Worlds of Fiction, Worlds of Fact

At the moment I'm reading a biography about Harry Houdini, and although I'm really enjoying it (Houdini was a fascinating person), like all non-fiction it makes me yearn to read something made up. I often have trouble getting through a non-fiction book, no matter how interesting I find the subject material, because I love the way that fiction creates its own world, even if what is happening in the novel could be placed directly within our own lives. It's almost like a book delivers a slightly warped parallel universe, and even if the contents are very sober and realistic, there's always this magical possibility with fiction that anything could happen.

Orhan Pamuk's Snow, about a Turkish city blocked off by heavy snow from the outside world and thus at the mercy of a military coup, is a book that opened an entirely new world to me: a place and political landscape that I knew nothing about. It's a world in which girls who choose to wear headscarves are banned from education and the state battles Islam for control, and it has been happening in Turkey for the last few decades, with headscarf girls only recently being tentatively accepted in the classroom. It's funny how living in England leaves you mostly ignorant of anything that isn't happening in either the UK or USA. Pamuk perfectly captures the mood of a nation divided, one in which a life can mean so little as to be expunged in the same way that a writer might decide a character is superfluous and just delete them from the story. Life seems like such a fragile thing in Snow: people die for their beliefs at the drop of a hat, little caring as long as they stand up for what they feel is right. It makes me feel small that I basically see myself as the centre of my world, and don't think I could ever see a cause as worth dying for, as big enough to give my life to. I love learning about new places and ideas, and with them presented in fiction I find them much easier to grasp than reading a factual book. I suppose it's the personal touch, the microscope that is placed over a story, that I identify with.