Day One Entry: 8 Jan 2014

I finally finished reading The Great Gatsby. What a great book! I am really amazed by the story. To begin with, I have to admit that the movie pretty much sums the whole book up in a great way. So for those who does not have the luxury to read it, the movie is a good enough substitute, I suppose. 

 It has been quite a while since I last read a literature such as this, it sure brings me back to the days when we had to read and analyze Jekyll and Hyde as well as Phantom of the Opera, just to name a couple of literature pieces which I am fond of. The thrill of finishing the story, and once you've done that your teacher will want you to summarize it all up, dissecting every detail of the story, the characters, themes and moral values etc. What saddens me so is the fact that back then, being forced to do so totally made me ignorant of how beautiful the piece was; when an action is forced, or even made compulsory with scarce justification, one's mind is then trained to be parallel.

Without giving much thought to the whys, I ran through all of these literature pieces during my school days. I only began to understand their beauty years later. That was when I began looking for the original texts of both Jekyll and Hyde as well as Phantom of the Opera.

 But why are they so special? To me, I personally love Jekyll and Hyde for the language. Truth be told, my copy of the high school Jekyll and Hyde was the result of us looting the form 3's classrooms when they left school after they were done with their exams. Luckily enough, I managed to find a well-kept copy of the book, neatly wrapped with no highlights (I am not a big fan of highlighters, unless it's for work purposes). Up to this day, I can still vividly remember the first time I opened the book. I was particularly amazed by Robert Louis Stevenson's language. I like how the author managed to write using simple words, arranged in a grammatically elegant manner; how he carefully chose the words and made them flow ever so eloquently. 

Being an independent, yet interested learner of the language ever since I was young, that was the moment when I began to leave the days of memorizing grammatically rules behind and write so long as I am compelled to do so.

I leave the rest to you…….

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