When I am reading, the words transform into pictures, sounds, colours and smells. All of my senses are alive and I experience my own movie as told by the author and interpreted by me. It's kind of like a 3-D iMovie that is built from clips and phrases and images but seen in only my mind. When I fold down the corner at night to mark my place, I press pause on the movie, with anticipation of what the next scene will hold, and begin to dream of the possibilities. I can take days, weeks, or months to complete a book spanning many hours in an unlimited number of locations. I can reread sections and paint new colours on my mind-screen filling in details that were missed on the first pass. I am unlimited in my ability to explore, invent, and believe the emotion, fear, or fact. It is only me and the author. My mind is the place where their works are presented, and there is only one ticket sold to the show.

Compare this experience to that of a movie presented in a theatre. We have all stood in line for to long, to buy a ticket to the hottest show-of-the-moment and to sit on a sticky seat while trying to figure out what that girl in front of us has in her hair, while we wait to be entertained. The director has read the script, which was written by a person who has read the book, written by a person who has researched the topic, and edited by a guy who needed to make sure the idea would sell to investors and ultimately a population of screaming fans. Now the director has taken liberties throughout the shooting of the film to make it exciting enough to have a great trailer, that would attract the fans to the theater. But the cutting room floor is littered with sequences that the producers have rejected and others that just took too long to get to the point. What's left is a media driven rendition of the story that in the end does not represent the original intentions of the author.

Alright, Taylor Lautner has great abs and I might or might not have imagined them quite so great, but I could have lingered over them and changed my impressions as many times as I desired. I want to be able to create my own dreams of the great stories, and not experience a watered down version of an executive from Paramount.