Reading Into It OR 74/365

I captured myself reading again today. And then realized that I am starting to acquire several pictures of this activity. 20%--just 1/5--of the way through my year-long photo project, and I am already getting redundant.

It's true. I can be seen reading here, in the cool evening after a hot summer day (sadly, that book didn't end nearly as fantastically as the great writing led me to believe it would). I was also reading here (even though reading wasn't the activity I was capturing, per se). I always read here (I paused that book temporarily for another that came to the top of my holds list at the library--I should get back to it). Oh, and look, reading again here (that book was okay, but yet another with great descriptive writing and a relatively weak plot).

Of course, some of the reading I do is required (although generally, still interesting). But most of these photos have captured leisurely reading activity. As was the case tonight.

This image finds me working my way through The Little Prince. A quick read, to be sure. It's a children's story, after all. That being said, it was one of those books that--when recommended to me as a child--I tested a chapter or two of and then blatantly ignored for lack of interest. It will disappoint true literary enthusiasts that The Hobbit--and by association, the LOTR series--met the same fate (I actually made it about half way through The Hobbit before surrendering), as did the Narnia series (we were made to read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe in the second grade as a class, and I clearly remember having more fun drawing lines with my finger nails in the classroom carpet). While I have not returned to those two novels/series, and don't plan to, I found The Little Prince on the bookshelf in my spare room the other day, and thought I'd give it a go.

Clearly, I am too much like the grown-ups the narrator describes to appreciate The Little Prince and his journey properly.

Here's what I did get out of The Little Prince:

• Children and grown-ups see things differently, and appreciate things differently.
• Consider closely what you deem to be a "matter of consequence"; your perspective may be distorted.
• When you form a relationship with someone (i.e. when you tame or are tamed by something), they become separate from all the others like it. Unique to you while "just another" to everyone else.

Here's what I don't get:

• Why the little prince wanted to leave his little planet in the first place.
• What the sheep has to do with anything.
• Why the little prince let himself be tamed by an insecure, manipulative little flower. That's why he went back, isn't it? To the flower? A flower that can't even handle being wrong, such that the little prince is constantly watching what he says and how he acts around the her? Without any expectation that the flower might change her ways or that the prince might buck up enough to start holding his flower accountable to a bit of reality? How is that a healthy relationship?

Perhaps--as a grown-up--I'm reading too much into it.

Perhaps I will give it another go down the road. But I doubt it. The wholesome concepts I did pull from the book were pretty much ruined by the flower.

I don't particularly like the flower.

Have we established that?

Little prince, you disappointed me.