The book I've just finished is a fantastic novel by Arundhati Roy entitled The God of Small Things. I first encountered it as a summer reading assignment in 2009, just before my junior year of high school. That's when I fell in love. I could write for years on end about this book; in fact, I've already written quite a long paper on the theme of loss of innocence in The God of Small Things and another of my favorites, Evening Is the Whole Day.
There are so few books that can immediately capture my fancy that I become practically obsessed with the ones that succeed. I revel in their beauty. I bask in their glory. And yet I constantly try to identify precisely what about them so enthralls me.
For the most part, I believe, it is the humanity. My favorite books are about people and their lives and their love and their struggles. The God of Small Things is no different. Again and again I find myself tugged into the world of Ayemenem, watching the Meenachal flow constantly and sluggishly by as Estha and Rahel's lives are torn apart.
I love that river. I was raised by the water - on the eastern shore of Mobile Bay - and the magic of its movements have always fascinated me. Water is constant and yet unpredictable. Gentle yet ruthless. It is always an uncertainty. One minute your water is peaceful and the next it has destroyed everything you know.
Water is so like the flow of humanity. Civilizations become the tides upon which all our minuscule wave-selves ride. We each have our moment to break upon the shore, to rise and fall without acclaim or much notice at all, but then there come the monsters of humanity - the waves that refuse to pass unrecognized, the people that rage and roil and crash until finally their destruction is done. They have swallowed their wave enemies. They have flattened a sand-castle. And now they retreat, leaving a legacy of terror and tears despite which they will eventually be forgotten with the rest of us.
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