I am not such a reader, I confess. I have fooled many, I know. Learnt a bad habit from a comedy that reading a book is easy; read the first line and the last line and voila! You have the whole story. I tried it, does not work well. :)
Reading can be a burden, if I am not captivated. That is why the Bible stays relevant to me- it speaks. As in, it does not just toy with my emotions, it actually speaks. It rebukes, it encourages, it comforts and consoles. I consider it a book I love because it is the kind of book I can go back to again and again, not for enjoyment but for learning, enjoying while at it.
Yes, this was obvious no?
I have tried to read before. The last book I finished reading was The Da Vinci Code. I almost never put it down. Brilliant suspense. I tried Angels and Demons after that and a whole lot of other books but unsuccesfully.
However, I have had good success before. Some of the best books I read were on the Literature syllabus at school: The River Between, Betrayal in the City, Carcass for Hounds, The Plague etc.. However, a book I will never forget is Darkness at Noon- Arthur Koestler. What a gripping story! The style itself was fabulous, raw, the book itself dark. Still, another book fits in this post:
I do not know how I landed on this book, but I did, and I had such a consuming read. It's like John Milton was Michale Holmes, giving the inside story of how things happened in the start. The plot of the devil, the gullibility of man, the passion of God, the scenes of heaven, descriptions of hell....
Ah, man. This book is awesome. It is an incredible poem. Wikipedia says this
Paradise Lost is an epic poem in blank verse by the 17th-century English poet John Milton. It was originally published in 1667 in ten books, with a total of over ten thousand individual lines of verse. A second edition followed in 1674, changed into twelve books (in the manner of the division of Virgil's Aeneid) with minor revisions throughout and a note on the versification.[1]The poem concerns the Biblical story of the Fall of Man: the temptation of Adam and Eve by the fallen angel Satan and their expulsion from the Garden of Eden. Milton's purpose, stated in Book I, is to "justify the ways of God to men."[2] Paradise Lost is often considered one of the greatest literary works in the English language.[3]
Milton also goes on to write Paradise Regained- another tale, of the temptation of Jesus. I recommend this man's works.
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