Final Thoughts On Star Wars: The Original Trilogy

As you may know from reading my posts over the past couple of weeks, I've been watching Star Wars for the first time (go HERE for my thoughts on the first movie, and HERE for the second). I saw the final movie in the original trilogy, Episode VI: Return of the Jedi, on Saturday.

After watching three movies, I cannot say I was completely bowled over by the series. Luke did not appeal to me, I wasn't utterly enamored by any of the characters, and by the last movie it felt to me like the scenes were too long and dragged. Also, most of it felt predictable; though that's probably due to the "Hero's Journey" formula and the fact so many people have copied the story.

But I am glad I watched them. I liked several of the characters (Princess Leia, Han Solo, R2-D2, Chewbacca, and I even thought Luke was okay by the end), and being a fan of Science Fiction, the world really interested me. (Plus, there's always the fact I won't be so clueless when people talk about the series and say something stupid that makes no sense in relation to the Star Wars universe.)

Overall, I would recommend watching Star Wars, if you haven't yet. They movies are a bit predictable sometimes and the main character, Luke Skywalker, may not always appeal, but it's still an interesting SF trilogy and a good adventure story.

As for the Prequel Trilogy, I don't think I'm going to run and watch those right away. I'm pretty sure I will in the future--since even if they're bad, part of me wants to find out just how bad--but for now, the questions I have about the history of the characters can wait.

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And now what am I going to watch?

Now I think I'm going to try and tackle that other well-known Star series, Star Trek; starting with The Original Series, because that's what the library has, and I figure it can't be a terrible idea to start with the original. Right?

Rest assured, I shall be back with commentary on that as well. :)

(Unless you'd prefer I wouldn't?)

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In other, unrelated news:

The A-Z April Blogging Challenge sign-ups have begun.

For those of you who may not have heard of this before, it's a challenge hosted by several bloggers (all of which can be seen HERE) where you post for every letter of the alphabet in April, so every day except for 4 days. Last year there were over 1,300 participants (or was it more?) and there's plenty of posting madness, but it's a blast. I've already added my name--I was a participant in 2011, and I am definitely looking forward to doing it in 2012!

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How about you? What did you think of Star Wars: The Original Trilogy?


Are you signing up for the A-Z Challenge, and/or have you participated in previous years?


-----The Golden Eagle

War and Peace: A Review

As mentioned in this post, I was reading War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy. I finished it yesterday (taking me almost a whole month to get through it, which is a terribly long time for me) and decided to give you a review of what I thought of this famous novel.

Note: This does not contain major spoilers, but if there are any of you who haven't read it (I wasn't the last person in the world to pick this up, right?) and don't want to know anything about the book before you do, considered yourself warned.


(Also note that this is not as short and tight as a regular book review. I didn't think I'd be able to condense my thoughts into just a few lines per category, so I'm going with a more informal post. Hope you don't mind.)

I expected that I would slog through the book. The version I took out of the library is 885 pages long, small text, large paragraphs, and there's relatively little dialogue. I did end up slogging through bits, but it wasn't as much of a "loose, baggy monster" (Henry James) as I'd thought. Yes, Tolstoy does go off on tangents and gives long explanations and goes on to tell the reader why the war was absolutely inevitable and so forth, but it wasn't entirely boring. A lot of it was interesting enough to keep me from skimming, which is a habit I get into when there's tons of text in a novel.

The characters were also interesting. I read several other books while tackling War and Peace, and I couldn't help comparing the contemporary characters to the ones in a classic like this. They're very different. Tolstoy gives you many descriptions of what the characters are like, and it's not just physical appearance, which (it seems to me) is how most people are described today--he describes how attractive the characters are, how their appearance relates to their personality, what is reflected on their faces, the different body language and what it means to the social circles they're in.

The changes (or lack of them) in the characters played an important role. They're quite different at the beginning than they are at the end, seven years later in 1812. It was sad to see how relationships changed, fell apart, and formed over those years, some things seeming hopeful at the beginning but completely unraveling later on. Some ties seemed doomed to fail from the start--and there's really nothing that compares to waiting for things to come crashing down on everyone's heads.

Of course, there's also the war part of the story. Much of the social interaction happened in peaceful areas, far from the fighting. There was lots of military strategy and violence, and this is where Tolstoy seemed to most often get off track from the main story. He went to great lengths to describe the mindset of the generals, the other officers and military, and the inevitability of war. (I disagree with Tolstoy here. If you ask me, everyone makes decisions that lead to war, so you can't really argue that it's just part of a sequence of events no one can stop.) He doesn't really spare you any details, from the characters' mixed emotions about being in battle to the letters between Napoleon Bonaparte and Tsar Alexander.

So, was all this peace and war, war and peace worth the time spent reading? I would say yes. I plan on reading this again, in fact, sometime in the future; I can see why they called this book a classic.

But.

Allow me to digress and point out one grievance I had with this novel, which was the dominant thought in my mind when I finished: the ending is unfair.


Well, you say, did you expect it to be fair?

Kind of. At least for this one character. I felt bad for her--she hadn't done anything special in the story, but while the other characters were having affairs and flirting and falling in and out of love and jumping into doomed marriages and dueling and just generally acting up, she sat through it all, rather calmly and quietly and reasonably.

Of course, she didn't get a happy ending. The OTHER characters got their happy(ish) endings after making all kinds of mistakes, but she didn't.

Fiddlesticks, Tolstoy. It wouldn't have been so hard to leave her content.

Sigh.

(To learn more about War and Peace, visit the Wikipedia article HERE.)

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Have you read War and Peace? If not, do you plan to read it?


If so, what did you think of it? And were you frustrated for said character at the end?


-----The Golden Eagle

Book Review: Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

Title: Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

Authors: Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith

Publisher: Quirk Books

Genre: Romance/Action/Mashup/Adult/Classic

Page Count: 317 (paperback)

Rating: 4.5 out of 5

Cover Rating: 4.8 out of 5. It fits the book quite well, and I just love the fact that it takes time (even if it's just a fraction of a second) to notice that there's something wrong with the picture.

Back cover:

"It is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains." 

So begins Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, an expanded edition of the beloved Jane Austen novel featuring all-new scenes of bone-crunching zombie mayhem. As our story opens, a mysterious plague has falle upon the quiet English village of Meryton--and the dead are returning to life! Feisty heroine Elizabeth Bennet is determined to wipe out the zombie menace, but she's soon distracted by the arrival of the haughty and arrogant Mr. Darcy. What ensues is a delightful comedy of manners with plenty of civilized sparring between the two young lovers--and even more violent sparring on the blood-soaked battlefieled. Can Elizabeth vanquish the spawn of Satan? And overcome the social prejudices of the class-conscious landed gentry? Complete with romance, heartbreak, swordfights, cannibalism, and thousands of rotting corpses, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies transforms a masterpiece of world literature into something you'd actually want to read.

My expectations: I expected it to be a bit violent, but otherwise funny; I read Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters before this, and enjoyed it.

I have to say I like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies a lot more than I do Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters.

About the book: Now, I don't know if you think this is sacrilege or stupidity (or both) but I just look at it as fun. I am not a huge fan of Jane Austen; the fact she was a woman, did not marry, and wrote books is impressive for her times, but I still don't particularly like her novels. So, I just had to pick up Pride and Prejudice and Zombies to see what they turned the original book into.

I, for one, thought it was quite amusing. There are humorous changes, (for example, the way they substituted references to weaponry and fighting off zombies instead of finding husbands), the characters are great, (I didn't like Elizabeth Bennet or Mr. Darcy much in Pride and Prejudice, but loved them in this version), and while the zombie violence did get a bit gruesome at points, it's not terrible, and the way they integrated it with high-society was funny.

Writing: The writing follows Austen's original work all except for action scene and context. Also, some things that happen in the original story are changed so that, instead, they are caused by attacks, fights, duels, zombies, etc. That's all Grahame-Smith's work--the whole idea of the book is based on the twists and turns he made within the original story.

• Plot:

Things turn out the way they do in Pride and Prejudice, except the causes can often be traced to zombies, often in a humorous way.

• Characters:

As I mentioned, I like Elizabeth much better in this book. She's stronger, determined, and has much more spunk than the Elizabeth in Pride and Prejudice.

Mr. Darcy said many of the same things that he said in the original at the start, with few changes but that turned itself around further along in the book; again, I enjoyed his character a lot in this version.

Other characters were pretty much the same: humorously altered to fit the theme.

• Setting/Elements:

The culture is different. One important thing I thought stuck out was the fact more power is given to women in Pride and Prejudice and Zombies--for example, Elizabeth has been trained at the Chinese martial arts temple of Shaolin and is in service to the King of England, and her sisters have been trained to fight; I loved the fact they could stand on their own and didn't pay so much attention to social restraints. Instead of sitting by, what they're supposed to be doing is, actually, slaying zombies and defending the English people. Go, Bennets!

Other: Violence, references.

IF they every get the movie off the ground, you can bet I'll probably be checking it out.

Do I recommend this book? Yes--provided you don't mind zombies, or the fact they changed so much of a classic, Jane Austen book.

-----The Golden Eagle

Challenge: How Many Of These Have You Read?

When I noticed this over on a lot of blogs, I just had to do it. For one thing, it's a book tag! For another thing, it's also a literary tag! 


And I want to show the BBC that there are, in fact, quite a few people--like my fellow bloggers here who did this--who are well-read and have consumed more than 6 of these titles!


Rules for the challenge:


• Copy this list.
• Bold those books you’ve read in their entirety.
• Italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish or read only an excerpt.


And as a bonus, I'm going to underline those I'm thinking about reading next year.


Commentary is in aqua.



Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
(Blah. I didn't like Pride and Prejudice)
The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
(One of my favorite books.)
Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
(Favorite again.)
To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
(Interesting . . .)
The King James Bible
Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
Nineteen Eighty Four (1984) – George Orwell
His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
(Ideas/opinions made me think. I know this book is controversial.)
Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
(Read it in one day. Liked it then, not particularly interested now . . .)
Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
Complete Works of Shakespeare
(I've read a collection--but not every single play.)
Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
(My mom read this to me.)
Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk
Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
Middlemarch – George Eliot
(I got around 150 pages in, and then it just flopped for me. It was too boring.)
Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
(BOO, Scarlett! Rhett Butler--hmph.)
The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
(The translation was odd--they put the French parts in footnotes, but put the Russian where it would be if it was being read normally. I should try reading it again, though.)
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
(Love.)
Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
(I'm interested in this one.)
Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
(Hate Alice in Wonderland, most of the time--I like the recent movie, though.)
The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
(Started, never finished. We have to copy, so I should read it . . .)
Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
(Interested. It's a pretty famous book, and I can't forget Lemony Snicket's comment from Horseradish. :D)
David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
(Enjoy this series.)
Emma -Jane Austen
Persuasion – Jane Austen
The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe – CS Lewis
(Um, you just listed the Chronicles of Narnia, BBC.)
The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
(I have an upcoming review of this--enjoyed it a lot.)
Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
Winnie the Pooh – A.A. Milne
(We have a collection of stories . . . does that count?)
Animal Farm – George Orwell
The DaVinci Code – Dan Brown
(Apparently I write like this guy . . . )
One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
(Never appealed to me.)
Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
Lord of the Flies – William Golding
(Reminds me of Robert Cormier's novels. This sort of book gets me into the mood to write evil, scheming, psychologically twisted characters. I do have some of that sort in my writing.)
Atonement – Ian McEwan
Life of Pi – Yann Martel
Dune – Frank Herbert
Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Of Mice and Men – John SteinbeckLolita – Vladimir Nabokov
The Secret History – Donna Tartt
The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
On The Road – Jack Kerouac
Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
Moby Dick – Herman Melville
(I reviewed this . . . it's in the archives. Kind of dull, but at least I can say I read it!)
Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
Dracula – Bram Stoker
(There's an electronic copy somewhere . . . or I could just get it out of the library to read the rest. :P)
The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
(I like the movie better. Ever seen it?)
Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
(I want to read this book! A Short History of Nearly Everything--one of my favorite nonfic books.)
Ulysses – James Joyce
The Inferno – Dante
Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
Germinal – Emile Zola
Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
Possession – AS Byatt
Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
The Color Purple – Alice Walker
The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
Charlotte’s Web – E.B. White
(This was one of the first long-ish chapter books I read.)
The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
(I read Tuesdays With Morrie recently for school. Wrote an essay.)
Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
(Go, Sherlock!)
The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
(Interesting story.)
The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
Watership Down – Richard Adams
A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
Hamlet – William Shakespeare
(The story, not the play. It's a strange story. I saw the PBS recent version of it, with David Tennant.)
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
(Wacky . . . never watched the movie.)
Les Miserables – Victor Hugo
(Cosette is an airhead. That's what I thought after I read it. Jean Valjean--interesting enough.)


So, to tally:


21 read.
5 started, never finished.
7 to (possibly) read next year.



----The Golden Eagle