Loved this. Found it at Out of Print.
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Summer Reading Map
Loved this. Found it at Out of Print.
Why I Disagree With Critics Of The New Gatsby Film
This review is everything I thought about the new ‘The Great Gatsby’ film. EVERYTHING. I really liked the film, with a few, relatively minor exceptions that the author mentions.
I missed the boat.
I missed the boat filled with people who believe the new Gatsby movie sucked. That ship sailed and I wasn’t on it. I don’t know what’s up with those people.
In this post, I’ll explain why I disagree with most critics on The Great Gatsby movie. The film has been critically panned, receiving 49% on Rotten Tomatoes. I’ve read several recurring arguments online, and I want to take a look at each of those.
As a reminder, I’ve read the Gatsby novel five times. It’s my favorite book, and if a director did a crappy job of putting Fitzgerald’s story on screen, I would be more than happy to ridicule said director.
In this case, I think Baz Luhrmann did a (mostly) excellent job of making this classic novel into a Hollywood film. But let’s take a look at what some of his critics are…
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A Game of Thrones
I read A Game of Thrones this past month. The whole experience has been a saga.
I actually knew about George R.R. Martin’s ‘A Song of Ice and Fire’ series before the TV show first started airing in 2011. My mom is a big fantasy reader, and since I was a child I’ve been regaled with tales of a Science Fiction and Fantasy Book Store in Manhattan that I’ve never been to and I think has since closed. An article from last August cites that “the first” science fiction book store has opened in NYC… the author probably doesn’t know this isn’t the first of its kind, but it’s obviously the first in long enough that the author isn’t aware that it isn’t the first of its kind.
Anyway, I’ve known about ‘A Song of Ice and Fire’ for quite some time. My mom has been bugging me to read it for years, and my two best friends have as well. After about a year of yet another friend insisting I watch the show, I finally did, watching seasons 1 and 2 in quick fashion, since they were both out by the time I got around to it.
It’s a really good show.
So as the third season started airing, I decided that I was going to read the series. I finally got around to reading the first book, A Game of Thrones, this past month. Part of what held me up was the book’s size. My mom has them all in hard cover, and they’re enormous. When I was younger it was the length of the book that scared me off, but this time what I found so intimidating was the actual size of the copy of the novel. It’s not exactly a book you can carry around discreetly in your purse. It’s heavy and requires its own car seat.
I finally cracked and bought the five book bundle on Kindle for $40, which is $10 less than if I’d purchased them separately on Kindle or purchased the cheapest paperback editions.
My favorite part of the book is how much more detailed the story is for me now. I had to do a lot of background reading to help understand the show, while trying to avoid the really huge spoilers. It always helps me if I understand about the houses and their histories and stuff like that.
I get they couldn’t fit all that into the show, but I loved learning it in the book. It’s fantastically detailed and clear. I naturally expected the book to be more detailed, but I was a bit afraid that due to the show cutting a lot of stuff out/changing a lot of stuff or an author who writes particularly dense, uninteresting prose.
I really enjoy how Cersei is somehow even more unlikeable in print, although nothing matches my loathing for Joffrey.
The only thing I don’t like much about the book, and it’s a weird thing, but I can’t help it: the great detail Martin goes into when describing food and feast sequences. I don’t care what the lord commander of the Night’s Watch eats for breakfast, lunch, dinner, or what Robert Baratheon stuffs his face with, or the type of wine Tyrion prefers, etc…
And even if I do care about those things, I only care about them once. I don’t care about them described a billion times. Really, it might have been a billion times he went into it.
Still though, I really enjoyed this book. Eddard was way better, although I continue to mostly dislike Catelyn.
This might be one of those series that I have to evaluate as a series, because you get almost no answers to any questions in the first book. I do like the idea that the series will be that complicated, but it makes it hard to evaluate each book when you haven’t read all of them and all of them aren’t available.
I’ve started the second book, A Clash of Kings, but I’m in no rush to finish – the sixth and seventh books aren’t out yet, and George R.R. Martin can go 5 or 6 years…or more… without releasing one.
He better not die.
Ezra Klein’s Problem with ‘The Great Gatsby’
Obviously I’ve been on a bit of a The Great Gatsby kick lately, so it should come as no surprise that I’ve been reading articles about it when I find them.
Ezra Klein of the Washington Post (and one of my favorite nerds) wrote a blog entry on his problem with The Great Gatsby. Lots of people have problems with the book, but this was the first time I encountered his particular problem with it.
Spoilers, obviously, but the book is 88 years old, so…
Klein’s ultimate conclusion is that the way the end of the book unfolds – a series of unfortunate coincidences and a lot of bad timing – takes away from the lessons the book teaches. I disagree with this. I think it’s part of Fitzgerald’s point that nobody shows up at Gatsby’s funeral. He is used by people who don’t know him for his money and free liquor and they don’t care that he’s gone, they’ll just get their booze somewhere else now. His business associates don’t turn out, and woman he’s loved and dreamed about for years doesn’t show up either.
It’s usually at funerals when everyone in the deceased’s life comes out of the woodwork to say goodbye and nobody shows up. But in order to show that, in order to have a funeral, Gatsby has to die somehow. Healthy 30ish year olds don’t just drop dead, even in 1925, so he has to be actively killed in some manner.
Klein also says that Fitzgerald got the ending wrong. He’s right in the sense that he means it. In 2013, it’s clear that Tom may have won the battle against Gatsby, but Tom, and the guys like Tom, don’t win the war. Tom’s a symbol of the establishment of the time: white, wealthy, powerful, connected, racist, etc… and that part of society is ultimately defeated – or at least, has a lot of their untouchable-ness taken away from them – by social progress.
At the time, Fitzgerald probably couldn’t see Tom ever not winning. Foresight is hard. And looking back on it now, isn’t it good to see how wrong Fitzgerald was?
Literary Ink
I don’t have any tattoos, but if I did, it would probably be something from a book.
I belong to a number of communities on a number of websites that are dedicated to literary tattoos. I don’t know what it is about book tattoos that I think is so cool, but I love them.
So naturally, when one of my friends on Facebook posted this article from Buzzfeed, I had to share:
A couple of my favorites from the article:
From Shel Silverstein’s ‘Where the Sidewalk Ends.’
This one REALLY freaks me out but is pretty cool at the same time: the Cheshire Cat from Lewis Carroll’s ‘Alice in Wonderland.’
From Disney’s adaptation of J.M. Barrie’s ‘Peter Pan.’
The lantern in Narnia from ‘The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe’ by C.S. Lewis.
Check them out at BuzzFeed, they’re all really good!
Gatsby and Us
this is a post I wrote for another blog I contribute to, but it was book oriented, so I’m reblogging it here.
The first time I read F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, I was 16 and a junior in high school. As far as books we were forced to read in high school went, it wasn’t bad. It was relatively short, with a story that was easy to understand. Even the green light, the book’s most obvious symbol, was stated to be a symbol in the book – a great help on quizzes.
It wasn’t just me. Most of my classmates liked The Great Gatsby too. While we all had different opinions on Fahrenheit 451 and A Tale of Two Cities and The Lord of the Flies, it was Jay Gatsby who managed to win his way into our hearts with, as Nick puts it, his “extraordinary gift for hope.”
Although I’ve read two other books by Fitzgerald since then, I didn’t revisit East Egg and West Egg again until last summer. I loved Gastby even more the second time through.
The film version of Gatsby that came out yesterday, and stars Leonardo DiCaprio as Gatsby, was not a bad film. It has taken hits from critics, and that’s easy to understand. There are risks when you bring a beloved story from page to screen, and unless you’re Peter Jackson filming a Lord of the Rings movie, you’re probably not going to be universally acclaimed.
But the film stayed very true to the novel, the soundtrack and the costumes in the new movie are phenomenal, and DiCaprio continues his streak of incredible performances. His Gatsby shines and his costars, particularly Tobey Maguire (Nick Carraway), Carey Mulligan (Daisy Buchanan), and Joel Edgerton (Tom Buchanan) turn in strong performances.
Director Baz Luhrmann and cast members such as Carey Mulligan have stated that this was a good time to bring Gatsby back to the screen as we’ve seen history repeat itself as the economic boom of the 1990s and 2000s came crashing to the ground in 2008 the way the roaring economic good times of the 1920s gave way to the Great Depression of the 1930s.
But The Great Gatsby, the great American novel, has been adapted to film six times now, and those adaptations range from fairly decent (2013) to nearly unwatchable (1974). Part of the problem with adapting Gatsby is that much of the story takes place through Nick’s internal narration. This is true, but the biggest criticism of Luhrmann’s Gatsby adaptation seems to be that it’s too big. The roaring twenties are just too roaring in the film. Gatsby’s parties are too enormous. The film is too visually amazing. Yeah, critics can be very strange.
But what is it about The Great Gatsby, the novel, that has earned it a place in the hearts of millions of Americans? Why do read it over and over?
Most of the characters are unsympathetic. Tom Buchanan is brutal, manipulative, and abusive. Daisy is shallow, spoiled, weak, and cowardly. Jordan’s a liar. George and Myrtle Wilson are both unlikeable in their own ways. The only two characters anyone can really like or root for are Nick and Gatsby.
Deirdre Donohue at USAtoday.com theorizes that The Great Gatsby is open to new interpretations in ways that keep it relevant. Could Gatsby be a black man? Could Nick be in love with Gatsby? Is Daisy trapped in her life?
And the novel is stylistically beautiful. It’s succinct, with no wasted sentences. It captures the excess and apathy and hope of the roaring twenties, juxtaposing the spoiled, shallow, old money of the Buchanans with the new money, hope, and deep(er) love of Gatsby for Daisy.
Finally, there’s the theory that most of us, as Americans, identify with Gatsby. He’s a nobody from nothing and nowhere who makes himself into a success story, doing everything to win the girl he loves. In fact, love is the primary motivation for wealth. He isn’t in it because he’s greedy, he’s in it to win Daisy. And in spite of all Daisy’s terrible qualities, she does love Gatsby too.
But it’s Daisy and Tom who eventually do Gatsby in, and it’s Gatsby who loses everything. As Nick observes, “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy – they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”
It does feel timeless, doesn’t it? In 2013 we’re still recovering from the financial crash of 2008, from rich, careless people like Tom and Daisy who drove our economy into the ground and left a lot of our lives in ruins, who retreated to their mansions and money and let the rest of us bail out their banks and clean up their messes.
And so maybe most Americans don’t love The Great Gatsby just because we identify with Gatsby, even though we do identify with him. Maybe most of us read The Great Gatsby over and over because we periodically like to remember Tom and Daisy, and remind ourselves of who, thankfully, we’re not.
The Great Gatsby Tees!
One of my favorite clothing websites is Out of Print Clothing. They have shirts printed with classic covers of classic books.
They have always had a The Great Gatsby classic shirt, but in honor of the movie (due out this Friday) they’re doing all kinds of special edition tee shirts in all kinds of colors and styles.
Check them out here. I totally want the ‘kelly green’ and ‘heavy metal’ first edition shirts.
Also, they have this really cute Gatsby video game where 25,000 points gets a book donated and completing the game gets you a special offer.
The Newsflesh Trilogy
I read the ‘Newsflesh’ trilogy by Mira Grant (a pen name for Seanan McGuire) on the recommendation of a friend. The three books are Feed, Deadline, and Blackout.
The basic premise of the series is that the human race has cured cancer and the common cold, but in doing so, accidentally created a virus – called Kellis-Amberlee – that turns people who die into flesh eating zombies. 15 years after ‘The Rising,’ the name of the era when the zombies first appeared and nearly wiped out the human race, Georgia and Shaun Mason run a news website and are selected to cover the United States presidential campaign of Senator Peter Ryman.
I liked this trilogy. A lot. It’s sci-fi and horror and a political thriller all wrapped into one delicious ball of page-turning goodness. But the author lost me a bit towards the last 150 pages of the third book. I’ll get to it. Hold on.
This post contains some spoilers – nothing too major, but spoilers none-the-less, so consider this your heads up!
Feed, the first book, was by far the best book in the series, although the latter two weren’t bad. Feed was narrated by Georgia, who is much more interesting and insightful than her twin brother, Shaun, who narrates the second and part of the third.
The larger mystery about the Kellis-Amberlee virus is captivating. The virus itself is captivating. McGuire really knows her stuff about pathology and sociology and history. The world building in this series is also incredible. I liked all the imagined tech and dystopia, and the continual shooting of zombies was also fun.
I liked the way McGuire used blog entries (written by the characters) to expose the characters innermost thoughts, particularly of the characters we didn’t get inside the heads of…so anyone who wasn’t Georgia and Shaun.
And I loved the way McGuire used Georgia to critique the current day news media. Georgia herself is a character to love: she is tough – rough around the edges – smart, and obsessed with the truth. In fact, it is Georgia who has given me a real motto to live by, especially when I write:
“Tell the truth as you see it and let everyone else decide if they believe it or not.”
…or at least that’s the gist of it. I can’t find the bloody quote now that I’m actually looking for it.
Anyway, I enjoyed just about everything about this series except for a few things: the end of the story happened too abruptly. Blackout was like, 600 pages, and the wrap up was maybe 10? Not what I wanted.
Second, and this is where the story kind of lost me: the relationship between Georgia and Shaun was too convenient. It gave Georgia something that had never been published, yes, but this relationship had been going on for how long? Nearly ten years? So this relationship had been going on as long as they said, and we’ve been inside their heads for 1000+ pages, and they’ve never acknowledged this relationship? Not even in their own thoughts? Come on.
Plus, even though they’re only adopted twins and not actually related, I found this more incestuous than I like to get in my stories. I really hate incest as a plot point.
Finally, the last 150 pages or so of Blackout feature a bizarre scene at the home of a male computer genius who seems to keep emotionally damaged girls to do his bidding. He’s clearly emotionally abusive and manipulative, and the girls he’s got with him are both clearly a couple of sandwiches short of a picnic, but the whole series of events at the house is confusing. I had to read the episode three times and I’m still not sure I fully understand what happened.
The editor really could have cut this “mad scientist’s mad apprentices gone extra mad” scene and nobody would have been sorrier for it. It felt like a very contrived way to get the good guys into a confrontation with the bad guys.
Anyway, yes, the last 150 or so pages of Blackout were not up to par with the rest of the series, but the series itself was still good. I think the last dystopian future alternate universe novel I read was Mockingjay (the conclusion of ‘The Hunger Games’ trilogy) by Suzanne Collins, and that book paled in comparison to Blackout. Plus, Georgia Mason’s character at the end of Blackout was much better than what Katniss had become by the end of Mockingjay.
Overall, I highly recommend the Newsflesh trilogy. It’s smarter than a lot of books featuring supernatural creatures, but the beauty of it is that it’s so much more than a zombie book. Most zombie books are 200 pages tops, but this is a thriller trilogy that goes on for 1000+ pages. The science is obviously pseudo-science, but it’s very convincing pseudo-science, and there is clearly a lot of background research that has gone into this story. It’s not just virus pathology science either, there’s tech research in there, research about government agencies and how they operate, etc…
It all becomes a very well built alternate universe that features all the action you’d expect in the post zombie apocalypse, but what makes it a page turner is the mystery and political intrigue. It’s also the sheer drive of Georgia Mason and her tireless quest for the truth that really makes this series so worthwhile.
She’s really the great triumph of the trilogy because she reveals the human condition: at the end of the day, the truth really does set us free.
The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency
I picked up The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith for a couple of reasons:
01. I had a coupon I wanted to use.
02. I had heard good things.
Unlike Life of Pi, which I’d also heard good things about, The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency wasn’t a huge disappointment.
I really liked the main character, Mma Precious Ramotswe, who, once her beloved father passes away, sells her inheritance of cattle to buy a building and set up a private detective business. She’s a modern Miss Marple, using mostly insight into human nature to solve her mysteries.
Unlike Agatha Christie’s heroine, Mma Ramotswe doesn’t solve any murders – at least not in this book – and mostly solves cases that, at least to me, correspond with more real world happenings. Not that people aren’t murdered in the real world, but I feel like thefts must be happening more frequently than murders, particularly in smaller, rural areas. She basically solves the mysteries people in a small, rural area would be worried about – cheating husbands, stolen dogs, mistaken identity. She does tackle some disappearances though, one of which could be highly dangerous to take on: that of a child who is believed to have been kidnapped and murdered for muti (medicine made by a witchdoctor, which usually involves killing a child for the child’s parts).
The idea for the story was inspired by the 1994 murder of Segametsi Mogomotsi, a 14 year old girl who was murdered for muti.
My other favorite part of the novel was the setting. The story takes place in Africa, specifically Botswana.
I’ve always wanted to go to Africa – I’ve been fascinated with the wildlife since I was a small child. But the part of my brain that is more sensible, the part that says, “Hey, doing 90 MPH on a dark lonesome highway is fun, but you’re probably going to get yourself killed, or worse, get a speeding ticket and raised car insurance rates, so maybe you should slow down to, say, 70?” that part says about Africa, “For every good reason to go to Africa, there are ten good reasons NOT to go to Africa.”
And every time I hear about civil wars and gang rapes in the Democratic Republic of Congo, or about child soldiers and Joseph Kony, or about blood diamonds in Sierra Leone, or a break out of Ebola, or someone who got HIV & AIDS from infected food, I tend to think that maybe I really don’t want to see giraffes THAT badly.
But Mma Ramotswe is proud to be from Africa (even if she doesn’t like the snakes, and let’s be real, I don’t blame her) and seeing things from the perspective of someone who doesn’t love America or want to be an American is a refreshing change. She wants to make Africa a better, happier place in a way that has nothing to do with personal advancement.
She’s not dying to get married either. This is a huge BONUS, since I feel like I’m at a point in my life where most people are starting to get married and I’m not anywhere near that. But she was married and her husband was abusive, and now she wants to provide only for herself and there are no husbands in her future… at least until her BFF proposes to her a second time and she agrees because he’s a good man.
I don’t know how accurate the portrayal of this African lady is – she’s really proud to be a proper African shape, which is fat, according to her, which is very foreign to me – and she was written by some Scottish guy, but hey, she’s different. I love her.
I’m not in a huge rush to read the rest of the series – yes, it is a series – but I probably will eventually, just to see what Mma Ramostwe does next.
words in scarlet ink 