After a dizzying couple weeks of moving, working overtime, and settling a trademark dispute for my uncle's company in China, I finally had some time to sit down and enjoy one of my favorite pasttimes: reading a book. MJ and I recently visited a Barnes and Noble and marveled at how the franchise still exists, in spite of the entire book industry being usurped by other media (recently Time Magazine was forced to go to only bi-weekly double issue, a change from weekly magazine I've been accustomed to all my life) and a pandemic, although a pandemic possibly aided its sales as more people had time to be at home reading. The bookstore's survival (as well as other famous bookstores like the Last Bookstore in L.A., Powell's Books in Portland, City Lights in San Francisco) gives hope for a biblophile like myself that there will still be demand for books and that great authors will still be encouraged to expess their ideas in print.
Just like I appreciate children's books now more as an adult, I now look back fondly at being required to read classic American and British literature during high school. Unfortunately back then I had so many other obligations and other subjects to study for that I never got into the classics (It's hard to go from studying for a trigonometry test to studying for anatomy of the body in biology then memorizing the U.S. presidents in order in U.S. History and then be expected to fully understand a lenghty soliquoy by Hamlet), and lacked the adult experience that I needed to appreciate fully the rich nature of those books. I oddly never got assigned Romeo and Juliet (my British Literature professor elected instead for King Lear, Hamlet, and MacBeth) so I just this weekend got the full story of the Montagues and Capulets and how tragic a love story that was, how fate was so cruel to the star-crossed lovers and "put a plague on both their houses." And understood how ludicrous it is that a 13-year-old girl like Juliet would fall in love, and even be married (almost twice!) at such a young age, when brains and emotional structures are still developing.
Edgar Allen Poe had quite the (short) story, and little did I know he wrote all his works before the age of 40 (before he died) and before even the Civil War. I professed my love for Agatha Christie's mystery novles and especially those of Hercule Poirot when I was a teen, Raymond Chandler had a run of detective novel like the Big Sleep, and nowadays Sue Grafton gets a lot of hype for her alphabet mysteries, but Poe was apparently the first detective fiction novel in the U.S. But yes just the visceral reactions he made me feel through "The Tell-Tale Heart" (the pounding of the heart felt so real!) and stories of live burials like the Cask of Amontillado (not the Count of Monte Cristo! Different author!) made me actually remember books because I lived through those reading experiences, I warped into that world and felt the emotion of the narrator. That was as memorable to me as any shocking movie twist ending, or wild sports finish, or disaster news stories. I LIVED through Poe's stories even when I was lying on the couch for hours with no one around, just emersed in the book, which is the power still of the printed word, even in this age of cell phones and distractions. Also, I also did not know the Baltimore Ravens were named after his story "The Raven." Baltimore is apparently has the grave of Poe and devotes a lot of resources to his memory. No word if there's a tell-tale heart somewhere in the city as well.
Fantasize on,
Robert Yan
No comments:
Post a Comment