L C Knights was an English literary critic, an authority on Shakespeare. He said a good novel, 'Makes me walk more in the world.'
J F Kermode, another Cambridge man, was a British literary critic best known for his work The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction. He judged a novel to be good if it was re-readable.
I am in the world of a good novel days after I have finished reading it.
One that takes me to another place, one that I want to return to again and again. Alternatively one like Alone in Berlin or Blood Meridian that you want to escape from, but can't, because of the power of the story and the images burnt into your inner eye.
"I am in the world of a good novel days after I have finished reading it."
Me too, but I think the best novel of all is the one you fondly recall years later like an old memory. If characters stay with you that long, were so strong you remember the images you created in your mind and endeared themselves to the point you smile decades later, the novelist really got it right.
I know I've seen the film The Lovely Bones but I don't remember it. When I try to recall it all my own images of the amazing book I read a few years before fill my mind. Now that's a book.
When I can't wait for the author to publish the next one.