For Whom the Bell Tolls

Since I was a kid, I used to read a lot of fairy tales and as I got older, naturally made the transition to fantasy novels. I used to read The Lord of the Rings every year during my university days. I thoroughly enjoyed the Valdemar series, Wheel of Time series (unfinished, only reached #10), Song of Ice and Fire series, Harry Potter series and so on. I generally avoided fiction as well as self-help books. I started to read outside my comfort zone around a decade ago. The fiction novels that impressed me were Cloud Atlas, 1Q84 and The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet.

In recent years, I started to read the literary classics including To Kill a Mockingbird, The Outsider, Fahrenheit 451 and The Jungle Book (finally!). I still like fantasy novels but I couldn't find any along the lines of Harry Potter or the Lord of the Rings recently. I like my fantasy novels to have adventure, magic, comedy, magical creatures, heroism, epicness and without any overtly sexual content. I don't like it if the story is too dark either. So yeah, my criteria for a fantasy novel is pretty high.

When darkness runs out of fuel...

This post is in relation to my post titled "Release" (October 15, 2018).

In the end, I did not shatter the friendship. I did go on silent mode for a few weeks but I ultimately started to respond again. It may seem like I'm backtracking from what I had intended to do but that's not quite what it is. It wasn't because I couldn't do it, it was because there was no longer a reason to do it. Months after the series of incidences that had troubled me thus far, I no longer felt the anger and bitterness I used to feel. It seems that the darkness that used to swirl within me has run out of fuel. Of course, there is still a small marble-sized ball of sadness caused by the end of a close friendship but I could still continue being not-so-close friends without any sense of it being forced.

This is partly due to a quote I heard from my mom, whom in turn, heard it from her best friend (translated): "Let others be mean to us, just don't let it be us who are mean to others."