Only one book. Perfect.
Actually, I don’t consider myself a heavy reader, because I only read books that are either famous or old. Yep, I might not really be into old music, but I LOVE old classic books, especially if they’re controversial or have a unique story behind how they were written. I’m talking about J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (1951).
So, The Catcher in the Rye? No
I hated Holden Caulfield so badly that I wanted to read it again in half a decade after the first time I read it. Turns out, he’s just this raw, dreamy, and naïve teenager who loves his sister but can’t really do much about it. Then I realized that maybe I hated him because I have some parts of his personality. And later, instead of throwing my translated copy away, I bought the English version with that iconic cover design.
Harper Lee’s Books? Nah…
But, we’re not gonna talk about Holden or how I love Scout Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) because of how similar I felt to her way of thinking and the questions she asked out of curiosity. I’m not gonna talk about Go Set a Watchman (2015) either, although it offers a lot of perspectives that validated my hatred toward racism and acceptance of my family members who probably have different views from mine.
So, What?
My favorite book is Dan Brown’s Inferno (2013) so far I can tell. It’s the gift I got from my close friend when I turned 17. It was the first Dan Brown book that I read, although I had already watched Angels and Demons (2009) and The Da Vinci Code (2006) years before. After that, I read Origin (2017) and didn’t really keep up with Dan Brown’s releases anymore until now.
What made it my favorite was (IDK if it’s rational but…) the shape of the book and the paper it uses. It’s not a hardcover book and the size is about the same as Jostein Gaarder’s Sophie’s World (1991). But unlike Sophie’s World, Inferno‘s paper is so thin that it feels like the Bible. It was one of those special books because my friend gave it to me during the era when I was obsessed in collecting books and Inferno was the first big book I got. I love the feeling when I hold it.
Regarding the plot, it’s pretty similar to Brown’s other stories. We’ll follow Prof. Robert Langdon’s “adventure” as a Harvard professor of religious symbology, so you’ll find a lot of signifiers and signifieds (hello, Saussure!). But what makes this one different is the way the story unfolds. The main villain was already dead when the story begins. Langdon was unconscious in the first chapters. He lost his short-term memory, which made us feel cautious early in the book, because all of us are clueless (there were no Dora nor Blue, so…).
The story didn’t exactly end happily, but I love the way it became so tragic. I dug more about Dante Alighieri’s The Divine Comedy, then the idea of human overpopulation which felt uncomfortably plausible (hi, Thanos), and the water-soluble plastic container (NGL, I LOVE that soluble thing, so genius).
From Book to Film
Inferno was also the first book I got excited about when they announced the film. It was postponed a few times until it finally got released in October 2016. Although, unfortunately the plot didn’t work for me, but this book left me thinking how humans create their own Inferno (hell) by ruining the Earth. If humanity became overpopulated, what could be the best solution to fix it?
