30 Day Book Challenge: 9
Feb. 20th, 2012 02:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kasihya(I really, really want a movie about a woman who finds out that her boyfriend is cheating on her with another woman. The other woman contacts her to let her know that they've both been played, they meet up and bond over this loser dude they both dump, and then they end up falling in love with each other instead and living happily ever after. It would be the most fluffy of all fluffy LGBT+ romantic comedies.)
Day 09 – A book you thought you wouldn’t like but ended up loving
The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway. I heard bad things about Hemingway from my English major mother, and this was the first writing of his that I'd ever read, so I went in knowing that I was going to hate it and it was going to be a huge chore. It was, at first. I hated it for most of the story because there was no point and no reason to care about the characters, and the narration was drunken and hazy ... although I have always loved that scene where Bill tells the main character that the Civil War was caused because Robert E Lee and Abraham Lincoln were lovers who had a falling-out, because it's just so off-the-wall and unexpected in a book from eighty-odd years ago. But then there was this one part about three-fourths of the way through the book that I didn't really understand. So I went onto Sparknotes in order to read the summary and figure out what I'd just read (yeah, I actually used Sparknotes for its intended purpose. I'm such a goody-goody two-shoes) and found something about how the book was about the pointlessness of the lives that the characters were leading, usually drunkenly.
And that whole form equalling content that I'd heard my teacher use in class, it suddenly clicked. I sat and stared at the screen and said, 'That is so cool!' to it, and then I went and devoured the rest of the book. Then I reread it. Because knowing that the whole plotlessness and pointlessness of it was deliberate; that I was supposed to be made to feel drunk and off-kilter by the narration; I thought that manipulating the reader like that, in a way that wasn't even part of the story, was just the coolest, most fascinating thing ever. It had never occurred to me that the format of a novel, and the stylistic choices of the author, could be used to reinforce the themes in the story and enhance the reader's understanding of them. I learned a lot more about that when we got around to poetry later in senior year of high school, and then again when I started taking literature classes in college, but The Sun Also Rises was the first book that introduced the concept to me, so I ended up enjoying it far, far more than I anticipated. I also realized that I thoroughly enjoy, both seriously and tongue-in-cheek, Hemingway's sparse style.
I think everyone else in my English class wanted to slap me for enjoying The Sun Also Rises, but I wanted to murder them every time they talked about how much they liked Jane Eyre, so.
Day 09 – A book you thought you wouldn’t like but ended up loving
The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway. I heard bad things about Hemingway from my English major mother, and this was the first writing of his that I'd ever read, so I went in knowing that I was going to hate it and it was going to be a huge chore. It was, at first. I hated it for most of the story because there was no point and no reason to care about the characters, and the narration was drunken and hazy ... although I have always loved that scene where Bill tells the main character that the Civil War was caused because Robert E Lee and Abraham Lincoln were lovers who had a falling-out, because it's just so off-the-wall and unexpected in a book from eighty-odd years ago. But then there was this one part about three-fourths of the way through the book that I didn't really understand. So I went onto Sparknotes in order to read the summary and figure out what I'd just read (yeah, I actually used Sparknotes for its intended purpose. I'm such a goody-goody two-shoes) and found something about how the book was about the pointlessness of the lives that the characters were leading, usually drunkenly.
And that whole form equalling content that I'd heard my teacher use in class, it suddenly clicked. I sat and stared at the screen and said, 'That is so cool!' to it, and then I went and devoured the rest of the book. Then I reread it. Because knowing that the whole plotlessness and pointlessness of it was deliberate; that I was supposed to be made to feel drunk and off-kilter by the narration; I thought that manipulating the reader like that, in a way that wasn't even part of the story, was just the coolest, most fascinating thing ever. It had never occurred to me that the format of a novel, and the stylistic choices of the author, could be used to reinforce the themes in the story and enhance the reader's understanding of them. I learned a lot more about that when we got around to poetry later in senior year of high school, and then again when I started taking literature classes in college, but The Sun Also Rises was the first book that introduced the concept to me, so I ended up enjoying it far, far more than I anticipated. I also realized that I thoroughly enjoy, both seriously and tongue-in-cheek, Hemingway's sparse style.
I think everyone else in my English class wanted to slap me for enjoying The Sun Also Rises, but I wanted to murder them every time they talked about how much they liked Jane Eyre, so.
