Do you ever find yourself really living a book you are reading?

I'm reading Mo Hayder's Pig Island at the moment, I really don't want to be living that!

You lot are not helping me reduce my reading pile or debts to Amazon...have just popped Restless into my basket too. Grrr.

I have just read 'Restless' and know exaclty what you mean, the book was great. If the book is that good, it is hard to do anything as all I want to do is sit down and finish it. Also, it is one of the best ways to relax. My DD is just as hooked on books and reads all the time, even when she should be getting ready for school etc !

Yes, almost all the really good ones.

I had this with The Mists of Avalon - not the sort of book I expected to adore but it completely consumed me for three days and I still love it! I remember actually sneaking off to the lavvies at work with it in my bag and reading it one the loo!

Oh yes and just gearing up to reread the DM trilogy. I think it is brilliant.

I read 'an evil cradling' by Brian Keenan and I was in the dark smelly hole of a prison with him, then I looked up and actually I was free, sitting on a rock beside the sea in a beautiful place with a fresh breeze...the total opposite place in fact!

The DM trilogy did the same to me. I was travelling round Australia when I read the first two, but hadn't taken the third as it was big, bulky and still only available in hardback. We spent the next few days trying to find it everywhere as I just couldn't not read it after the cliff-hanger ending of The Subtle Knife. BTW all you DM fans out there, have any of you read the Abhorsen books by Garth Nix?

Oh God yes. And similar ones to everyone else too. I went to a wedding with my hair unwashed and in a bun once so I could read more HP, and took the book with me and kept sneaking off to the loo. And I was given the whole DM trilogy one Christmas. I'd finished them all by the 30th, and lay in bed crying through the last hour of reading.

The other one that always gets me is the Hornblower books. They are among the very few books I read again and again. And whilst I now know the stories so well that I am not desperate to continue reading to find out what happens, i do find myself becoming more Hornblower like - I put others first and act very nobly and honorably for the week or so it takes me to get through them all (because once I've started the series I have to go all teh way to teh end)

I even have some books that I keep for mood altering emergencies, a bit like drugs but not illegal or needing a prescription. If I'm stressed out or my mind is whirring and I'm over-thinking then I read A Place of My Own. If I need to be cheered up then I read Welcome to Temptation. For the full effect I read them no more than once a year.

I stayed up all night once reading a book and finished it at 5am. I only picked it up for something to read in bed .

I can pick up a book in a shop to glimpse at it and come to, hours later, still reading it. Funnily enough the first magic can't be recaptured once you've got it home .

Yes. It first happened for me when I read The Famous Five too. Glad I'm not the only one. The Secret History as well, stayed up all night reading it and 'came to' at five in the morning feeling very dazed, as if the real world had disappeared.

I think about characters in books a lot. I can get very upset about Will and Lyra and find myself wondering how they are bearing it....

Felt very energised when reading Whit by Iain Banks and realised afterwards that it was probably because it had a female protagonist who was pro-active, not passive.

When i have my head stuck in a great book i find i don't want the book to end and i miss the charactor after.

Oh yes. My mood completely changes depending on what book I am reading. I become really thoughtful if I am reading a slow, melancholy book (e.g. Tim Winton), and I perk up when I am reading something like Harry Potter. Its good in that, as Dumbledore's girl says, I can turn myself around by reading a book, but bad in that I avoid reading some books, or have to make sure that I am in a very settled situation before reading them.

JackieNo - it was a Fay Weldon short story, I know the one you mean (sadly can't remember the name of the book it appeared in!) and completely agree with you. I empathised with the woman so much, I actually wanted to slap her useless husband.

When I first read the Time Travellers Wife I wandered around in a daze for a week, thinking of the plot and how the timelines all worked together. Not so much losing myself in the book, more being intrigued by the way the dates worked out

LOL@ the impossibility of being lost in Martin Amis.
I agree LW....he's not been that great lately.

Yes, that happens to me a lot. Sometimes my vocabulary changes for a few days after a book. I was very arch after I first read Pride and Prejudice, which confused everyone who was used my bluntness and general irritability. After I read On the Beach by Neville Shute and was convinced that we were alone in the world (we were in quite a remote location) and were going to die of radiation sickness, I though perhaps I should steer clear of the sad books unless I was in a very cheerful mood at the start. Similarly I only read anything vaguely horror related if I'm in a very cynical mood.

I read a lot of, what I think may be considered "male" fiction - books of heroism and derring-do - and I certainly find they help me when I am feeling low. It is hard to explain, but I sort of become that hero and it helps me face my demons.

I think a mix of the two is fabulous. When you are totally lost in the book, but able to recognise great literary flair. I stopped reading Martin Amis because it seemed to me - especially with his last book - that he was just trying to be clever and it was frankly rather boring. (IMHO)
Anyway, apologies if I misunderstood, I do bow to the great Pullman - looking forward to the film too...

the 'proper writer' was Philip Pullman, sorry for not making that clear.

exactly, Kathy, the self-consciousness issue -- that's more or less exactly how he explained it

I don't think I could ever lose myself in the kind of self-conscious fiction that BP's writer is talking about, though certainly not all literary fiction is like that and some earlier stuff is (Tristram Shandy the obvious example).
I don't find the omniscient narrator distances me - could lose myself in Dickens.

Oh yes, and I really enjoy reading a couple of series of historical books by Dorothy Dunnet which are so engrossing, it's like waking up when you come to the end of them. YOu're not quite there for quite a while after. And I find myself wanting to visit that world, but don't really have time to read something that engrossing these days.

Yes to the getting lost in and obsessed by books. I once had a book of short stories with one in it (it might have been by Fay Weldon, but I might be misremembering) about a woman who was on holiday with her family and another family and was constantly getting put upon, meal plans ruined etc, and I had to stop reading it, because I was completely identifying with her and being incredibly grumpy with DH, who hadn't done anything wrong, but was in my mind the selfish husband in the book.