Ok. You people have read lots and lots, just as I have, and I want to bring up this subject that came up in my contemporary american lit class.
Is identifying with the books you read a bad thing? My professor says it is. He says it's "dangerous". Now just to be clear, (because it took us a while), he's talking about the identifying you do as a kid/teenager. The example he gave was when he was 12 he read "Catcher in the Rye" and he said it took him 2 weeks to get back to "normal" in his thinking, because he got so caught up in the book.
Identifying- as he defines it- includes such things as putting yourself into the book in your mind. Now I got kind of upset about this. I had many happy hours in my childhood imagining I was a character in my favorite books. And to be honest, I still do it. The books I love the most, that I ADORE, I think about that way. Sometimes it might be for just 5 minutes, like with something like Elantris.
So my questions are:
1.) Does anyone else still do this, even for a minute?
2.) Do you agree with my professor that it's dangerous and should not be done?