developing individual at the time, by me, is a non-typical book. Why do I say it that way, it’s not because I feel that all books are typical (however one could interpret that), and mine is not, so – boom! – it’s special; no, I say it that way because my book is a short-read, it doesn’t have too many pages, and it is the most standard example of what is a story. It is explicitly and simply a story. In essence, books are mostly longer, and they are not merely stories. They are someone’s life, a lesson or a movie. My book, although it has all those common traits to a book, somehow makes me feel about it among all the other literature as if it’s a stegosaurus in the safari (if anything, that’s not the most impressive dinosaur, he eats herbs…).

However, after reading my published book, to my surprise, it revealed to me that my perception of books is obscure. A book is not A, B and C, it must have this, it shouldn’t have that. Even the content of the book we cannot gauge as how much talent it has, uniqueness, novelty, intelligence, etc. A book is like a painting: each reader, as each viewer, sees in it his own. His own to like, his own to dislike.

The topic that I am pinning down in this blog, is reads that leave us a pleasant after-taste. I must add that my encounter with this term was as related to cinema, and most recently I have learnt that it’s used in wine degustation, although if the official term’s in French, then that’s not how it sounds… Anyway, after rereading my story with a fear what if I won’t like my work, in the case of which the devil on one shoulder would say to me: ‘… just don’t tell anyone about this’, and the angel on the other, boosting my spirits would say: ‘It’s ok, you are still a good person…’ (funny, how for the first time they both seem to have the same opinion…), anyway – I liked my book! And the proof to myself that I liked it was the first impression that came to me after reading the last sentence. It was positive. It was this after-taste… And nothing explains better what an after-taste of a book is, than the comments of readers. In the case of my story, some readers told me this taste was the joy to live, the expectation of love.

And what pleasant after-tastes from reads experienced you?

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