The Beginning.

I have always been mystified as to why Ian McEwan's novel, Atonement, is so incredibly fascinating to me. The book has held a highly coveted spot atop the list of my all-time favorite novels ever since I first read it in one tear-filled Sunday afternoon in high school, and I have always been mystified as to why. It's not that I completely understand it -- I don't, not at all. And it isn't that it makes me happier about my own life, as tragically sad novels are supposed to do. All that reading this novel succeeds in doing is raising a bunch of questions that neither I, nor anyone, has the answers to.

Perhaps that is exactly the reason I like it so much.

Anyways, I am extremely excited to be reading this wonderful novel once again. I definitely look forward to reading and analyzing the complexities of this book in an attempt to try and understand it, as impossible a task as that may be. As Briony writes early on in her novel, "There did not have to be a moral. She need only show seperate minds, as alive as her own, struggling with the idea that other minds were equally alive...And only in a story could you enter these different minds and show how they had an equal value. That was the only moral a story need have" (38).