Augustine's View on Sin

My fellow classmate,
Augustine, in his Confessions, makes an interesting argument that, despite going to Catholic school my whole life, I have not heard. In book 2, he, in essence, is saying that sin is people's attempts to emulate God. People sin and commit crimes to keep or gain status and in this way, it is an attempt to become more powerful. The other way sin is a way of copying God is that Augustine says that God is the ultimate good of each form of a sin. For example, on page 40, in section 13 of book 2,  he says "Envy is contentious over rank accorded to another, but what ranks higher than you?" He does this with many of the sins we commonly hear about and attributes God as the ultimate master of them. In this way, he claims, sinning is nothing but trying to copy God by doing as much as we can, but not being good enough to reach the ideal that God set. He then explains that these all are just trying to get something, whether it be physical, or just pleasure, but then says as long as we turn to God, we don't have to sin as we have no worry of losing things and needing to gain more.
I did a fair amount of paraphrasing in this, and please feel free to correct me if you think I misunderstood something. I feel like this view of sin is almost opposite to the way we see sin now. Sin is presented as the thing that drives us farther away from God. Augustine claims, rather paradoxically, that it does this because sin is attempting to become more like God. I do not really grasp how God can be seen as the master of each sin and that be good. Emulating God, living life in a way that would be worth of God is undoubtedly a good thing, but in this passage, I read it as Augustine saying the way to do this is through sin. Please tell me what you think about this. Did I simply take a passage and isolate it, giving it different meaning? Or is this a legitimate paradox and contradiction to the common way of viewing sin? What do you think?