My Favorite Books Essay

Ever since I first learned to read, I have felt the allure of the written word. A book opens up whole new worlds, different from one’s own, offering distant and exotic adventures where one can reinvent his identity and become anything he desires. The moment I would get my hands on a book, I would feel excited like a little child, who has just received a new and more delicious kind of candy, and who cannot wait to sink his teeth into it. Books open doors to a world of dreaming, where one does not need to be asleep while visiting it, and the next few pages will serve as a short overview of books that have had a great impact on me.
One of my childhood classics and still, a heartwarming read, is most certainly Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. Its utterly ridiculous scenarios, the abundance of nonsensical and fantastic elements are the things every childhood dream is made of. Despite the seemingly facile character of the novel, it is anything but self-explanatory. Alice’s experiences in her dream world resonate powerfully with her fears in real life, and this is where it is extremely easy to identify with her and her trepidations. When I was rereading this book in my adolescence, I noticed many ideas that I have not on my first reading. Alice’s apparent fear of losing her childhood innocence and eventually being forced into the world of adults really resounded with my fears at the time. Being on the brink of adulthood is something that one never takes lightly and it raises many questions and uncertainties. I can honestly claim that reading Alice in Wonderland has helped me a lot in my perception of the adult world and taking responsibility for the actions that I have myself undertaken. Just like Alice needs to take matters into her own hands and gain control over the unmanageable growth episodes that the mushroom instills, I also knew that the time is coming when I will also be forced to master my frustrations and see the world not as a hallucinogenic vision, but a place where I will know my identity.
Another book that has left me pondering even after I have put it down is another worthy classic, Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. It is a tragic story of a monomaniacal captain who finds himself in a never-ending pursuit of the infamous white whale. He possesses the tragic flaw that all great men have, like tragic heroes of Shakespeare’s plays, how they believe that they have power over god-like qualities and that by imposing their will, they will manage to be victorious over nature. I found Captain Ahab’s psycho-physical flaw a mirror image of every human being’s secret desires. We all want to fight nature and, in a certain way, overcome death. In this sense, Moby Dick represents nature that is incomprehensible to man, and that we mortals will never understand it. I can sympathize with the doomed captain all the more, because his plight is the plight of every human being. We fear death and nature’s cruel, unforgiving, incomprehensible ways, but we can still fight, to the very end, till the last breath leaves our corporeal existence. At the very end, the captain plunges deep into the depth of the ocean, stubbornly refusing to let go, even if it meant the difference between life and death. I really admire the courage and determination of such a man, because a person who believes that much in his cause, no matter how futile it is, can never say that his life is devoid of meaning.
Next in the line of books that I have enjoyed immensely is Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. It is a book that was initially deemed as immoral by the Victorian sensibility and morality. Its subject matter questions exactly these notions, by exposing them as fraudulent and cynical. The book is an excellent exemplar on how superficial the nature of society is; they do not care whether a man is good at heart, but they, Dorian and his friends, choose friends based on their physical appearance. Lamentably, this is mostly the case with the world today, even after one hundred years of the first publishing of the book. People still value the surface of things, utterly disregarding what is worth the most: depth. This book has taught me that being considered beautiful by everyone else can have a lot of advantages, but eventually, it corrupts the mind and the soul. Youth and beauty are all too fleeting; it is the core of who we are that stays with us as long as we live.
Books have the power to offer enjoyment, to teach, even reform individuals. They are a treasury of words that offer life lessons for those who know where to look. And, I take pride in the fact that I can call myself one of those people.