Resumo de A Lifetime Of Literature

Books and novel were my greatest fear till the age of 10. by this time many of my friends had completed all the Enid Blyton and Nancy Drew series. Unlike all I stood in my school library like a mute spectator when a friend of mine introduced me to Jane Eyre. Having read an extract from it and then hearing my friend?s response, I was prompted to read it. Not literally my first flight to the world of literature but it was surely an intriguing one. As a child I was never fascinated by Enid Blyton? adventures and thought R. L. Stevenson to be deadly boring, I did not have conventional journey to this amazing world. With no book lover in the family and considering reading to be a lonely activity, I preferred to stay away till I could not resist the temptation when given a peep in this Pandora?s Box by the charismatic writer Charlotte Bronte. Reluctantly though, I started the book, within a span of few hours and about a few hundred pages there was no stopping me.My next pick: Pride and Prejudice. Jane Austen made a large impact on me. Her impeccable style of writing, her round characters and her understanding of human emotions are spellbinding. Her works not only give an insight in a character?s heart and soul but also in the culture and customs of nineteenth century England. Her ability to connect to the readers of all ages, all cultures, and the universality of her works tickled the writer in me. Having read all her works and not being disappointed by any, Austen is ?the? writer I hold in great esteem. Next I met another impressive Bronte in Wuthering height, the darkest of the novels ever written. Though with the cliché if stormy weather to create the required environment, Emily strikes the cord with reader in the first few pages.Despite of being a classic fan, my journey saw even not so popular sights. Jeanne Betancourt, Sid Hite, Holly Webb and Barry Dannenberg among others who truly leave their mark on their readers. Betancourt, though not a traditional writer, knows the nerve of her target audience, the teenagers. The philosophical journey through ?A Hole in the World? gave new heights to Sid Hite in the ranking of influential writers list. While Nowadays, with the reader?s attention span shrinking, a writer barely survives in their minds for more than 25 months even if his work was a bestseller accompanied by controversies.
On the contrary, Shakespeare continue to enthrall readers even 250 years after his demise. His immortal characters reflect the innumerable human emotions, both the sweet and the dark. Even today literature-buffs like me spend hours discussing whether Othello was a week or a strong character. Even today people call any two star crossed lovers to be modern day Romeo ?Juliet. This is what we call timeless classics.My journey through this world of words took an unexpected turn when I set off for my first flight to fantasy. Having discarded Harry Potter as being childish and the story being unrealistic (which it certainly is; to an extent), I underwent a change of heart. Listening worlds of praises from my friends I unpredictably(for me too) gave in. without exaggeration, the very first part tempted me to read all the remaining five within a span of two months. The most captivating part was the game of Quiddich which not only reflects a creative but also an intellectual brain behind the series which has taken the world (including me) by storm. Things changed so drastically for me that Harry a weird wizard changed to the most commendable of characters ever invented, and changed me, the big critic too a die-hard fan of Rowling, so much so that I keep her on the same pedestal as Austen.My interest in non-fiction grew as I got tête-à-tête with the bloody German history. Anne Frank, the biography of her friend Hannah by Leslie Gold and innumerable short stories strewn around in old magazines and on the internet are just not enough to quench my thirst for this unusual aspect of humanity. I even love to read about astronomy and quantums. Back to my first love fiction. Short stories of O? Henry and Saki along with countless science fiction accompany me on many of my sleepless nights. The things which disturb me are their on-screen translations. Even the blockbusters like ?the Da Vinci code? do not match up to the interest the book creates. The most astonishing observation, breaking my philosophy of first interaction with a story being the best, novelisations of films like ?Raise your Voice?, ?Parineeta?, ?The Day after Tomorrow? which I read after watching them on the silver screen, were far more enrapturing. After having been a literature illiterate for years, I now read every thing from newsletters to fashion journals, articles in newspapers to e-zines, holocaust stories to scientific theories and novels to NASA dispatches. The end of this journey is nowhere in sight, not until all books, magazines, newspapers and internet is destroyed (lord forbid).

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