E tenebras, lux dormiens

On first reading

I've been reading Chinua Achebe's ethnographic novel Things Fall Apart for an Anthropology class I'm taking, and uniquely among most books I've (tried) to read, it--the book--has a very interesting beginning. I've always been terrified of reading novels because I don't have any idea what's going on in the first few pages. It's always so florid, like you're waiting for the story to begin.

So this book has definitely gotten my attention. Unfortunately, it's not easy for me to suggest a way to carry this kind of attention-grabbing-thing to all other books so that I can read them as well. That's because what interested me was not the story, but the fact that there is this culture so distinctly different from the one I am growing up in. Here is a tribe, Umuofia, who has dealt in warfare that has trapped it into hatred of other tribes and races, and it is not likely to change. Naturally, that's not the plot of the story, but it in itself was interesting enough to encourage me to read.

When I got Book 3 of the Harry Potter Series, I had to struggle to get through the first twenty pages about how evil Harry's aunt, uncle, and cousin are to him. I even put the book away because I could bear to read and feel frothing vilification to his family. I couldn't understand why such a family exists. It made no sense. It still makes no sense, but after I got through the twenty pages, the interesting stuff started. Like Harry's magical ability and the history of wizards!

It's fascinating to see what I am interested in. Not in real life, but in fantasy. Shakespeare, Orwell, Tolkiens, and Rowling all share one thing in common, they talk of a whimsical time.

It's possible that I'm not exposed enough to literature, so I can't judge. But seriously, what I have read and what I like do say a lot about me as a person. Sure, sure, I haven't read any books like Great Expectations, the Christmas Carols, or even Shakespeare's Comedy of Errors and Winter's Tale, or works by Dostoevsky, but I've read about them. I've often found explications of the story more illuminating than the story itself, to my ambivalence.

Even though I've not read these works, and I would like (though I am not particularly wanting) to read them someday in my spare time, but I realized that not everybody is intellectual! I'd say the average person hasn't read any of these works, which probably belong to a more elite class. And I'm an average person, therefore not of the elite.