Consumer or creator

           So, I was reading after lunch over the weekend, and my husband turned on one of his go-to TV shows "Love it or List it". Suddenly I thought: that narrator is the same one that reads Janet Evanovich's Plum series. I recognized it because her reading is the reason I stopped listening to the series (I have talked about audiobook readers previously), having liked the original reader much better. The newer reader's voice was too patterned, in a way that made me think about the reader's voice instead of visualizing the rich milieu of Stephanie Plum's life. And that is terrible - I prefer to get lost in the book, imagining the lives and locations being detailed on the pages. And I get lost - I was rereading the Long Winter, by Laura Ingalls Wilder one summer night. If you haven't read it, it is all about a long, extremely snowy winter. So my desperate dog finally got my attention and I got up to let her outside. I was so completely lost in the book that I was totally shocked there was no snow and it was warm outside.
           I had also just been following a discussion online about whether reading is a consuming process or a creating process. A director in a big midwest city library had been quoted identifying readers as consuming - and certainly one could argue that a reader is taking in what is written, not creating it. But some participants in the discussion believed that reading creates something in your mind. After all, two people can read the same book, the same descriptions of people and places and have radically different ideas of what it looks like. Why else would there be any argument when a book is filmed as to the choices of actors. One poster's comments are particularly evocative: "I know that as I recently reread C. S. Lewis's Narnia books, I discovered that much of the rich world I remember from reading those books as a child is actually not detailed in the books. Lewis's writing and my own imagination interacted to create the world I remembered. An individual's ability to imagine something that doesn't exist is the basis for innovation". Consider that and then think of the Narnia movies, where you are watching, or consuming, someone else's vision created when they read the book.
           So I guess my opinion is clear - what do you think? Hmm, so opinions are created by reading as well . . .