“To live wonder-smitten with reality is the gladdest way to live. But with our creaturely capacity for wonder comes a responsibility to it—the recognition that reality is not a singularity but a plane. Each time we presume to have seen the whole, the plane tilts ever so slightly to reveal new vistas of truth and new horizons of mystery, staggering us with the sudden sense that we had been looking at only a fragment, framed by our parochial point of view. The history of our species is the history of learning and forgetting and relearning this elemental truth.” - Maria Popova
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If you’re reading this, I’m guessing you’ve also read a book at some point in the last few years. At the very least, you’ve bought one or rented one from the library.
Why did you choose the book you did? Did you think, “I’m looking for a YA fantasy book”, or “I’m going to browse non-fiction titles and see what comes up…”? I don’t think so. I think you chose it because you were in a certain mood or you wanted a specific experience from the book. It wasn’t so much about how the book is categorized by a bookstore, but about how it would make you feel.
Unfortunately for readers, books aren’t typically organized by mood or experience, they’re organized by genre. This makes the book discovery process even more painful. Parea organizes our books by three experiences: Feeling, Learning, and Escaping. I believe those three things broadly cover what you typically go to a book for. You either want to learn about something new or go deeper on something you already know about, you want to feel a deep emotion that you’re having trouble accessing in your own life, or you want to take a mental trip to a new world.
Our first book, The Hours Before Dusk, is an Escape book. I’ve had several debates with a close friend about the word “escape”, he believes it has a negative connotation. I disagree. I think we’re always looking for an escape; some escapes can be harmful, of course, but many give you the space you need to step away from your reality and gain a new perspective on something.
This category of book will cover a wide range of content—it might contain a book that puts you into a very specific world that’s much different from yours, it might whisk you away to places that are typically reserved for screensavers and Travel + Leisure spreads, it could place you in the brain of someone who thinks in new ways. The point is that this type of book should feel like a cloud of possibility, a mental respite, a warm light beam of an undiscovered world.
The Hours Before Dusk author, Jenna Matecki, describes the Escape category like this: “Books that surprise you, that are unexpected, and evoke a sense of wonder.” Maria’s quote at the beginning of this post also hits the nail pretty squarely on the head—each time we think we know what life is, what our reality is, something happens to make us realize that reality is so much bigger or more nuanced than we suspected.
That’s what I hope these Escape books do. I hope they inspire a sense of wonder that widens or shifts how you see the world, that they open new horizons of mystery.
Pre-order The Hours Before Dusk now and give yourself the gift of an escape when you receive it in early August.
There are those who want to find answers and narrow the options to some absolute truth. Like Maria Popova, I want to expand my bandwidth by reading books that start and end with questions, suggesting new starting points for inquiry and adventure. Talking with many of the graduates here at UW Madison, I sense that they have "checked a box" by completing work for whatever diploma they earned. A few, however, have come through the process being better able to formulate questions. Those are the ones who received the better education.