Flowers for Algernon

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So I created my own little "book club". Yes, it is totally nerdy but I totally don't care. ha ha. It's just my friend G and I and well, now we may have another member. lol. We had our very first meeting last night and it was quite awesome. We had some Chipotle (I had never been and it was pretty darn good - especially their guacamole!). Then, we headed over to B&N right next door.

For our first book, we read Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes. I am 100% aware that this a book that I should have read long ago but truthfully, I hadn't and neither had G so we went ahead and read it. And we both loved it! It's really such an amazing book! It's short, yes, but in it SO many themes were discovered and after reading it, I just felt enlightened in some way? It's kind of hard to explain. I guess you could say it's the kind of book that leaves you seeing certain things in a different light.

(tiny spoiler later on)

Here are some of my highlights:

"I dont even care if it herts or anything because Im strong and I will werk hard."

"The more intelligent you become the more problems you'll have, Charlie."

"But nobody has time."

"Now I understand one of the important reasons for going to college and getting an education is to learn that the things you've believed in all your life aren't true, and that nothing is what it appears to be."

"The intelligence has driven a wedge between me and all the people I knew and loved."

"Sure he's egotistic, so what? It takes that kind of ego to make a man attempt a thing like this."

"Who and what am I now? Am I the sum of my life or only of the past few months?"

"Nothing in our minds is ever really gone."

"But I've learned that intelligence alone doesn't mean a damned thing."

"...the men of the cave would say of him that up he went and he came without his eyes..."

"Alice knows everything about me now, and accepts the fact that we can be together for only a short while. She has agreed to go away when I tell her to go. It's painful to think about that, but what we have, I suspect, is more than most people find in a lifetime."

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I guess if I had to say what I "took" from this book, I would say that it opened up my mind to see and really understand the importance of perception. It also allowed me to make more sense of the quote "It is better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all." Sure, Charlie lost his intelligence and went back to his old self. And some may argue that he might have been better off not ever knowing what it was like to be "normal" or in his case "a genius". However, I think the experience made him more complete, if that makes sense. He was able to understand everything that happened in his life before and just understand life itself.

There was so much more that I was able to learn from this book but I think that would be the most important for me. That quote, to me, was always a bit controversial but now it makes more sense to me and I can at least now try to understand why for some, it means so much.