Origin of life theories

So I finally got around to reading Frankenstein, and I'm a ways into it, and it's gotten me interested in the origin of life. Apparently no one has any firm idea how life 'happened', as it were.

I'm reading the abiogenesis article on Wikipedia (in before "Wikipedia can be changed by anyone, it's totally false!", it's reliable enough for me.), and the only guy that had any clue what was going on was Alexander Oparin.

Now, I'm no scientist, but it seems completely mind-boggling to me that simple molecules could spontaneously become autonomous due to the chemical properties of their constituent atoms.

Any intelligent anons care to spread the intelligence, or can recommend any reading other than Wikipedia to try to comprehend this concept?

there is some stuff called auto-catalytic sets
in the primordial oceans
perhaps in clay near volcanic vents
(going from 3D to 2D makes the probability of
collisions between random chemicals go way up)
things stick to surfaces because of charge
and because they are greasy
hydrophobic amino acids in proteins w00t
stick in the membranes of fatty bubbles
some catalysis happens
A is transformed into B
happens all the time
then B gets turned into C
and maybe there's a lot of extra B
so lots of C gets made
and it turns out that some other molecule
turns C into A
and you get an explosion of self-replicating molecules