Fiction

There's something magnetic about a good story. I am introduced to people with no obligation to introduce myself to them. There is an opportunity to know someone intimately without being vulnerable yourself (without being vulnerable to the characters, at least). I am brought into a time and place different than my own, learning another culture's ways without having to participate in them (although sometimes I wish that I could). It's also refreshing to listen to a voice richer than what most of the academia I'm exposed to offers. I curl up on a chair in the library or in the corner of my couch and just read, falling into another world away from my own, which is cliche, but everyone feels that way about reading at some point.

I'm currently revisiting Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game, and it's just as good as I remember it being five years ago. I have loved the process of getting to know the characters, especially Ender and Valentine, who are interestingly complex, especially when I remind myself that they are not older than 10. Ender does the things he doesn't want to do, the things which spawn from the treatment he has been given all of his life. Valentine loves Ender deeply, but her love has become so removed that she hates herself for how she has forgotten. I love reading about the games, the battleroom. If the battleroom and quidditch were real, I would want to try playing them, at least once.

I think that I appreciate the writing more now that I'm older. The third-person narrative peeks into Ender's thoughts in an especially interesting way, and I really enjoy the vocabulary, the sentence composition, the attention to sensory intake. I would include an excerpt, but I don't want to carelessly choose one for the sake of this blog. It can wait.

I have so many novels on the bookshelf in Marcus' room just waiting to be read -- All the King's Men, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Frankenstein, Emma, The Kite Runner... just to name a few. I want to have the time to read each and every one of them. Maybe it's just a matter of making time.