How do You Like Lit? Books and Mental Books

If you like literature, how do you like it? I mean, in what way? I'm curious to find out the range of ways that people enjoy it. Here's how I like it:

I read the book (War and Peace, maybe) and find many passages tiresome. Sometimes when no one is looking, I skip a few pages. But in spite of myself I get caught up in certain characters or images or sentences. Then I finish the book. At this point, I have twenty to thirty favorite bits of it pleasantly mucking about in my brain.

A week later, I think the book is amazing and it's my new favorite.

What happened in that week? I recreated the book mentally, but unconsciously, I only used the parts that appealed to me. So it is not the same book. That's wierd. Is it really literature I like? Yes, and no. I got most of the material from someone else - the author. Part of it came from me, though - I inevitably have preconceived notions about what is good reading. The book isn't read into a vacuum. It's read into a working mind.

Ever went to re-read a favorite book that you hadn't picked up for years? Was it disappointing? Your mental book didn't match the original. Of course, it doesn't always happen that way. If we really detest one part of a book, it will probably make it into our reconstructed book, too. And then the mental book isn't quite as satisfying. But that's fine - to some extent, we can be aware of this whole mental book thing, and we can actively choose to further distort our imaginary recreation of some original book by deleting things we don't like.

The only problem with active distortion is that mental books are awfully vague. I know I like the idea of Smaug of The Hobbit on a pile of treasure, but I can't remember what it was about the writing that made me like it. When we want specifics, we have to go to real books - and the originals are increasingly unsatisfying in proportion to the amount of distortion going on.

Which is a darn good thing, because I'm pretty sure that discontent with the discrepancies between idealized mental books and real books is what drives many people to write. "That book would've been my favorite, but..." Obviously, we don't usually want to create a mere distorted version of someone else's work (except in parody). But we don't have to. In my experience, mental books are focused on loose combinations of themes and scattered images and character traits, which are mostly uncopyrightable. So our "perfect story" can deal with revenge, for example, and still be quite different from Beowulf, even if Beowulf was part of the original inspiration.

The tough part is making the details relevant to the narrative and accurate to the story we have in our heads. But now I'm talking about writing, which is slightly off topic. *concludes*