Mille

So I just created this list of books I have to read for next semester (both for classes and for book club) I am really excited about it! So many different works :) I can't wait for the semester to start, though I do need to finish some other readings first :)

Here is the list: 

3/2: Beowulf

6/2: Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck

10/2: The Canterbury Tales by Chaucer

24/2: King Lear by Shakespeare

27/2: The Sound and the Fury William Faulkner

3/3: Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift

13/3: [Sic] by Davis Schneiderman

24/3: Hard Times by Charles Dickens

31/3: The Turn of the Screw by Henry James

3/4: Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy vol. 1 by Douglas Adams

24/4: The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky

28/4: Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe 

I think this is going to be a great challenge for me. I am especially looking forward to/scared about [Sic], both because it is a very different kind of novel - if you can call it that - than what I usually read (I have heard that it is half pictures, half text) and also because Schneiderman will come to the book club meeting, where we will be discussing the book. 

I have read parts of Gulliver's Travels previously and I have of course also read The Perks of Being a Wallflower. Both will be nice re-reads though :)

So this is what I will be up to for the next couple of months and I am as mentioned before very excited about that :)

Hugs. 

The book is always better than the film. 

I have always thought that, I have always been completely sure, that this would forever be the case. However, I have found this one exception. 

I saw the film "Never Let Me Go" long before reading the novel by Kazou Ishiguro which it is based on. I have loved this film ever since I saw it the first time. It is moving, beautiful, strange. I love the actors in the film and their performances also. But maybe it is exactly my love for the film that makes the novel not as good in my eyes. Because that is the case here. 

I first read the novel this autumn for a book club at my university and honestly I was a little disappointed by it. The novel is slow and somehow it portrays the characters that I love in a different way. I find this hard to explain, but it suddenly felt like they were not the same anymore, like Kathy H was not really the Kathy played by Carey Mulligan and Ruth was no longer the beautiful, yet gruesome girl Keira Knightley portrayed. Tommy was no longer the Tommy I knew, somehow he was different. 

I know that this is usually the case, characters are altered and speed is added, because filmmakers cannot bring all the elements of a novel with them when creating a film. 

The novel is not bad, not at all. It is thought provoking, and moving, strange and beautiful as well, but I just find it very difficult to compare the two. Reading the novel definitely put the world Ishiguro has created into a new perspective and where I had not thought so much of the gruesome world before reading the novel, I had much larger insight in it afterwards, but this comes not only from reading the novel, it comes from discussing it and also a lecture on doppelgangers in literature afterwards helping see some things that I might not have noticed or thought about before. If it is critical thinking you are after, I certainly think the novel is better for that.

Despite all of this horrible background that I can now think of for the story, it is for me a story about people; real people, friendship, love, death, a story about life and one that makes you think of the meaning of life. It is a story of a life, three lives that are woven together. 

I think both film and novel to be beautiful and a must read/watch, though I will continue to favour the film, you should judge for yourself. 

Hugs.