I have stewed over this post for a little bit. It has sat in my draft area and I’ve looked it over and rewritten the beginning and I just didn’t know how to address the idea of exploration. There really is so much that we can say about it, so I guess the best course is just to dive in.
When you think of exploration, is the first thing that comes to your mind the ships of Columbus and Magellan?
Or do you think of the exploration of the moon?
I know my mind always wanders to those massively well-known exploration journeys and how those people must have felt, being out there all alone, being the first to find what they were tasked to find and coming home with all the new information.
A way to feel this exhilaration again is through reading. Reading can open up worlds that can’t exist today, already existed, or are in places that you aren’t able to visit. A simple act of picking up a book and pouring your interest into it can take you anywhere. You can visit the fantastical worlds of Middle Earth, Faerun, and the stars of the Star Wars Galaxy. We can dive deep into time and learn about history through historical fiction of Outlander, The Last Kingdom series or the oceans of the Aubrey-Muturin series (Master and Commander). There is nowhere that reading cannot take us, especially if we let it.
Books create worlds that are beyond belief. All we need to do is explore them. Don’t fall into the norm for today and watch videos on your phone or get lost in social media, fill that time with reading. The human experience is laid out in those pages, things and places we can’t feel or discover, all waiting for you to explore them. Don’t let novels fall by the wayside because of tech. Experience everything you can. Dive in!
A reader lives a thousand lives ………. The man who never reads lives only one. - George R.R. Martin
What novel worlds have you been experiencing lately? Below is my current reading list.
Fiction: Ahsoka - E.K. Johnston
Non-Fiction: The Templars - Dan Jones
Audiobook: The Complete Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
If you enjoy reading Musings of a Lost Author, please share my works with others so we can build a community! Thanks for reading.
Right now, for fiction, I'm finishing up The Stone Circle by Elly Griffiths. It's part of her Ruth Galloway series, who is a crime-solving anthropologist in England.
For non-fiction, I love books on exploration, also. Some of my favorites are Exploration Fawcett (records and letters of Col. Percy Fawcett), The Fourth Part of the World by Toby Lester, and Sea of Glory by Nathaniel Philbrick.