I’ve just finished reading the last series of Sherlock Holmes, one of my most favorite books of all time, and now feel so discontent.

I don’t understand what’s happening, but I’ve always felt the same sense every time I finish reading a masterpiece of a writer, whose works I like a lot.

Like when I finished reading Mark Twain’s The Adventure of Huckleberry Finn, o gosh, I just felt so … so … I can’t find the right word, indeed, can anyone help me?

Maybe it’s like when you’re losing someone and know that you’ll never meet him/her again…? Or like you have to leave people, and places you love so badly?

I don’t know. But, perhaps, I can try to explain the feelings I experienced when I read Huck and just finished it.

First, of course, as with many other books I’ve read, I got so much involved with the lives, the characters, the settings (including time and space) and every other things that made up Huck.

I felt as if I was indeed a part of the story, living the same lives as the characters’, although I’m not sure where or who I was there.

When I read Huck, as he and runaway Jim drifted along Mississippi river and engaged with a lot of unique occurrences, I felt that I was so close to them. I felt as if I was in the same dark, wet nights they sometimes experienced, and like I could see the black figures of tall trees and some homes alongside the river amid thick or crimson darkness that covered the scene.
I could clearly see the ripples, especially those around the drifting raft that Huck and Jim were at. And I could somehow feel the same emotions they had. I felt their fears, hopes and weary; I felt their disappointments, and others.

So when I finally finished the book, I felt so miserable; so between sad and as if just losing someone (or something?) important in my life.

Huck has since become one of my favorite book characters, and I think he’s the best that Twain could create, so I’m not interested in tackling with the longing (or whatever that is) stuff by reading Twain’s other work; Tom Sawyer, for example … I’m a type of person who doesn’t like looking back, or taking steps backwards, degrading, etc…and I consider Tom Sawyer is not at all a better work, or an equal one, with Huck.

I finished reading Huck about two months ago, and I’ve tried to forget it by reading another book. I then chose my other favorite: The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.

I’ve read some series of the book, so when I went to a bookstore less than two weeks ago, I picked one that I hadn’t read.

And you know what? It is the last series. So, when I finished it, and then realized that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle stopped his work on Sherlock Holmes there, I experience another despair, misery moment.

The longing (or whatever) that I’ve been feeling for Huck has yet to end, but I have to endure another longing caused by Sherlock Holmes.

I experienced the same stuff when I finished Laura Ingalls’ Little House on the Prairie series and Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, Good Wives, Eight Cousins and Rose in Blooms.
Only after many months I could recover.

I wonder what’s wrong with me…is such a sense/feeling something normal to anyone just read a book? Or it’s only on particular type of people, one like me?
If this is a psychological disorder (I hope not), what I have to do to cope with that then?

Do I have to stop reading books, even if that’s the thing that I like the most in my life?

Please, anyone…give me some advices. I terribly need that.