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Tell me about the oldest work of fiction you've read that you love with a passion-- not just something you think is a great work of art, but something that really speaks to you even though it was written a long, long time ago.
Reading very old stories-- not stories set in old times, which are inevitably colored by the more modern attitudes of the author, but stories written by people living those times, or hearkening back to their own olden times-- gives me a lot of the same pleasure that reading sf does. The setting and ideas about how to live and how the world works are completely alien, but the dilemmas and characters are heartbreakingly familiar and human. Except when they go back to being utterly strange. And then back again.
When I was sixteen, I saw Kenneth Branagh's Henry V for extra credit, and fell madly in love-- walked out of the theatre in a daze, babbling like a mad person about how Shakespeare was the greatest writer ever and OMG how could I have failed to notice before? My uncle said, "Oh, well, that's not even one of his better plays. You should read Hamlet."
It happened that someone had given me a Collected Shakespeare years ago, which I'd of course never opened, and so I went home and began to read Hamlet. I finished reading at about 4:00 AM, because I absolutely had to know what happened. (I think I did know that everyone died, but not why or how.) All angsty teenagers with the requisite reading skills should read Hamlet: it is the perfect age to begin a lifelong appreciation, and if you miss that window, you will probably never confide to your diary, beside trnascribed song lyrics, that you are Hamlet. And that would be sad. It's a limited understanding, but a very pure and intense one, and I'm glad I had it. I felt a kinship, across hundreds of years.
You all know what my oldest favorite is. But tell me yours, and why you love it.
Reading very old stories-- not stories set in old times, which are inevitably colored by the more modern attitudes of the author, but stories written by people living those times, or hearkening back to their own olden times-- gives me a lot of the same pleasure that reading sf does. The setting and ideas about how to live and how the world works are completely alien, but the dilemmas and characters are heartbreakingly familiar and human. Except when they go back to being utterly strange. And then back again.
When I was sixteen, I saw Kenneth Branagh's Henry V for extra credit, and fell madly in love-- walked out of the theatre in a daze, babbling like a mad person about how Shakespeare was the greatest writer ever and OMG how could I have failed to notice before? My uncle said, "Oh, well, that's not even one of his better plays. You should read Hamlet."
It happened that someone had given me a Collected Shakespeare years ago, which I'd of course never opened, and so I went home and began to read Hamlet. I finished reading at about 4:00 AM, because I absolutely had to know what happened. (I think I did know that everyone died, but not why or how.) All angsty teenagers with the requisite reading skills should read Hamlet: it is the perfect age to begin a lifelong appreciation, and if you miss that window, you will probably never confide to your diary, beside trnascribed song lyrics, that you are Hamlet. And that would be sad. It's a limited understanding, but a very pure and intense one, and I'm glad I had it. I felt a kinship, across hundreds of years.
You all know what my oldest favorite is. But tell me yours, and why you love it.