A Thought of One's Own

I think I'm going in a new direction as a reader at the moment. Over the last couple of years I've mainly been working my way through the classics and non-fiction, with the occasional bit of modern work from an author I know to be good or as new bits of series come out. But lately I've been more inclined towards Asian writing. 


At school I studied Chinese Cinderella, which I sort of liked at the time but wasn't a massive fan of. More recently I've been reading The Vagrants, which is again about China, and really quite disturbing. It follows various characters about one generation after the Communist revolution. Some of them like it, some of them don't but won't say anything, some of them have said something and are punished for it, and others don't even seem aware that it happened. But the characters are all connected; they all live in the one small town, and their lives are all intertwined whether they know it or not. It's quite good thus far, although I haven't finished it yet. 


On a slightly odder note I've also been rereading Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis, which is just weird. Everyone knows that one morning Gregor Sansa woke up to find he'd been turned into a  cockroach, many of them because it made its way onto the SATs syllabus a few years ago. But what I find most odd is that nobody seems to ask why. They just hope it'll go back and carry on, but then that is the point, because it highlights the absurdity of life. You get the feeling quite strongly that it demonstrates that the working class don't really have any other choice but to just carry on regardless. 


But anyway, as to the Asian side, I think it's because I got bored of European literature (and I haven't yet found it in me to like American stuff really) because it's too familiar. So I'm heading to other cultures to try and find something a bit more new. Because that's really why you read, isn't it, to broaden your own experience into things you've never encountered through fiction. 


Or maybe you just like stories. But that seems a bit mundane.