Have you ever gotten so involved in a book that it deeply affected your personal life? Where everything you do is related back to the plot of a story, and at every moment of the day all you can think about is getting back to your book to finish reading? Well, for those of you fellow book nerds like myself, I find this happening way more often than it should. We spend hours thinking about the book, even after we've finished reading it. It almost haunts us, but in the best way possible. We find ourselves wondering why real life can't be the way it is in the books. we are disappointed when dates don't happen like they do in movies, and love stories aren;t the way we picture them when we read. And that's all l because of certain writers who build up our expectations just to have them beaten down again, certain writers like Nicholas Sparks.
Pretty much every living female knows who Nicholas Sparks is because of his books that both crush your soul and make you weep with joy. Most guys know who he is because their girlfriends or sisters dragged them to the movie remake because of the dreamy main character they cast. So pretty much everyone can agree that after seeing a movie adaptation or reading the book, then bar for romance has been set much higher.
Not only does Nicholas Sparks create love stories that exceed everyone's expectations of how real life actually is, but he also decidedly makes us hate reading any of his books because we know there's going to be tragedy somewhere in it. Your favorite character? Yeah, they're probably either going to get in a car wreck or die a long, slow, and depressing death. Every time we read his books or see his movies, we always seem to convince ourselves that everything will be fine, that the couple will end up happy and in love until the very end. But we know in the back of our minds that not everything is as it seems, and our hearts are soon to be broken.
Take, for example, the book and movie that made this man famous: The Notebook. In case you never saw it because you've been living under a rock or you're over the age of 25, The Notebook is a heartbreaking tale about two loves that just weren't meant to be, aka Romeo and Juliet without all the dying. If you've seen it, you've either bawled your eyes out the entire time, or stonily watched the whole thing and thought to yourself, "these people need to make up their minds and stop crying."
And while some may not have believed in the whole romance of the novel, we all secretly wished for a Noah Calhoun who would write to us every day for a year, or who would lay with us in the middle of the road and look at the stars.
What keeps us coming back to these heartbreaking stories is the originality of them, of the idea that maybe this really could happen to one of us. Hopefully, the conclusion to our story is happy and doesn't end with another person in a car wreck (seriously, it's in like every book), but it's Mr. Sparks who keeps raising the bar higher and higher for his readers. For the most part, we all know that a lot of the romance portrayed in his books would never happen anywhere besides in the movies or books, but for just a little while, we are able to imagine ourselves in the footsteps of Allie Hamilton, and we begin to believe in happily ever after again.
