Dismantle My Bed

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.

This novel is one of the most heartbreaking works I have ever read. I absolutely love it.

It has a beautiful simplicity at the start, based on a sort of obsessive love of a young man for an older woman. Then, it takes a turn that is just absolutely breathtaking. Because the first twist, you will probably see coming. I think it’s designed as such, so that the second twist is all the more surprising. It’s one of those books you can’t say too much about without giving it away, but the one thing I will say is this -

The main issue in the novel may be hard for many people to understand. There may be a moment when readers cannot comprehend a person’s decision to face steep consequences rather than face humiliation. But just when you are wondering why someone would choose that path, the author sums it up in roughly one paragraph. That is truly remarkable.

And now they are making a movie! Hooray! Though, as per usual, there is no way they will be able to truly capture the glorious nuances.

I am happy, however, that Nicole Kidman is pregnant, because, personally for me, Kate Winslet is definitely preferable.

aka my favorite book of all time. So far.

Three things unite to make The Handmaid’s Tale my favorite read.

Theme, a poetic style of writing, and an obscure ending, all elements that I absolutely adore.

The dystopian theme of a society in which women are turned into household commodities, each just as much a tool as a microwave or a food processor, has extreme resonance with me. The Handmaid’s Tale made waves with women who lived through the feminist movement of the 60’s, but, supposedly, it leaves baffled those women who were born past that era. This is frightening to me. If a woman cannot understand the notion of such a dystopian society, if it doesn’t resonate for her… well, I really can’t explain that.

The writing style in The Handmaid’s Tale is a glorious mesh of fragments and unusually arranged sentences. I once read an interview with Margaret Atwood in which she said that she believed punctuation should have to do with the ear. Perhaps that’s why this novel reads so beautifully to me. When read aloud, it sounds like poetry.

I don’t like to be told what to do, what to believe, or exactly how it all turned out. I like a little something left to imagine, a little parting shred of intrigue. The ending told enough, without telling too much.

Too many books give it all away.