Literary Hangovers: Share Your Rude Awakenings From Fictional Reveries

This post by Alison Flood originally appeared on the Guardian Books Blog on 7/15/14.

After a heavy bout of reading – or a bout of heavy reading – the return to reality can be painful. Tell us about your worst mornings after the book before.

There are certain books I’ve finished and, looking up, have found the world to be a gloomier place for having done so. I was reminded, thanks to the novelist Harriet Evans on Twitter last week, of how The Greengage Summer by Rumer Godden had exactly this effect on me. Her story of that “hot French August, [when] we made ourselves ill from eating the greengages” – when the Grey children, left alone in a small French hotel while their mother is ill, fall into danger – exerted such a powerful grip on me that I read it desperately, obsessively, and felt slightly ill when I emerged.

I am indebted, then, to the team at Epic Reads for dubbing this feeling the “book hangover”, in a neat, funny little video. That’s exactly what it is. The experience was good; the aftermath, not so much.

 

Click here to read the full post on the Guardian Books Blog.