Dismantle My Bed

Okay, so the last one was just made in the 90s. And so dozens of movies, plays and the current books have borrowed the theme liberally. But I think it’s time for another Three Musketeers remake. There are plenty of young actors right now who would make The Three Musketeers incredibly watchable. And can you have too many remakes of Three Musketeers. Granted movie versions of books have a tendency to be terrible and movie remakes even worse, but still, I wouldn’t an attempt.

I shouldn’t love it. First off, I haven’t actually read it. But the title is fantastic. Second, as far as the author is concerned, I am part of this dumbest generation since I’m under thirty. But I still love it. The point that the author is trying to make, that our future is in dire straights in the hands of people who have more online friends than real friends, who would rather read comments about themselves than something where they actually learn,  and who think that ‘z’s and an ’s’s are interchangeable, is rather valid. You don’t have to agree with the sentiment to heed the warning.

Oddly enough, this could also be categorized under ‘books i didn’t love’. You see, I loved some. I severely disliked some.

It went like this -

The Magician’s Nephew - Loved it

The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe - Loved it, though interestingly enough, not as much as The Magician’s Nephew

The Horse and His Boy - I slept through half of this book

Prince Caspian - Okay, now we’re back on track

The Voyage of the Dawn Treader - Rocked my world! It did. Several times.

The Silver Chair - Eh, it was transitional maybe?

The Last Battle - This is really what it was transitioning to?

Over all, a series worth reading for sure, but few of the individual books are worth reading more than once. A hard look at the spines tells me that The Magician’s Nephew and Prince Caspian have received the most love, though Voyage of the Dawn Treader is by far my favorite.

Weird.

aka, The book that reminded me how to piss my pants in my teenage years.

Haunted Heartland is a collection of ghost stories, divided up by state, and all supposedly based on true events that happened right here in the United States. The stories are relatively well-written. (There is nothing particularly fancy or bold about them, but it’s a book of ghost stories, not meant to be a masterpiece, so there you go.) Poltergeists, ghosts, and plenty of unexplained phenomena are captured within the pages. If you are looking for beautiful craftmanship, you may want to look elsewhere, but if it’s a good scare you are after, you won’t find a better source.

I read this book for the first time when I was in high school, then I read it again in my twenties. Both times, I had to put it down several times and hours before bed to prevent the creepy crawlies all night long. It’s just that much more scary when you are told that the stories are real.

Call it depressing. Call it apocalyptic. Call it completely off base, because 1984 has come and gone, and Big Brother hasn’t taken over quite yet.

I would even call George Orwell’s most widely regarded novel slow to get going and overly wordy in parts, and yet… I love the hell out of it.

Decades past the titular year, 1984 no longer seems terribly unlikely. In some of its doomsday scenarios, it is dead on, and, in others, the real life counterparts of those things so avidly warned against in the novel are close at hand. It no longer reads so much like science fiction or rhetoric, as possibility and forewarning.

As for the novel itself, once the novel picks up, which I believe comes at the beginning of Part Two, it becomes infinitely more readable. Until Julia comes into the picture, Winston is slightly hard to identify with, not surprising since he is living in a time and a world where humanity isn’t exactly acceptable. Once Winston becomes human, though, he remains as such, which makes the end all the more intense and heartbreaking.

Since the first time I read the novel in high school, I have never let go the agony of the fear and submission.