Books and other texts

For me, books are very sacred, special things.  I love cracking their spines, dog-earing their pages, highlighting favorite passages, and generally making a mess of them.  If a book is especially special, pages will fall out upon picking it off the shelf. 

The best sorts of books are those that make you think of things in a new way.  I had an excellent professor as an undergrad, who taught both Milton and Science Fiction, and who would go off on a passionate rant whenever he came to a passage like this.  "Argh!" he would say (paraphrased) "I'm nothing man!  These guys were thinking of things no one had ever thought of before!  Isn't that incredible?"  So from that point on, I have loved books which have described things in a new way.  Traditional literature is full of this, but in this day and age I believe that science fiction is becoming especially poignant in this sense.

One thing I hated doing in grade school was writing book summaries.  Why the heck would you write a summary of a book you could just pick up and read?  When I got older, I realized that summaries were just the start of writing ABOUT books.  In college, I came to the realization that the reason to teach and read literature is to learn things about yourself.  For me, life is a constant search for and reworking of my identity.  When I was a kid (I was perhaps the most awkward individual ever) my mom told me that one day I'd burst forth from my cocoon (I'm assuming this cocoon was somewhere between my heart and lungs) like a butterfly.  But no, I can see now that that is a cliche. Identities are not absolute.  Ever moment of every day reforms my identity.  I changed myself to be this here, and now I'm changing myself to be someone completely different.  What changes me of course includes life experiences, but in my case also involves a lot of books.  I think about what I read ad nauseum, and if I decide something is important enough, construct walls and pathes of my identity around and through it.

This blog is about important concepts I find within (mainly books) but also movies, games, TV shows, and so on.  It is also about the construction of my identity.