The Road Not Taken

by Robert Frost

This is easily one of the most popular and most misunderstood poems of all time. I remember my favorite teacher in middle school, who I am still in contact with, had a poster with the final three lines of this poem on it. I thought it was so cheesy that I deliberately chose a desk to sit at where I would not have to see the poster during class. If you couldn't tell by my previous posts, I despise sentimentality. Makes me want to hurl.

Anyway, on with the mocking!

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

You know that warm, fuzzy feeling you get when you read familiar lines of poetry? If you've got it right now, kill it. Statistically speaking, this ain't the line you know. The line you know is all the way down in the fourth stanza. If this poem were a person, you'd be standing there saying to it, "you're a strong, independent poem," and it would be all like, "you don't know me. You don't know my life!"

Opportunity

by Edward Rowland Sill


     Before I get started here, I just want to state that I actually quite like this poem. It will not always be the case, as with "The Children's Hour," that works I make fun of are works I dislike. Heck, Shakespeare will probably end up on here one day (cuz fuck Romeo and Juliet).

This I beheld, or dreamed it in a dream: --

     We're off to a good start here! The man doesn't even know if this actually happened, or if he dreamed it. Either we've got some opium use going on, or Sill's got some majorly realistic dreams. Either way, this line is pure filler. It doesn't matter one bit if the events of the poem are supposed to have happened in real life or in the author's head. It's just a goddamned poem, we all know it's not really "real." You've only got three fucking stanzas here! If you must preface your poem with this kind of shit, pick which one you want the reader to temporarily believe, then write a better opening line that establishes that premise. Or, better yet, just get on with it!

Change of Plan

So, obviously, I haven't been updating this blog in, like, years. College was happening, sorry. And... buying a house and.. God, how long has it been since my last update here? Damn.

Anyway, my husband came up with a great blog idea the other night, based on some of the conversations I've had with him about literature. I have some very strong opinions about books and poems and plays that are considered "classics" and capital-I "Important." After all, I do have a Bachelor's in English. Oftentimes, though, my more negative opinions spill out of my mouth laced with expletives and curses upon the now-dead author. I mean, have you read Moby Dick? It is probably the most boring, long-winded piece of shit I have ever slogged through. Its sole redeeming feature is Chapter 95. But it must be read; it's capital-I "Important." And I don't argue that. It has had a lot of influence on our culture, and in summary it creates a beautiful metaphor for life. But it's a terrible read.

So, basically, I will still be reviewing books here (and poems and plays), but I won't be giving star-ratings, I won't be reviewing new things, and I won't be dwelling too long on the positive aspects of whatever I'm reviewing.

I hope to update about once a month, maybe more often if I'm feeling particularly opinionated.

The Chimes

by Charles Dickens

Buy the book here.

***

Plot:A poor man tries to make an honest living. One night he has a dream about dying and being shown the future by the spirits who live in the bell tower of a church. Things work out fine.

This story was written by Dickens because he was required to write another holiday story as part of a contract with a new publisher. It shows. The story feels rushed in some places (he wrote it in mere months, with a strict deadline) and lacks the overall charm typical of a Dickens piece. Unlike A Christmas Carol, no lessons are learned here and no one lives their lives differently because of the spirits. It simply shows some unfortunate things that COULD have happened, had the poor characters taken the advice of the rich characters. But none of the poor people in the story were likely to have actually taken the advice of the rich people to begin with. It's all just some silly dream.
     The tone is preachy. I know Dickens always had a message in his stories and it's impossible to ignore that message when reading. But he was usually able to straddle the thin line between getting his point across and still being entertaining. It's not a bad story, but had he taken some more time to smooth things over, build characters a little less obviously, and slow down the pace, this could have jumped back on that aforementioned line and been a truly great story.

A Christmas Carol

by Charles Dickens

Buy the book here.
Buy the movie version.

*****

Plot: A mean and stingy old man is haunted by a series of ghosts on Christmas Eve, causing him to change his entire life for the better. Yay, happy ending!

     Let me start by saying that I love Christmas. The very idea of Christmas makes me all kinds of warm and happy inside. I also love Charles Dickens. His style of writing, his nomenclature, his intricate plots that always, always work out without anything left hanging: all provide a rich and rewarding reading experience. Being a novella, A Christmas Carol doesn't have an intricate plot. It's more similar to a fairy tale than a typical Dickens novel. We're all familiar with the plot; we've seen it interpreted a million different ways from The Muppets to Doctor Who to every sitcom in existence. And like a true fairy tale, it never gets old and the moral is rarely lost in translation.
     Most recently, I read A Christmas Carol during my breaks at work over the Thanksgiving rush (I work at a grocery store). It certainly helped to keep me in good spirits. I cannot possibly praise this book enough, but it also feels unnecessary to comment on it, considering how thoroughly this story has permeated our culture, our language, and especially the last two months of every calendar year. And so I won't comment on it. I will simply leave this here to encourage you to read it.

Frankenstein

by Mary Shelley

Buy the book here.
Buy the movie version.

****

Plot: A man creates life, which in turn seeks to destroy him and everything he loves.

     The main thing that struck me about this book is that while it may be easy to label the "monster" as the bad guy, Victor Frankenstein is not innocent himself. He created the creature, then abandoned it. All the terrible things that happened to him were entirely of his doing. If he had taken the time to realize that this newly created life was his responsibility and had treated and nurtured it according to that responsibility none of his loved ones would have been murdered. Only once during the entire course of the novel does he even hint that the creature's disposition and not just its existence is his fault, and that's just before he dies.
     It's easy to label the creature as the "bad guy" but I beg to differ. He knows no different. He had observed love and kindness toward others, but horror, violence and disgust were the only things he ever saw directed toward himself. How could he possibly be expected to know the difference between right and wrong? He shows evidence of knowing that what he does is wrong, but only on a theoretical level. Like a child, he cannot just be told that certain things are right and others are wrong, he must be shown those principles through the actions of those around him.
     Naturally the second thing that struck me was that the novel's plot is nothing like the plot of the original movie. I do feel that the movie held true to the theme and moral of the novel, though.

To Kill A Mockingbird

by Harper Lee

Buy the book here.
Buy the movie version. 

****

Plot: On the surface, it's about a couple kids getting into trouble because of their recluse neighbor, and their father getting into trouble because he's the lawyer defending a black man in Depression-era Alabama.

Well, since most people are required to read this book in school, including myself, I really don't think there's much I can say about it that hasn't been over-analyzed time and again in classrooms across the nation. I certainly recommend this book to anyone and everyone, but I don't think I could ever count it as one of my favorite books of all time simply because I did originally read it in school, and it was over-analyzed in class. As a matter of fact, this book is the reason I failed 10th grade English. We had this packet of questions we were supposed to answer, with 5 questions or so for each chapter. They were stupid questions. I didn't answer them.

Pride & Prejudice & Zombies

by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith

Buy the book here.

***

Plot: A family with five daughters trained in mortal combat live in Regency England, which has been over-run with zombies. When the girls aren't sending the damned souls back to the fires of Hell, they're trying to find husbands.


Let me start off by saying that before reading this book I had never read Pride and Prejudice or anything else written by Jane Austen, nor do I plan to without it having been improved by the addition of zombies or sea monsters or whatnot. From what I gather, all her stories are about silly girls chasing after guys in Regency England. In other words: pointless and boring. Pride & Prejudice & Zombies is equally pointless, but at least it's not boring.

I didn't really start caring about the characters until about the middle of the book, when Mr. Darcy proposes to Elizabeth (and she beats the shit out of him.) The only reason I continued reading past page 50 or so was for the zombie scenes. I'm glad I did, though. The ending is superb, and I say that as a person who hates happy endings. There are no happy endings in life; everyone dies eventually.

Aside from Austen's basic flawed plot concept, the only thing I can really complain about is how the revisions were added. I found myself continually looking for the seams in the story - trying to separate the original story from the zombie mayhem. On a superficial level, it was easy (probably too easy, sometimes it felt like Seth Grahame-Smith was trying too hard to stick in a zombie reference), but in some areas I puzzled over what had been omitted, and was distracted from the novel as it stands. Hopefully, it's just me having not read the original and being a little too nerdy for my own good, rather than a fundamental flaw in the writing style. Unfortunately, there is no way for me to answer that for you; you'll have to read the book to find out for yourself.