Annie's Literary Moments

The Stranger by Albert Camus (Sublime Literary Experience)
When I read The Stranger at seventeen, it was the first time I ever found myself hating a book. Everyday I would drive the 20 minutes to school and just think about the book, wrestle with the message it was conveying. It bothered me, more than I had ever been bothered by a work of literature in my life, but I loved it because it stretched me. It taught me how think through things, how to mentally struggle, how to deal with uncomfortable things so in the end it was one of the books that impacted me the most out of all the things I read in high school.

Youth in an Austrian Town by Ingeborg Bachmann (Literary Coping)
I found this short story in an Anthology for a Comparative Literature class I took a few years ago. It wasn't until a few months ago that I read it for the first time and it was very carthartic. Yes, this is the story of children growing up against World War II but all these decades later it connected so personally with me and some of the hard things that I've experienced.

The Last Battle by C.S. Lewis (Reading Literature Privately) 
This is the first book I ever cried over.  It's the piece of literature that is most dear to my heart, because it was one of the purest moments of my life, when I closed the last page and looked out the window of our teal mini-van at the sunset as we drove along the interstate. Maybe these are insignificant details, but they are inseparable from the moment and from these words: "The term is over: the holidays have begun. The dream is ended: this is the morning."

Creature Comfort by Arcade Fire (Literary Within Musical Experience)
This song from the start had a lot of personal significance to me, but I think the reason that I've listened to it over and over and over again is because it talks about things that plague our generation specifically, and these things have had there fair share of foul play in my life. It's definitely on the dark side but I just like that its illuminating something that is a touchy subject.

Surprised by Joy by C.S. Lewis (Religious Literary Experience) 
The Currant Bush. In one of the first chapters C.S. Lewis relates an experience he had standing next to a Currant Bush: "As I stood beside a flowering currant bush on a summer day there suddenly arose in me without warning, and as if from a depth not of years but of centuries.. it seemed difficult to find words strong enough for the sensation which came over me; Milton's "enormous bliss" of Eden comes somewhere near it." Reading this gave me a vocabulary for things I'd felt my whole life but never been able to put words to them.

The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald (Cinematic Literary Experience) 
I had read The Great Gatsby once before, but it was when I saw the Baz Luthrmann version in theaters that my eyes were opened to the magical-ness of the story Fitzgerald had created. It was almost like seeing poetry--the way all the imagery and sound flowed together on the screen. The next time I read The Great Gatsby it was so much more vivid and alive to me.