Classics

I guess there could be a reason why some books are "classics" and are widely acclaimed to be fantastic. In other words, most of them are dull [trust me, I know].

I remember picking up books like To Kill A Mockingbird [TKAM by Harper Lee] and Sense and Sensibility [SS by Jane Austen] when I was in middle school, and finding them so boring that after reading a few sentences, I would put them down for the dust to collect and go in search of something with a bit more adventure. Sometimes I would even force myself to get past the first page, yet, as soon as I got to the second, I gave up.

This year in school, I had to read TKAM. Again, at first, I thought it was so pointless. I mean, they give so many names in the beginning it's hard to follow. Who's Jem? Who's Scout? [Those are two of the main characters involved in the book.] I just, kept reading because I wanted to do the assigned work and get an A.

But... by the last pages of TKAM, I'd grown to understand the characters more, and the ending persuaded me to like the book to my surprise. I wouldn't say it's... very moving. I think the only reason it's a classic is because it deals with a black man on trial, but... other than that, I didn't think it was as... I don't think it should be a book everyone should read. Granted that it does portray what life was like back then for African Americans, I still think that I wasn't that important of a book.

Another book this year that I had to read was Charles Dickens's, Great Expectations [GE]. I didn't finish the book, even though it was assigned. I even got about half-way through, pushing my way past pages that made me fall asleep. I think it's one of the harder books I've had to read, just because it didn't catch my interest at all. Maybe at times it was interesting, but the language and the plot was just... Oi, how do people get done reading that? And why is it so critically acclaimed?

Alright, this is turning out to be like a book report, but there's one more book I want to talk about.

The Plague, by Albert Camus. I read it recently, again, as an assigned book [since a book with that cover and content about history would never have appealed to me] and found myself astonished when it turned out to be a great book. At times it was hard to follow, and indeed, I fell asleep to some parts. But... I guess this whole post was for me to say that, some books need the maturity and understanding that develops from age. I think if I had read that book even a year or two years ago, I wouldn't appreciate it as much. The story... it was slow at the beginning, and I felt so detached from all the characters. Most of the book just talked about how they were trapped in a town because of the plague [mostly bubonic] and some of the writing was hard to follow and hard to understand, never mind that it lacked in my interest. But by the end, I cried when a main character died. It was as if, the attachment to the story had crept up on me. And... I think I wouldn't have understood the pain the people went through [in the story] if I had been any younger or any less understanding. I hope to become even more of a person, so that maybe I can find what's so special about GE.