Note to mods
This is a poll but it seems very cafe society to me.
When you read a book do you imagine yourself as;
one of the characters in the book,
a different character interacting with the characters in the book,
do not imagine yourself in the book?
I usually imagine myself as a seperate character interacting with the ones in the book. Not myself but a different character that I think would be ‘helpful’.
Does anybody else do this?
Only with pornography… 
I am always a casual observer. I can interact with the characters if I choose, but am usually just a benevolent force hovering about.
I’m not so much “in” the book as certain of the characters might look or react a lot like me, and this can float. I mean at one point Merlin might look a great deal like me down to my slight limp and at the same time the young Arthur looks surprisingly a great deal like me in my youth. Then Lancelot appears on the scene and guess who he reminds me of? Yep, you’re right, my older brother who didn’t seem to be able to do anything wrong.
Of course Morgana La Fey (was that her name?) is an awful lot like my sister, except my sister is much, much more evil. Any trolls, ogres or dragons also remind me of her.
When I’m reading a book I’m consentrating on the story, so if anything I visualize the story in progress- like a movie of sorts.
When I read a book, I tend to read them more as a play. Each of the characters has their own look, pretty much never like me, but I do find myself filling in their roles every now and again. In my mind, I can become the character (so to speak), and experience their feelings of joy, sadness, fear, anger, whatever, but it’s never “me,” it’s always “me as them.” So, if I read a story and the character is a six foot seven blonde haired man from Germany, I can bring myself to experience what he’s going through, but the vision in my mind is still of that man and not the five foot ten brown haired man I am. Does that make sense?
As a professional editor, I find this a bizarre but fascinating question…
I’ve never even considered the issue – to me, it’s like asking “when you listen to a symphony, do you imagine yourself playing the brass or the tympani” or “when you watch TV, do you pretend to be the hero or the sidekick?” That’s not a way I’ve ever considered my relationship to a book – I’m simply not part of the book at all, so the question doesn’t arise.
I guess books written in second person (like McInerny’s Bright Lights, Big City) might change this slightly, but, even there, I’m more concerned with trying to figure out who the protagonist is (age, gender, relationships to the rest of the people in the fictional world) than trying to construct a place for myself in that world.
To come right down to it, my place (and what I’d always thought was any reader’s place) in a fictional world is as audience – not the same as any of the persons in the story (even if it’s being told in first or second person, even if it’s a story being told in dialogue to a particular person). I’m not a person in any story – unless there’s some roman a clef that I’m not familiar with…
I kind of imagine a movie being played out with the characters. Mostly, though, my brain space is used for the “narrator” who reads the words. Right now, James Earl Jones is reading me The Things They Carried.
At last a thread in Café Society (I haven’t been here long, though) that is not about TV shows, songs, or hollywood movies!
After that mini-rant (sorry for any inconvinience), when I read a book I normally read it as if someone was telling me a story. If I identify with some of the characters, it is always from “outside” but I do not imagine myself in the situation. If the narrative is powerful I do make up images in my mind about the events, etc., but also from an outside perspective.
Nevertheless, I think it would be great to imagine yourself as the character, a little vicarious living never hurt anyone. I’ll try that next time.
I haven’t read fiction for some time now, but I never imagined myself in any role while reading, although I have often been Frodo or Boromir in my dreams or imaginings. And weirdly, they also involve a much raunchier Tinuviel than Tolkien intended…
The book I am reading currently, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason is making me feel like a steam roller is driving on my brain. And that is just the translator’s prologue. I am hoping Kant is/was more capable a writer than the translator, or I am soo screwed…
Me too–I often have helpful suggestions for characters, like, “It’s only a whale–overcompensating a wee bit, aren’t you?,” “You senile idiot! They don’t love you, they’re just after your money! Your other daughter really loves you!” and “For God’s sake! The man is married, not to mention insane, keeps his wife in the attic and you get all noble and romantic about him? Grow up!”
They never listen, though.
**
Thank you
<snip>
Shouldn’t the reader become ‘wrapped up’ in the book? Shouldn’t the reader be feeling what the characters feel? I mean if the main character is being chased by a tiger should I feel his fear? Should’n’t I wonder 'What if I was in that situation? Or What if I was running with that person from the tiger?
{please hampster let this post go through}
I always read books with a kind of omniscient kind of overview of everything. If it’s written in first person, I tend to think of it as reading an account of what that person went through, not someone talking to me. I think it comes from reading too much Stephen King, since in interviews or prefaces he refers to the reader as “Gentle Reader”.
<gasp> …Did I just say that? How can there be too much Stephen King?
Skerri, who is currently ambling slowly through “Night Shift” again…
I don’t put myself into the story at all, but the most interesting thing about the way I read is that I don’t generally develop any sort of picture in my mind of what is happening. Descriptions of appearances, clothing, etc. tend to go right by me. I understand the story in terms of plot, action, emotions, etc., but I never “see” the characters. When I write, I have to remind myself every once in a while to put some clothing on a character, or give her some identifying physical features, because otherwise my characters would be completely naked and faceless, sort of like department store mannequins. I always have a hard time when people are discussing a book in terms of “the blonde”, or when a plot turns on a physical characteristic like “it had to be the tall guy,” because I’m never sure which character is being referenced.
When I read, my brain does a weird thing: I see the words as I read them, but my brain processes the words and creates a visual field that I see… not “behind” the words, but I can see both the words and the scene that’s being described. I always do this. If there is a paragraph that’s describing the room the character walked into, I’ll mentally construct an as-accurate-as-possible image that fits the description given.
I do this with everything in the book. Settings, scenes, entire dialogues, characters’ appearances, etc. Basically my mind turns it into a movie as I read.
I guess I have a sort of “fly on the wall” feeling about the actions of the characters. I do the same with TV or movies, although, because I’m a reader, it’s easier with books. But yeah - I even get embarassed for the characters sometimes. Those almost painful moments of truth can be hard to read over - you feel personally impacted by them.
StG
Depends whether it’s first or third person. If it’s first person, I kind of float along behind the narrators eyeballs, mainly. I often have a very hard time describing what I think the narrator looks like–though I have vivid mental images of the other characters. If it’s third person, I have the invisibible fly-on-the-wall feeling. Third-person omniscient, on the other hand, has a way of keeping me out of the book. Even though I get a deeper insight into each character, I am not usually swept up because the ability to know what other people are thinking breaks my “suspension of disbelief” or whatever you want to call it. The book remains words-on-a-page, or, at best, like a tv program or a movie.
And Hornswaggler, when I’m listening to music, I often do imagine that I’m one of the musicians. 
I usually identify like mad with the narrator or point-of-view-character–so much so that as I child I remember getting very snappy with my sweet, inoffensive mother because I was reading a book where the main character had a very prickly relationship with her mother. It’s one of the hallmarks of good writing for me if the author can get me to identify with someone I wouldn’t normally have much fellow feeling for. I’ve always thought that’s why reading’s such a great escape–you get to be someone else for a while. I suppose this may be a kind of old-fashioned view.
I’m inclined to identify with the main protagonist, but sometimes I end up identifying with another character. If the author is any good (my own value judgement, of course) I never see words-on-the-page, I sort of experience what’s going on. One of the big surprises I encountered as a teenager was discovering that I even identified with female protagonists. I’d be real upset to miss a Kinsey Milhone book.
I occasionally imagine myself as being the author when I read a book. And then I imagine going on promo tours, eating cheese cubes off toothpicks, drinking cheap wine out of plastic glasses, and having desperate and cheap sex with literary groupies in hotels which have seen better days.
You probably think I’m kidding.