I went to the bookstore earlier to browse for books to add to my want-to-buy list. Aside from Wilbur Smith's African adventure novels, I wanted Thomas Harris' Hannibal Rising and Ken Follett's The Pillars of the Earth. I saw Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale and Frank Herbert's Dune. And it gave me a jolt of pleasure to see, on the shelf, Daniel Keyes' Flowers for Algernon.
Charlie is a mentally retarded man who becomes a genius after an experimental brain surgery, a procedure which has been tested only on mice. It is written in the voice of Charlie, and it becomes a heart-wrenching journey when he realizes that his intellectual capacity will diminish after some time, and he is as alone as when he was dim-witted. The book had won a Hugo and a Nebula award. Like Dune (which also won a Hugo and a Nebula) and The Handmaid's Tale, I read Flowers for Algernon when I was thirteen.
Now I'm thirty-one, and the book is on the bookstore shelves again, with raving reviews. And seeing it has made me excited. I wanted to tell the other people there to grab it because it's a damned good book, and it can make you cry.
Good books are like your childhood sweetheart. They steal your heart, and when you see them again after some time, your pulse race just a little bit, you smile a wistful smile, and you think, Hello, good-looking. I've known you some time ago, and boy, wasn't it marvelous.
Charlie is a mentally retarded man who becomes a genius after an experimental brain surgery, a procedure which has been tested only on mice. It is written in the voice of Charlie, and it becomes a heart-wrenching journey when he realizes that his intellectual capacity will diminish after some time, and he is as alone as when he was dim-witted. The book had won a Hugo and a Nebula award. Like Dune (which also won a Hugo and a Nebula) and The Handmaid's Tale, I read Flowers for Algernon when I was thirteen.
Now I'm thirty-one, and the book is on the bookstore shelves again, with raving reviews. And seeing it has made me excited. I wanted to tell the other people there to grab it because it's a damned good book, and it can make you cry.
Good books are like your childhood sweetheart. They steal your heart, and when you see them again after some time, your pulse race just a little bit, you smile a wistful smile, and you think, Hello, good-looking. I've known you some time ago, and boy, wasn't it marvelous.
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