SEVEN books

These are seven books I read for the first time this year and would like to reread in 2012:

1. The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
2. The Giver by Lois Lowry
3. Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons
4. Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris
5. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
6. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
7. I, Q: Independence Hall by Roland Smith

Tickle my brain

Three books I read this year that tickled my brain, that were utterly delightful to read thanks to the way they were written.  A lot of the charm comes from the magnetic narrator.

The Book Thief, by Markus Zusak
The book is narrated by Death, perhaps the Ultimate Omnipresent Narrator.  A bit fanciful, a lot poignant.

Lolita by Vladimir Nabakov
The very first paragraph got me hooked, and the writing style of the rest of the book is the same: luscious and linguistically delicious.  The narrator is an admitted pedophile, and yet it's hard not to be drawn into his personality, worldview, and the unraveling of his plot.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
The narrator, or the Watcher, as he refers to himself, is a friend of the titular character.  He drops in f-bombs mixed with Spanglish mixed with Oscar's vernacular, which is nerdy and sesquipedalian. Also read a bit like a modern-day myth or tragedy or fable.  You read and decide which one it is.

The "Harry Potter" series and wordplay

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Duh.  Two things I love: the Harry Potter book series and wordplay/lexical fun.  Why haven't I written a post like this before?

A selection (read: anything I can come up with right now) of puns or wordplay in the book series:

Remus Lupin
- in Roman mythology, Remus is the twin brother of Romulus, for whom the city of Rome was named.  Both were orphaned and were raised by the she-wolf Lupa
- Lupine= wolf-like
- Remus Lupin, 3rd year professor of Defense Against the Dark Arts, is a werewolf

Knockturn Alley
- introduced in book 2, this is a seedy place and the prime location for finding anything or anyone related to dark magic
- say it all in one breath: "knockturnalley".  It becomes "nocturnally".
- nocturnal= having to do with the night/the dark--> the time/place of dark magic

Professor Dolores Umbridge
- evil, evil lady and firm believer in eugenics and cruelly punishing those who she finds disagreeable
- dolor in Spanish (and in other Latin-based languages, I assume) means "pain"
- to take umbradge in something is to take offense or be insulted by something

Professor Minerva McGonagall
- the strict and wise Transfiguration professor
- Minerva is the Roman name for Athene/Athena, the goddess of wisdom and strategy

Sirius Black
- Harry's godfather, who is also an Animagus who can transform into a black dog at will
- Sirius is the dog constellation
- black--> duh, he can turn into a black dog; also, he is initially seen as an antagonist and misidentified as the one who betrayed Harry's parents to the Dark Lord

Poor Captain Hook, and some other thoughts

I finally saw a live-action non-musical movie version of J.M. Barrie's eternally youthful male Peter Pan.  I was only slightly acquainted with this story as a child and until now only saw snippets of the Disney version, the famous live-action one with a woman in the titular role, and Hook, which is more of a contemporary modernization of the show than a proper movie adaptation.

I don't tend to sympathize with the villian, but in this case I feel bad for poor ol' Captain James Hook.  His goal in life is to defeat a child-- a smug little boy-child!-- and he's lost his right hand to a ticking crocodile (symbolism of a biological clock or something?), and <SPOILER ALERT> he dies alone with no one (well, no female) to love or mourn him.  This guy's got it rough, and I pity the fool.  And there's some real Oedipal/Electraesque (Electracal? Electran?) about the fact that he and Mr. Darling, the father, are traditionally played by the same actor to better highlight the poignant struggle between children and parents when it comes to growing up.  It's not hard to see why this is a children's classic, but it's also so very tragic and heartbreaking.  It is true nostalgia, for algia is Latin for "pain", and nostalgia is to "remember with pain".  That is what it means to realize that you're not a child any more, and it's rougher than realizing that you're too tall to enjoy the McDonald's or Burger King play time area.

Still, I enjoyed the movie and think it was artfully directed.

Impossible Christmas wish list item

Oh, if only these really existed and I could've received them as a child!  Actually, I wouldn't mind receiving them now, as they'd make primo desk toys.

I know that there are various offbeat action figures available for purchase, ranging from the Mozart to Sherlock Holmes.  Female action figures that are marketed toward females (girls) are called dolls, and female action figures marketed to males (usually men) are (usually) x-rated sculptures.

I would've loved "Jane Eyre" as a tween and I'm embarassed that I only read it for the first time this year.  But better late than never, right?

Batman vs. Sherlock Holmes

Who would win?

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Batman/Bruce Wayne and Sherlock Holmes have much in common: they are both incredibly smart, athletic, and charming men who solve and fight crime.  To me it's interesting to note that in the latest movie adaptations of these characters, the former is an American comic book character played by Britain-born Christian Bale, and the latter is the second-most famous male British character (after Harry Potter, duh*) and played by the American Robert Downey Jr.  Both are my heroes, and I'm not the first person to compare and contrast them.  The following is just my own take on the debate, based on several categories:

In terms of physicality the characters are very well matched.  Had he so desired, Sherlock could've become a boxer and made a career out of it.  He's 6' 0" and has the capacity to be very energetic and athletic, but he has the proclivity-- and capacity-- to solve crimes without ever leaving the comforts of home at 221B Baker Street.  Batman, on the other hand, is always on call and, uh, gets into lots of fights with criminals.  He actively fights them in addition to solving and preventing past and future crime.  Due to the nature of Bruce Wayne's daily (or should I say nightly?) life, I think he'd be the one in better shape and more likely to win if pitted against Sherlock.

When it comes to a battle of wits: never bet against a Sicilian when death is on the line!

I kid.  I think neither men are even remotely Sicilian anyway. But I'd put money on Sherlock winning this round.  Batman is smart but he gets a lot of help thanks to the technology and information he has at his fingertips.  But Sherlock's brain is like a computer, and there's no wasted space in there because every iota of information stored is useful and important.  He's literally written the book on hundreds of types of cigar and pipe ash so that one may be able to figure out crucial information about the person who smoked and left the ash behind.  Sherlock's mind is purely logical and sharp as a tack, capable of deducing in the blink of an eye what Bruce Wayne's computers would take a few seconds to figure out. 

Okay, so both have brains-- good brains.  But what good are brains if you can't get women? I kid.  But that conveniently brings me to the matter of their skillz with the ladiez.  In this category the win goes to Bruce Wayne.  Sherlock is good looking and knows how to turn on the charm when it comes to women-- in The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton he woos a maid and proposes to her within a week of meeting each other and she accepts him.  But he only wooed her in order to get information about the man she works for and the layout of his mansion.  If he wanted to, he could get a wife, but women don't interest him.  He's heterosexual, but only slight; he's mostly asexual and uninterested in the female sex and domestic life as it was in his time.  He seems to have had a complicated relationship with Irene Adler, who is the one woman named as a former love interest, but she seems to be mentioned only to prove that Sherlock is human.  Irene Adler was kind of like his Catwoman, except more mysterious and less tortured.


Batman/Bruce Wayne: 2
Sherlock Holmes: 1
But this is only beginning...


*I don't have any research to back this up, but I think that the boy wizard has eclipsed the singular detective.

What I've read so far this year

Children's/Young Adult books
Balliett, Blue                Chasing Vermeer
                                   The Wright 3
Chbosky, Stephen       The Perks of Being a Wallflower
Collins, Suzanne          The Hunger Games trilogy
Creech, Sharon           Replay
Lowry, Lois                The Giver
                                   The Willoughbys
Riordan, Rick              The Red Pyramid
Smith, Roland              I, Q: Independence Hall
Zusak, Markus            The Book Thief
(total: 12)

Graphic novels
Satrapi, Marjane         Embroideries
                                  Persepolis 2
Mignola, Mike            Hellboy series: Seed of Destruction, Wake the Devil, and Darkness Calls
Miller, Frank              300
Moore, Alan and Dave Gibbons  Watchmen
(total: 7)

Plays
Auburn, David             Proof
Henley, Beth               Crimes of the Heart
Miller, Arthur              Death of a Salesman
(total: 3)

Non-fiction
Sedaris, David             Me Talk Pretty One Day
Prejean, Helen             Dead Man Walking
Woolf, Virginia            A Room of One's Own
(total: 3)

Fiction
Atwood, Margaret       The Penelopiad
Brontë, Charlotte         Jane Eyre
Brontë. Emily               Wuthering Heights
Brown, Dan                 The Lost Symbol
Butler, Octavia             Kindred
Christie, Agatha           Evil Under the Sun
                                   Murder on the Orient Express
Dumas, Alexandre       The Three Musketeers
Jong, Erica                  Fear of Flying
Larson, Stieg               The Millenium Trilogy
LeCarre, John             The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
                                   Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
McCarthy, Cormac     The Road
Nabokov, Vladimir    Lolita
Valdes-Rodriguez, Alisa  The Dirty Girls Social Club
Woodrell, Daniel       Winter's Bone
Yamanaka, Lois-Ann   Heads by Harry
(total: 19)


Total from this entire list that have been or will be made into films: 18

Beginnings and adaptations

It's strange to think that about a year ago I was mourning the beginning of the end of one beloved book-to-movie adaptation (the imminent release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part I), and today I am looking forward to the beginning of the beginning of another one, as the Hunger Games trailer was officially released today.

A year ago I was in a tizzy about HP7.1 and avidly watching any and all retrospective video clips of the series as a whole.  My favorite is this one, with Tom Felton waxing nostalgic over past props:

  I think I reread the book, or at least revisited my favorite scenes and prayed that they'd be faithfully reinterpreted and edited to be properly cinematic and dramatic.  And the movie did not disappoint.

This trailer has me excited, as it hits all the right notes and right scenes.  There is a palpable ease between Jennifer Lawrence's Katniss and Liam Hemsworth's Gale, as there should be because in the book they are very close friends.  It was a solid trailer but only one moment made me almost choke on my yogurt, and that was the very last clip with all the kids rushing towards something (the Cornucopia).  There's still about five months before the movie hits theaters, and I remain optimistic about it.

I'm probably reading too deeply into this...

It's startling to see what kids are reading and watching these days, but even more startling to look back at what books and movies children of previous generations were exposed to.  I think that kids picture books today are a lot more diverse and open-minded, generally speaking.  In the past month I have frequented a few yard sales and browsed through children's books from the 60s and 70s and I have been amused and discomforted by what I found.  Part of that discomfort is due to the fact that I, as a sort-of adult, see certain symbolism and themes that just go right over the heads of the kids who read them.

I'm thinking specifically about this book, which I bought at a yard sale today.

image source

Pretzel is a male dog, a dachshund-- the longest one in the world, one who has won a dog show and is lauded for his longness.  In the book he courts Greta, who doesn't really care for him or care about his extraordinary physicality.  But (spoiler alert!) when she is in peril he saves her and she agrees to marry him-- not for his length but for the fact that he saved her.

While I flipping through this book I thought the drawings were cute; the authors are the same ones who wrote the Curious George series.  But as I sat and read the book cover to cover I couldn't help but read more deeply into this children's book.  I doubt that there was any ulterior intention behind the story of the book yet I can't help connect some dots that may just be freckles/random spots: Pretzel is male, he is proud of how long he is but Greta the girl dog is not interested; because Pretzel plays the prince Greta decides not to be single any more and their story concludes with the birth of their five children/puppies.

But, as indicated in the title, I'm probably reading too deeply into this...

Public Transportation Bingo!

I saw a man wearing a kilt earlier this week.  I did a classic double-take: from the waist up he was dressed like any other man, with a half-zip up black fleece sweater.  On the bottom, though, was the kilt and his stout, pale, slightly hairy legs.  This was on the train.  I didn't see any other people wearing kilts that day, or even in this month.  What are the chances of seeing a guy in a kilt on a non-holiday?  This question made me want to come up with my own version of BINGO based on the typical and the unusual people and events I've witnessed while riding public transportation:

B Be my friend?	I Icky habits	N Normal, not atypical people	G Go.	O Oh the things you can hear!
Man wearing a kilt	Person sitting next to you reeks	Tourist couple	Delay due to inclement weather	Stranger attempts to engage you in a serious conversation
Someone reading a book on an esoteric topic	Someone eats something smelly	Woman applying makeup	Delay due to police action	Uncomfortably loud and personal  conversation takes place
Person with dog too big to sit in lap	Nose-picking	Free Space!	Unexplained delay	Loud baby
Musician carrying an instrument	An uncovered sneeze	Field trip school group	Someone almost falls due to sudden jerking movement of vehicle	Can hear every word of the song someone’s listening to on headphones
Someone who has almost completed the daily crossword	Someone who leaves trash behind	Man in business suit and sneakers	People cluster around exits rather than moving all the way into the vehicle	A mumbling vehicle operator

I think I'll see how close I get to a BINGO this week, and see how well I fare for the next month.

meet cute on the subway during rush hour

Featuring two young professionals, male and female. 

Male: (getting up from his seat) Would you like to...? (gestures at empty seat)
Female: Oh, sure, thank you (sits down)
M: I'm reading that too, see? (shows her his iPhone display)
F: Oh! Yeah, cool (looks at her thick book)
M: I just started, I'm reading the first book.
F: Oh, really? This is the fifth book, I started the series after I finished watching the first season and I just started this book.
M: Me too!  I watched the series and I said I gotta read the series, if the show was this good.  Because the books are always better.
F: Yeah, that's true.  And, like, you really get to go inside the characters head, how they're thinking, even more than the show.  I don't know what part you're reading but--
M: I'm almost done.  After watching the first season I know what's going to happen but it's still cool to read it happening.  I want to be ahead of the curve, though.
F: Yeah, I know what you mean.  All the other books in the series are great.  Well, the fourth one is a little slow, but it builds up to the payoff at the end of the book.
M: Ah, cool.  That's the fifth book?  I thought it was a trilogy...
F: I think he was going to make it a trilogy, but then he wrote more.  I think there's supposed to be seven books in the series now--
M: Seven!
F: Yeah, and this is the latest one that came out.
M:  So what are you going to do when you finish reading that?
F: I don't know...I'm going to have to wait around to find out what happens next.  I guess I'll just reread the series from the beginning.
M: Cool.  Well, I'll let you get back to your book.
F: Thanks,  you too.  I think you'll really like it.
M: Yeah.
The two resume reading their respective texts.
F: This is my stop.  Thanks again for the seat, it was nice talking--
M: Yeah, of course, no problem. 
She smiles at him, then leaves.


If this were a movie script, the two would have exchanged numbers.  But this conversation happened in real life, right next to me a few days ago, and it went more or less the way it's written above.  I'd heard about Game of Thrones prior to this time; this conversation made me want to read the series.

I've never heard people on the subway discuss a book series before.

On Halloween and being 'ethnic'

Ah, Halloween:It’s the only day on which it is socially acceptable to dress up as someone other than yourself (or a sexualized version of yourself) and ask people for free candy.  So many options to choose from, with so many pre-fabricated costumes available not just at your local party needs store but in department stores and drugstores and megamarts.  But I think the issue of who/what to be for Halloween gets a little sticky if you’re not a white person. 

“An Asian little red riding hood?”

My best friend in middle school Dorothy (not real name) gave me this question, accompanied with dubious look when I told her I was considering going as that character for one Halloween.  We were close friends and I thought we had reached the point where we could be brutally honest with each other without getting offended or personally injured, but the way she responded managed to sting me a bit.  White girls were used to sell the costumes for geishas, Pocahontases, harem girls, gypsies, flamenco dancers, and Cleopatras—why couldn’t I dress up as someone who didn’t share my ethnicity?  Did Dorothy expect me to trick-or-treat as an Oriental, because I already had the right “look”?  Actually, I think that was the year I went as Cleopatra—mostly because the costume kit was relatively inexpensive and it gave me the chance to rock some heavy black eyeliner.

It’s fun to assume another identity through a sartorial transformation, don’t get me wrong.  But it’s not fun when being “ethnic” or being a minority is thought to restrict what kind of roles you can play, even just for one night.  It’s bad enough that Hollywood often sequesters certain minority actors to certain roles.  The first thing I think of it how the (very handsome) chocolate-skinned Idris Elba was cast to play a Norse god in “Thor”.  Well, why not?  Elba himself pointed out the ridiculousness of the fact that the movie deals with Norse mythology, and that itself is stranger than his casting in his role.  Ah, but I digress; this could be a blog post itself but this topic has already been extensively covered and articulated more comprehensively than I could ever hope to accomplish. [Amazing Grace is a great children’s book on a similar topic.  The titular Grace is an African-American girl who gets the part of Peter Pan in her school play, despite the discouraging whispers of her peers that she’s black and a girl.  Thank God for “Reading Rainbow”, which is how I know about this book in the first place.] 

So, Halloween: great opportunity for people—especially white people—to  appropriate other cultures’ dress just for kicks and giggles.  This year I hope to go as the boy Russell from the movie “Up”.  When I first watched the movie it never occurred to me that his character was Asian, but I later learned that the voice actor and Russell were both Japanese.  I admit it: it’s convenient for me, an Asian person, to dress up as this character.  But another motivating factor is that I have the proper physique and this character is a boy, a young male.  Most of my peers—twenty-something year old females—will opt to dress up as something sexy and female.  I aim to do the opposite by donning garb that is the opposite of both those adjectives. 

Today is the last day of Banned Books Week

Top ten most frequently challenged books of 2010, as listed on the ALA website

http://www.ala.org/ala/issuesadvocacy/banned/frequentlychallenged/21stcenturychallenged/2010/index.cfm

Boldface indicates books I've read 
Underlined marks books I had heard of before seeing this list

1. And Tango Makes Three, by Peter Parnell and Justin Richardson
   Reasons: homosexuality, religious viewpoint, and unsuited to age group
2. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, by Sherman Alexie
   Reasons: offensive language, racism, sex education, sexually explicit, unsuited to age group, and violence
3. Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley
   Reasons: insensitivity, offensive language, racism, and sexually explicit
4. Crank, by Ellen Hopkins
   Reasons: drugs, offensive language, and sexually explicit
5. The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins
   Reasons: sexually explicit, unsuited to age group, and violence
6. Lush, by Natasha Friend
   Reasons: drugs, offensive language, sexually explicit, and unsuited to age group
7. What My Mother Doesn't Know, by Sonya Sones
   Reasons: sexism, sexually explicit, and unsuited to age group
8. Nickel and Dimed, by Barbara Ehrenreich
   Reasons: drugs, inaccurate, offensive language, political viewpoint, and religious viewpoint
9. Revolutionary Voices, edited by Amy Sonnie
   Reasons:  homosexuality and sexually explicit
10. Twilight, by Stephenie Meyer
    Reasons: religious viewpoint and violence  

Based on the descriptions of these books I'm not too surprised that they were challenged.  Brave New World sort of flaggergasts me because I thought it was a modern/nouveau classic or something like that.  But I suppose if Huck Finn got reconsidered in light of its "racist language" I guess it makes sense that Huxley's text was challenged.  Nickel and Dimed surprises me because the content didn't seem so incindiary; this is a work of non-fiction and the author expresses political and religious viewpoints but it never came across to me as ban-worthy.  This makes me wonder: who exactly are these people who come together and make concerted efforts to prevent others from reading these supposedly damnable texts? Ironically enough, even Fahrenheit 451, a book about banning/burning books, was on the banned list.  Haven't people heard of the phrase "there's no such thing as bad publicity", and that challenging a book just ensure that it'll get more attention and readers before it is potentially off library bookshelves?

Cold.

These books make me think of winter, pain, cold, and humanity.  Also, these are all books I read for the first time in the first half of this year.  Despite the saying "Don't judge a book by its cover", these covers do a good job representing the kind of story within-- note the lively color palette employed (Kidding, of course).

The Giver by Lois Lowry.

image source

I know, it's a children's classic! I had chances to read it in elementary school, and my favorite middle school English teacher recommended it to me, but I didn't read it until this year, I know.  It's shocking, to read a children/preteen book as a non-child/non-preteen.  The controversial topics that are brought up within its pages!  And the slight science-ficiton twist/quirk/turn of this story make it particularly creepy.  It's not winter througout the story but snow falls heavily and plays a big part in the story at the end.  A great read, not too long but not light fare, not by any means.  There's so much to discuss and an added factor when given repeated readings as one gets older.






Winter's Bone by Daniel Woodrell

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I think the title says it all: 'winter' and 'bone'.  Protagonist Ree Dolly is gritty, tenacious, a no-nonsense kind of girl because she has to be and has no other choice.  Set in the wet, wooded Appalachia area, you get a sense of hopelessness and inertia, which makes our heroine's efforts all the more remarkable.  Comments have been made about this story as a modern day Antigone, and having read that play this year I can readily make out the parallels.  Ree has to find her crank-cooker father before it's too late, and the cards are really stacked against her.  The story is simply and well-told, with fairly short chapters that are neither titled nor numbered. 







The Road by Cormac McCarthy

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This book, too, has chapters that have no title or number, but they almost aren't even chapters.  The dialogue bits don't even have quotation marks around them, that's how bleak this book is.  Does that make sense?  Eh, well if you've read the book it makes sense.  Each book in this list is more haunting, cold, and bleak than the last, and The Road really takes the cake.  You don't even learn the names of the main characters, a father and son, who make slow and sometimes steady progress through the landscape of a post-apocalyptic United States.  You don't even really get a good background as to all this happened and how our characters ended up on this journey, but that adds to the whole aspect of these two survivors just trying to stay alive.  This book made me shiver.  This is not the kind of book to warm up to after a long day slogging through snow, not the kind of book that I would read by the fire with a mug of cocoa or tea, because no amount of heat will really thaw the bitter frost that this book exudes.  Devastating, this is, and a very good read.  Author Cormac McCarthy also wrote No Country for Old Men.

I'm thinking of a book...

I’m thinking of a popular book, one that was recently adapted into a movie.  It is set in the South around the 60’s and features a young white female protagonist who forms a strong and loving relationship with older black females.  No, it’s not The Help; I’m referring to The Secret Life of Bees.

Unfinished business

If I start to read a book I try to make a point to finish it.  There are only three books that I can think of and definitively say that I started and gave up on trying to finish; someday I hope to go back and read them cover to cover.

Pride and Prejudice

I just couldn't get past Jane Austen's writing style.  I think I made it to the second or third chapter of this book before I gave up because I wasn't entirely sure what was going on and I didn't care what happened to the characters.  I remember telling my then-teacher when I first started the book and she put a hand to her chest, sighed happily, and told me, "You'll love it, it's one of my favorite books." I did like the books that I was assigned to read for her class but this book just did not agree with me.  Since then I've read some other Brit lit and gotten through it relatively painlessly.  I saw the film version of this movie, the most recent adaptation starring Keira Knightley, and while I enjoyed it I wasn't enraptured, didn't find the romance particularly engaging.  Maybe the next time I pick it up I'll be able to follow it better now that I know roughly how the action transpires.  This tome has been on my "to read" list for a while and I keep passing over it; I've resolved to pick it up again if I happen upon the book (I won't actively look for the title while at bookstores or libraries).  I'll let Fate decide when I should read it.


Crime and Punishment

This book became increasingly depressing the more progress I made with it.  A good friend highly recommended this famous Dostoevsky work to me and I went into it with zeal.  But again the writing style was a bit...turgid, I guess?  A bit thick-- not thick as in stupid, thick like a very dense chocolate cake that is hard to swallow and demands a tall glass of cold milk to wash it all down thoroughly.  It wasn't the book's fault, it was my fault that I had a hard time getting into it.  Then someone (a woman much older than me) told me, "Dostoevsky is best read in your thirties," and so I felt justified in setting the book aside for the time and moving onto something else.  And I have my own copy of the book, ready to be read when I come of age.  On a slightly related note, I have read something else by the author, The Death of Ivan Ilyich and read it with relative ease.  It's a short, thoughtful story.


Sing Me to Heaven

Unlike the other two, this book is really easy to read and was written in the late 20th century.  It's the heartbreaking story and the simple and agonizing way in which the story is told that has deterred me from getting through it.  It's a elegy of sorts, a true story of a romance and marriage in the 80s, a tale of a short-lived interracial/bicultural relationship, but most of all it's the story of a woman who married a man despite/because of his HIV positive status, and that man happens to have been a relative of mine.  I remember attending a funeral when I was a child, maybe six years old, and in retrospect I think it was his funeral that I attended.  He wasn't a very close relative, blood-wise, so maybe that's why his death wasn't really mentioned, or maybe there's some other reason; in any case, it wasn't until I picked up this book and started to read it that I put the pieces together.  I think that within the first few chapters the narrator, his then-wife, reveals his medical condition and that she was widowed within two years of marrying him, but this doesn't take away from the tension in the story.  If anything it makes her story more poignant, knowing that they went through so much and knowing that everything deteriorated eventually.  Even just thinking about the book and writing about it here is enough to stir up strong emotions.  Maybe someday I'll build up the emotional fortitude to make it through the book, but for now I don't really forsee even attempting to pick the book up again unless I feel the need to sob my eyes out.

Reactions to first Hunger Games trailer/footage

Get More: 2011 VMA, Music

Solid trailer.  Doesn't show too much, just enough to tantalize us fans and keep us optimistic about the film adaptation.  I know that this will come off as a backhanded compliment, but it was the end that really got me excited:
1) got to see Katniss use her signature weapon
2) loved how the arrow she shot got integrated into the gold mockingjay symbol
3) love that it caught on fire
4) got to hear the simple but important 4-note melody (Danny Elfman is scoring this film!)

March is a long way away and they're still shooting the film, but it's nice that the people that be cut together this teaser of what to expect to see.  Man, with every little bit of info that gets put out on this film, whether an interview or photo or promo image, I get more pumped/less worried that this'll fall under the category of "just okay but you gotta read the book".

Today, as represented by...

a song:


an odor:
musty

a book:


http://knowledgelost.org/literature/reading-lists/1001-books-you-must-read-before-you-die/wuthering-heights





















a tactile feeling:
damp

a taste:

https://www.eastcoastcatalogue.com/store/default.php?cPath=63

Deserted island picks

My picks for what six ______ I'd bring with me on a deserted island:

Movies
- Little Women (1994)
- Shaun of the Dead (2004)
- La Belle et la Bête (1946)
- Adam's Rib (1949)
- Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back (1980)
- Hellboy II: The Golden Army (2008)

Books
- The Complete Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
- War and Peace by Fyodor Dostoevsky
- The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster
- The Bible (my Korean-English version)
- Shadow of the Hegemon by Orson Scott Card
- Little Women by Louisa May Alcott

Albums
- Inglourious Basterds soundtrack
- Dvorâk's "New World Symphony" (any orchestra)
- The Best of Ella Fitzgerald or Ella Fitzgerald sings Gershwin Songbook
- Yo-yo Ma's Obrigado Brazil
- La Boheme soundtrack
- One of those meditation CDs with sounds like gongs or digeridoos, stuff like that

Other/Misc./"Necessities"
- soap
- toilet paper
- pens
- notebooks
- something to make/collect potable water
- bug repellant

On "Beauty and the Beast"

Disney's "Beauty and the Beast" was my favorite Disney princess movie while I was growing up.  Now, Pocahontas, Mulan, and "The Princess and the Frog" heroine Maddie are up there as well.  It's kind of depressing to think about, though, considering how dark that movie is and the implications of the turn of events at the end:
1.  Belle says to the Beast (whose name, Adam, is never revealed in the film) that she loves him
2.  The rose is deflowered with the last petal floating magically down to the table
3.  The Beast (animal, base) becomes a Man (noble, gentle but strong)

Not to mention that this version justifies domestic violence in framing the female protagonist as the one who sees beyond the masculine one's abuse and endures it, ultimately transforming him through her love and patience and other feminine virtues.

There are many iterations of this story, both in text and film.  I have seen and read many of them:
- Cocteau's La Belle et la Bête (1946)
- Panna a nevtor (1981) from Czechoslovakia
- Cannon Movie Tales' musical version (1987) starring John Savage and Rebecca De Mornay
- Faerie Tale Theatre's Beauty and the Beast episode (1984) starring Klaus Kinski and Susan Sarandon
- the first season of the CBS drama Beauty and the Beast (1987) with Ron Perlman and Linda Hamilton
- of course, the Disney version from 1991 (but not any of the sequels or spin-off straight-to-VHS movies)
- haven't seen it but I have the soundtrack of the Broadway musical version of the Disney version
- the Hellboy movies, with Ron Perlman, include a bit of "Beauty and the Beast" undertones
- ...as do werewolf stories (and probably vampire ones too, but I don't want to get into that)
- any sitcom with a hot wife and schlubby/not conventionally attractive husband counts as an addition to this list

I've felt conflicted about my passion for this story, but I've come to accept it for what it is-- patriarchal teachings to pubescent females-- and can't help but appreciate the storytelling and, well, the romance of it all. Oh, I'll have to watch some of those movies again and write a post in response to each one; there's just so much for me to analyze.