Reading Dan Brown’s Angels and Demons was like eating a bag of potato chips. You pick one and put it in your mouth, and before you know it, you empty the bag. I’ve not been so active a reader, gluing to the pages for hours forgetting meals and forsaking sleep until the bitter end. But then, like eating a whole bag of chips, there is that empty feeling and what the hell? A rush was what I got and I kicked myself for wasting my time, especially upon the last chip, with a James Bond like conclusion, it tasted stale.
Reading good literature is hard work. I usually can’t read more than half an hour in a sitting. My brain needs rest and time to digest when the language is rich. However there is always a sense of elation, a feeling of accomplishment when I finish a good book. An author’s use of language and their subjects’ character, to me, are much more essential than plot. But of course it cannot be overdone. Orhan Pamuk’s Snow comes to mind, and also Arundhati Roy’s God of Small Things—both of which I humbly put away, unable to finish.
The good books? Nabokov’s Lolita, Hubert Selby Jr.’s Last Exit to Brooklyn, Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eyes, Pearl Buck’s Good Earth, Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years Of Solitude, Reinaldo Arena’s Before Night Falls, Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road… and on and on. These books are my teachers as they demand as much as entertain. But there’s one book which I recently finished, which is quite curious and odd, that I would like to talk about tomorrow.
