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Reading Watching

It was fun reading this book excerpt by an author I had never heard of. Crime fiction is a reading genre for me but it is definitely one of the movie genres I like. If they made this book into a movie, I would gladly watch but reading the book is harder. After having watched The Fall of the House of Usher, I tried reading the Edgar Allan Poe - starting with the eponymous book. I struggled just as much as I had as kid trying to read Poe, inspired by my cousin who was older, wiser and a fan of Poe's works. I did not want to miss out and applied my best effort to understand what the fuss was all about. It did not work and it was my loss. There will always be some exceptional writing out there that some readers simply cannot latch on to. As such, they cannot get the value from that that the devotees of the writer get from it (my cousin was nothing short of a Poe devotee). 

The writing of Poe was only one of many examples of the how two kids from the same family, cultural background and similar age can start to diverge early and by a lot. By the time we were in our twenties, there was was very little we had left in common. It's like our vocabulary of words and the ideas were completely different. We could look at the same thing and arrive at completely different conclusions, suffer through the same set of tribulations and be transformed in opposite ways. Poe was almost a bellwether of what was to come. Today we are as far apart as two people can be despite the fact that we don't bear any ill-will towards each other. It's as if we were creatures of two different species that have no common language. I thought of our childhood together many times while watching the show and then trying yet again to read the works of Poe. 

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