2.03.2010

Favorites and not-favorites

Really good stuff:
  • King Lear can be related to anything. It's my favorite of Shakespeare's works. So complex.
  • Jane Austen was an amazing author, and it never ceases to shock me that in her heyday of writing, she was significantly younger than I am. Pride and Prejudice shaped the template for the novel. (That's a professor -- not me -- but I agree.)
  • Because I love working with people with special needs, I love reading books that understand their thought processes. So many people don't bother to try. The Memory-Keeper's Daughter and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime are two favorites.
  • In Confessions of a Wallflower, I love that the narrator describes the girl he loves as "unconventionally beautiful."
  • Books that changed the way I looked at the world: The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver, The Kite Runner (not even trying to spell that author's name correctly), Blue Like Jazz by Donald Somebody (I'm better at this not sleep-deprived), and The Hiding Place by Corrie ten Boom
I'm sure there are many, many more. Here are some not-so-favorites:
  • I'm not a fan of Romeo and Juliet partially because it's overexposed.  And I think it's safe to say that it has one of the most depressing endings in all of literature. I don't care that the Montagues and the Capulets make up; it's really a bummer. I'll concede that the balcony scene is pretty awesome and pretty much every teenage girl's dream, but you can get that in Cyrano DeBergerac.
  • I don't know what all the hype was about Love in the Time of Cholera was about. Maybe I didn't read it well, or maybe I missed some analysis, but I wasn't a fan.
  • I think Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger is as popular as it is because of when it was written. Descriptions are good, character development is fabulous, but I didn't like the plot structure.
And a part of my book philosophy I forgot to mention: Movies adapted from a book almost always disappoint. BBC's Pride and Prejudice is an exception. I've heard the Lord of the Rings trilogy also was pretty close to an exception, but I haven't read those books.

My sister says My Sister's Keeper is a prime example of movies ruining books. I'm kind of nervous about seeing The Lovely Bones for that reason.

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