I used to love reading, got a chance to read great novels in both English and Spanish. I believe I stopped a few years ago. Slowly and unknowingly, like everyone else, got addicted to being on my phone 24/7. When would I be able to read if I am always at work or busy? The time I get to relax I can just be on social media or watch Netflix instead of reading. I believed that the book that first caught my attention was “The Outsiders”, by S.E. Hinton. I was in Jr High School when we read this book in class. We had read plenty of novels in school, but this was different.
This book immediate caught my attention with its crude language and its way to describe what was going on so clear that it made you feel like if you were there. I used to go back and re-read the chapters we went through in class with my undivided attention. It was a book from the 60s about a group of friends (three of them brothers) who live in a pretty ugly part of town. This alone was not a problem since the author emphasizes multiple times how happy and united the friends were. One of the friends falls in love with a girl from the wealthy part of town and problems start from there. Multiple street fights that ended in multiple tragedies. I remember reading about the comparison about the people that could be friends but grew hating each other just from growing in the wrong part of town. Makes it seem dumb how they see each other so different while someone from the outside could see them the same.
I believe this could apply to everything from religious believes, racism and social classes. What impacted me so much from this book was that I always thought it was written by a tough dude in recent times, but it was actually written by a woman in the 60s. I immediately went and bought all her books and started reading until recent times where I am too busy to do anything. Recently I “read” an audiobook I would listen to on the road. “Hells Angels” by Hunter S. Thompson and now I want to listen to his books all day. Hopefully, we get to read some of his work in the class and I can understand better what was going on in his head when he wrote all that.