A surprising conversation :)

I had quite the interesting conversation today. I actually sat down with a classmate and talked about books, classical literature and rhetoric. Now, I know that this is a complete stereotype, but I did not expect to hold a conversation like that with anyone from my school. I have no idea why I believed that I was the only person who had their nose buried in books when they were growing up. I mean, to get this far in your academic career, you had to be a bit of a nerd. And most nerds had their noses in reading material of some type. But this entire conversation was quite the pleasant surprise.


The conversation started out just as small talk. She asked me about my writing and such. And then she mentioned George Orwell's 1984. I was floored. Now I wanted to pick her brain. What other literature did she know about? What else had she read? We talked about Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, Doyle and others. We talked about Shakespeare and Hawthorne. We even brought it around to modern day writers, Learner, Baldacci, and who ever it was that penned Memoirs of A Geisha. We talked about the books we read when we were kids, for fun and for school. 


Honestly, I have never talked books with anyone for years. It has never come up in conversation. Not leisure reading anyway. All I have ever heard people talk about are textbooks, review books, and peer reviewed medical journals. But this classmate, we were able to bond in a place that was entirely outside of all of that. Swapping book titles and authors like we had suddenly become our own exclusive book club.


We talked about English classes, rhetoric and forming arguments and how we both that it was utter bullshit. She told that me that I should watch "Chasing Amy" because Kevin Smith captured what conversation would be like if all us just stopped pretending and were totally honest with one another. I told her she should read A Study in Scarlet. I would be surprised if she wasn't hooked before she was halfway through it. She asked me if I liked reading from the Kindle.Did I miss the feeling of having a book in my hands where I could flip the pages.


It felt good. It felt so good. To be able to connect with someone else like in a place where I believed that I was the only one.