One of the first adult novel that I read was the Razor's Edge....
I was in between my junior and senior year in High School. All my friends had their drivers license and me, well I was kind of stuck out in the middle of nowhere. They also were all over 18 and could hit the bars. I was only 16 that year.
We lived in the farm area of our town that was about to explode with development. It was hard to get in and out of our house so I was kind of isolated. I also had a raging case of acne that forced me to the sidelines of the dating game..
So I immersed myself in books. The Razor's Edge was my first "adult" novel that wasn't force fed to me by the English Departments. Even though I was in Honors English, we were reading Homer, Shakespeare and the Bible as literature, I still kept looking for that book, the book that would, well for lack of a better phrase, speak to me.
I found it in the Razor's Edge. Of course it borderlines on the salacious, but there was enough stuff about finding oneself to make it interesting for an isolated kid who continued to walk the batter when pitching woo.
So I spent hours that summer reading what was interesting to me. Now there was no internet to look about to find something, so I was left to tagging along when my mom went to the mall. I would slip away and head on to the book store and look for books that might surprise me.
I found the Razor's Edge and was drawn in after reading the first chapter. The main character, Larry, was a man who had seen the brutality of war as he served as a ambulance driver in WWI, or "The Great War" as they called it back then. After the war, Larry wanted more than being defined by a job or even a career.
Years later, I was excited the Bill Murray did a remake of the movie. It followed the book pretty but Bill was miscast. I was glad to find out that Tyrone Power was the first Larry.
The idea of searching for something to believe in has always been a part of our humanity. Over the years I have become far more cynical than I was way back there in 1974. So I read the book at just the right time.
The book showed me how to look for the meaning of life by just trying to empathize with the people around you.
Why did I post this in the General Forum? Well, because I think there are a lot of Larry's who flock to the democratic party because we look for solutions to problems that are just as well as functional. The other party seems to have the cloak of "what's in it for me" blanket that stifles all compassion.
Politics should be an exercise in compassion because if you have no empathy toward your fellow man, what, dear god, are you here for....
And so, read the book or watch the original with Tyrone Power
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