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2006-01-10 07:41:36
From: JJ
(San Francisco)
...because i was stuck in heathrow and was anticipating a trans-atlantic plane ride without a book. The thought alone made me feel nausea from fear.
Panicking, in the terminal's well-stocked bookstore (I love the Brits! such thing would never happen in the States) i noticed the entire row of thin books with light green book spins. I love traveling outside of the States, to see an author with so many books and a name that i have never heard of was like Christmas morning to me. :) Heaven!
I could always count on his lucid writing whenever i opened a new book by him. It was like entering the forest on a cold winter morning. It was serenity all around. And of course, the air was filled with clever and cynical remarks.
:)
| 2006-01-11 17:31:20: Orpheus
The first Greene I read is "Power and Glory", at a time when I was a bit confused about... something, which has nothing to do with identity or meaning of life, etc. I was courted by church-goers around me day and night, who offer a cozy retreat for my supposedly lost little pinko soul. Then, in a used bookstore in Pasadena, I came upon "Power and Glory". In more ways than one, Greene's novel intensified my contempt for organized religion, confirmed my belief that Meaning and moral responsibility are strictly private affairs for which there can be no help from outside, and made religion a totally unviable solution for my qualm at the time. And I have remained a proud "universal skeptic" ever since.
The moral of the story: in a true Christendom, there should be no place for used-book stores.
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| 2006-01-13 08:40:12: JmeDoom
(Asheville, The Sea)The first Graham Greene book I read was Travels with My Aunt. I hated it. It wasn't the right time for me then to discover Green, I guess.
Later I was hiding out a friends house for a couple of weeks. He had just bought Greene's autobiography, "A Sort of Life." He also had "Green on Capri, a short biography about him and Capri.
Reading about his life made me want to give it another try and I read "The Power and the Glory" and loved it. I come from a pretty strict religious background, but as I grow older my spirituality is much more of a personal thing.
JJ: I enjoyed your descripting. Greene is cold, refreshing and sometimes can be a bit of a jolt to the system.
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