Hokay. 

I know I talk about Battle Royale all the time, but this is the last time (maybe). I just finished the novel. 

Well. I will say this. It is a very easy read. No big words, lots of description, and the gruesome parts are the most fun to read, because that’s where the author gets really colorful with the imagery. It also is very suspenseful, and once you pick it up, it’s pretty hard to put down.

That being said, I do prefer the movie. In the book there was a ton of back story, which is important, but there was just too much. It translates very well onto film, but in the book the flashbacks just kind of took away from the action. 

The novel also repeats certain details incessantly. It became pretty annoying after a while.

Another thing that bothered me were the characters. All of these kids were supposed to be 8th graders, and everyone in the class was either a computer genius or a baseball star, or they were in a gang or they were a prostitute. Really? I could understand one kid in the class being in a gang or being really good with computers, but it seemed like everyone was like, “oh yeah, before we left I dismantled the government’s computer programming system so they can’t track anyone who hacks into their database.” No. No 8th grader does that.

Besides that, I enjoyed the book. The end actually was amazing, and much clearer than the ending of the movie. Again, I’m really happy with how well the novel translated onto film, there’s actually many slight details in the movie that weren’t in the book. If you are a fan of the movie, I would never discourage you from reading the novel, because it does enhance the overall experience. 

And so concludes my summer of non-stop reading. I’ve decided to take a break for a while, since I’ve spent the past 4 months with my nose in one book or another. There are many books still left on The List, but I think I will save them for the school year or for winter break. 

Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn is a progressively lipogrammic epistolary fable.

I cannot take credit for that sentence, that is the extended title of the book.

This was the kind of book where you finish the last few pages with a giant smile on your face, because it was the cutest and most clever book you’ve ever read. The wordplay, the overt messages relating to religious tyranny, the resolution in the end! I loved it all. 

I really don’t want to give anything away about the plot. Read it for yourself. It took me two afternoons. You will be so pleased.

(And I know I’ve been changing it around a lot, but the rest of my summer reading list can be found here.) 

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly  is one of the most beautiful books I have ever read. It rivals Breakfast at Tiffany’s for Best Book Of My Summer Thus Far. 

Like Breakfast at Tiffany’s, The Diving Bell is a short story- more accurately it is a short memoir. It chronicles the thoughts, memories, and desires of Jean-Dominique Bauby. He was once the editor of French Elle, and after a massive stroke is left almost entirely paralyzed, except for a fully-functioning mind and the ability to blink with his left eye. Blinking is his only means of communicating with the world, and is how he wrote this memoir.

I love his wit and his creativity, and the dreaminess of his writing, though his own world probably seemed more nightmarish. Bauby gives an insightful, observant account of what it is like to be a prisoner trapped inside of one’s own mind.

The rest of my summer reading list can be found here. 

I tried to watch the movie Layer Cake one night when I was bored at school and looking to watch something action-packed and produced by Matthew Vaughn (I have already seen Snatch and Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels). It was, as most of Vaughn’s movies are, very exciting (and enticing, thanks to a sharply-dressed Daniel Craig) but nearly impossible to understand with all of the fast-paced British action flying about. If only I had subtitles (goddamn Megavideo).

But had I been able to understand it, it probably would’ve been an excellent film, which is why I didn’t want to completely give up on it. I just finished reading Layer Cake, the novel.

The novel is just as twisted as the movie, plot-wise, but if you read and reread carefully enough, you might be able to understand what’s going on. I won’t go into dissecting all the layers of Layer Cake. There’s just too many. Even wikipedia had to pick and choose which layers made it into the plot summary.

I found that the beginning of each chapter was like, “Oh, just another day in beautiful London. I got a phone call and then I went to the park, la, la, la…” and then two pages later, “DEAD BODY!”, “BRUTAL BEATING!”, “DRUGS!”, “SEX!”, “THIS GUY’S DEAD AND NO ONE KNOWS WHY!” So when the action picked up, all the extraneous plot details didn’t really matter anymore because it got super exciting. 

In the end, I liked the book a lot (it’s best read in small doses, to avoid getting a headache), and I think I might be confident enough to give the movie another shot.

The rest of my summer reading list can be found here. 

Breakfast at Tiffany’s is best known as the movie which made Audrey Hepburn an icon. In it, she is the epitome of quirky elegance. She does whatever she wants, and she does it with panache. This movie was based on a short story by Truman Capote. 

The two stories are VASTLY different. The cast of characters is the same, but everything is darker, grittier. Holly Golightly isn’t the same Manic Pixie Dream Girl that we have come to know and love through the movie interpretation. She drinks heavily, dabbles in marijuana use, swears freely, uses racial epithets, and chooses in the end to be a lost soul forever. No wonder Truman Capote hated the movie so much. 

The unnamed narrator’s voice in this story is simply delicious. I loved the honest descriptions of Miss Golightly and the strange world she lives in. It is funny to be able to see lines in the novella that were lifted directly into the movie, but in a different context. As I was reading other comparisons of the movie and the novella, I came across this post stating, “It’s like having two witnesses discuss the same person and the same events.”

You could analyze Holly’s character all day. You could build an entire college course around her. Reading the novel, I aspire to be her, yet at the same time I’m repulsed by her. But why?

I highly recommend lovers of the film to read this story. It is a highbrow read, and you could finish it in one sitting.

The rest of my summer reading list can be found here.

Lolita has intrigued me for many years. I attempted to read it about four years ago, but probably made it through only half of part one. This is the kind of novel that would be perfect for an english class, or perhaps even a psychology class. There’s a lot of layers here.

I actually really liked the descriptive voice of the main character, Humbert Humbert. There were some parts that were hard to read, as I could clearly see them in my mind’s eye, but his character was certainly the most compelling.

When I tried to read it at sixteen, I didn’t like Lolita’s character at all. I think because her age in the beginning of the novel was rather close to mine, I took offense that it would characterize her as being so childish. In my rereading of the text, I can appreciate her character more. I felt for her living under the distain and jealousy of her mother, Charlotte Haze, and I certainly felt for her living under the tyranny of Humbert Humbert. I was just wishing for her to run away.

The first part of the novel was great, during the second half I lost interest at times when the plot became a little too slow. After Humbert pulled Lolita out of Beardsley in part two, I tuned out until the part where he receives news of her marriage and pregnancy towards the end. There was a good ten pages that I kind of skimmed through. I found there to be an excessive amount of driving in this novel. I was actually distracted, wondering how much the gas on their cross-country road trips would cost today.

It’s not a feel-good story, but I certainly appreciated the Humbert’s eloquent style. Humbert also frequently writes and speaks in French, usually to describe or reference something. I wish I knew French, or had the patience to use Google Translator because I’d imagine there is a good deal of Humbert’s wit that is being lost in the novel’s lack of translation.

The rest of my summer reading list is here.