get lost in a book

Syllable breakdown

Dictionary meaning

an idiom describing the experience of deep, absorbing reading in which one becomes so immersed in the world and characters of a book that awareness of one's actual surroundings temporarily recedes; to get lost in a book is to experience what the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called flow — the state of complete absorption in an activity — applied to the specific pleasure of fiction, where the reader's imaginative participation in a narrative world temporarily displaces their ordinary consciousness; the phrase captures the particular quality of reading as a form of transportation, distinct from passive media consumption, because the reader must actively construct the imagined world from the text's cues; readers who get lost in books often report losing track of time, forgetting to eat, and being disoriented when interrupted, experiences that attest to the genuine psychological depth of narrative immersion