Lessons of a Bookworm

  Books teach lots of lessons, sometime it's something the author intended and sometimes it's something that only you can take away from the book, a combination of the authors words and your unique experiences. This isn't to be an exhaustive list, just a random bit of things I've learned reading books.
   From Siddhartha I learned that a book doesn't have to be big to pack a big impact and from Hermann Hesse that loving one book by an author doesn't mean you'll love the rest of his work; but even if you don't love the story (Demian) it can still resonate with you for years to come. Also from Siddhartha and from some of Salinger's work I learned that we often have to forget what we know in order to learn what we need to know.
  Speaking of Salinger, Salinger taught me that, "If you had a million years to do it in, you couldn't rub out even half the "F you" signs in the world. It's impossible."While he probably didn't intend to Salinger also taught me that a certain amount of phoniness is not only normal but necessary for society to function, sorry Holden. Salinger, Vonnegut, and Hemingway also taught me that war is indeed hell; although Hemingway made it sound a bit like a romantic hell.
  Tolstoy taught me in Anna Karenina that really big books usually have lots of filler that has nothing to do with the stories being told. That sometimes regular romances seem much more desirable when compared with flashy, star struck ones and that the main story in a book isn't always the best one.
   Speaking of Russian's, Dostoevsky taught me many things and I've only read two of his books so far. He taught me that a man can reason anything, even murder can seem reasonable when dwelt on too long. He taught me that 'classics' could be interesting stories, and (with The Brothers Karamazov) that the parts of a book can be greater than it's sum. He taught me that people don't know what to do with freedom and would rather have laws and dogma, and that we are all responsible for the worst among us because we didn't reach them when we had a chance.
   Dai Sijie, Paulo Coelho and Laura Esquivel taught me that there are non-English writing authors out there definitely worth reading, Coelho gave me the only version of the story of Job I've ever really liked and also made me see how a writer can mess up his own story by inserting too much of himself into it. Sijie taught me about Chinese reeducation camps (in the 1960s) and how literature can free the mind. And Esquivel taught me that a book can be smoldering hot, fantastical, romantic and contain recipes all at the same time.
   Neil Gaiman showed me fairy tales are also for adults.
   Joyce Carol Oates showed me how a house can be a major character in a story.
   Christopher Moore and Tom Robbins showed me that a warped imagination can be a good thing, that profanity can be prose and that red heads can be real trouble. Moore also gave the world Pocket (a unique reworking of Shakespeare's fool from King Lear)and Abby Normal, which maybe isn't a lesson learned but a good thing all the same; remember when Abby was talking about Boo Radley?
   Which brings me to Harper Lee, who taught me it's not always easy to stand up for your principles but it's always worth it. Cyrano de Bergerac tempered that lesson by teaching me that standing up for those beliefs to the point of being obsessive about them can lead to loneliness and death. Cyrano also showed me you can love a character even if he's a dick and in a similar vain Lolita showed that you can sympathize with even a very base protagonist with the right writer at the helm.
   Stephen King showed me how important a good ending is, and Elizabeth Kostova showed me how a terrible ending can ruin an otherwise amazing book. The Notebook showed how you can love the ending of a book even though you're reading it through a torrent of tears.
   Speaking of endings brings me to the end of my blog, again not an exhaustive list by any means, but these are some of the lessons I've learned from my time spent between the pages of books. Some were about literature in general and some from more of a personal growth perspective. I hope I can be as good a man as Atticus without being quite a Cyrano, I hope to be as peaceful as Siddhartha but with a Fool-ish streak, to be as passionate as quail in rose petal sauce flavored by Tita's erotic thoughts and as devoted as Noah Calhoun.