Day 17 → A book you’ve read that changed your views on something.
Y'know, if I'd known how many of these would leave me scratching my head, I'd have passed this up.
This one took some thinking. I don't have a really profound answer for it, either. I cannot say, for instance, that I read the Bible and started believing in God, 'cause I have believed in Him as long as I can remember. I can't say that reading Jim Hightower's book If The Gods Had Meant Us to Vote, They'd Have Given Us Candidates made me a populist, 'cause I already counted myself as one, or even that The Joy of Sex taught me how to do it (I did have a friend who gave up deodorant after reading it, though).
So...this is all I've got:
I'm reading The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn for the first time. This is a bit odd, considering that I'm 31, but it wasn't required reading in junior high or high school, though plenty of other things were. It is required for my American Lit II class, however. Even though the full text of it is available online, I picked up a copy at Half Price this past Sunday for about three bucks, and I've been reading it since.
And...it's good. Not great. To be honest it's kind of dragging. There's a lot of stuff happening, but nothing really seems to have any meaning or be advancing the plot (I imagine I'll think differently in hindsight, though). But it's much better than I'd expected it to be. (I had one of the Illustrated Classics versions of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer as a child, and it bored me shitless, to be frank.)
So: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has changed my mind on whether Mark Twain sucks. He doesn't.
1 comment:
I just finished reading The Grapes of Wrath for the first time and feel like someone should have required me to read it in school. Like Mark Twain, that Steinbeck fellow knew a thing or two about writing.
I think that is a book that might change some people's views (it is certainly pro-union, since the scared rich man is trying to keep the poor man down), but I was more interested in his descriptions of each scene. He could have been writing about ants moving blades of grass and it would have been fascinating.
Post a Comment