Tuesday, January 15, 2013

Blog Post Number 1: Interview For Book Report



Discuss and describe your interview. Whom did you select and why? What did your chosen person express about reading and literature? What was interesting to you about the interview?
I selected my mum because in our family she and I do the most reading and talk about it the most. We both enjoy reading and have read many books together which gives us more common interests. My mum really loves reading because whenever she reads she flows away into this new world and relaxes. She really enjoys reading just like I do. It was interested what she said about her favorite book and how she wants me to read it some day and see me take the advice she got from it and apply it to my own life just like she's done when she read it. My mum really sees reading in the same light as I do which I like since we have common interests and that gives us another topic to bond over. :) 

My mum and I decided to read "Wuthering Heights" by Emily Bronte. 

"All i care about in this goddamn life are me, my drums, and you"...
If you don't know that quote, you're probably too young to be reading this and isn't is past your bedtime or shouldn't you be in school?
but that quote, hyper-earnest cheese - that is romance. withering heights is something more dangerous than romance. it's one long protracted retaliation masquerading as passion. and goddamn do i love it. i can't believe i haven't reviewed it before - i mention this book in more than half of my reviews, i have a whole shelf devoted to its retelling, so why the delay?? but better late than never.

no, it's not a perfect novel; it's a flawed structure revealing the actions of seriously flawed people. the framing device-within-a-framing-device? totally awkward. having Nelly dean tell the story even though where was she for most of the action? totally wrong move, Bronte; it makes the beginning such a slog to get through. but that's just stale loaf - the good stuff is all the meat in between.

and oh, the meat... the swarthy stranger of mysterious origins being raised in a family of sheltered over moist English mushrooms, all pale and rain-bloated, the running wild, two-souls-against-the-world adolescence...childhood indiscretions... vows and tantrums, bonding, unspoken promises, yes i will yes i will yes i will. oh, but wait, what's this??...it's blond and it's rich and it's whats expected of me. very well then. see ya, heath cliff...

it's just textbook Gothic from here on out: revenge-seduction, overheard conversations, mysterious disappearances, murdered puppies, swooning, vindictive child-rearing, death, ghosts, moors, phoar...

But this to me, is a perfect love story, even though it's more like torture. The unattainable is always more romantic than the storybook. I don't like an uncomplicated ending, and a story is more impaction with nuanced characters, preferably heavily unlikeable throughout. This story just makes me feel good, and I'm well over reading books about teenage fascination with the "bad boy"; i realized pretty quick that "bad boys" are usually pretty dumb. So I moved on to "emotionally disturbed" books, which are the same thing, really; plenty of drama, and they will leave you drunken "presents" on your lawn , but not complete burnouts, at least. but my teenaged dating pool is neither here nor there, the point is that heath cliff can be romanticized as this victim/villain without having to correspond to the ideal. It's about the level of passion, the size of the grand romantic gesture. devoting your life to destroying the people who kept you from your true love is an amazingly grand gesture.

3 comments:

  1. So what book did you decide to read?!? You and your mum sound very alike, I see where you got your love for reading from.

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  2. Yeah, like Alex said, which book did you choose at the end? And I know how much you read every quarter (a lot!), and now I see where you got that from, you and your mum are probably gonna finish the whole book and the project in a week. :)

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  3. How long did you think it would take for someone to notice that the Wuthering Heights "review" is not yours? Never? For anyone reading, this post - the text in green is copied VERBATIM from a review on Goodreads.

    I know the Goodreads reviewer and her name isn't Ajda. And she knows that you copied her review. So take it down.

    ReplyDelete