Sunday, January 06, 2008

the long slog through a boring book

I finished reading Atonement today. My landlord and I swapped about a half dozen books probably a year ago and it's been sitting there ever since. What with the recent buzz around the movie, I figured, what the heck. I don't know what you may have heard about the book and/or the film, but I kept reading things about how Ian McEwan wrote this amazing book with a stunning plot twist at the end and that the movie, while very good, perhaps even great, is not the same as the printed word. Yes, yes, nothing new in that type of review.

So my experience was that for whatever reason, during the pivotal part of the story, the part upon which everything hinges, my mind immediately went to a different place, a different character. The result of this was that when the big reveal came at the end, the jaw dropping twist, I had assumed it to be so for the entire book. No big reveal, no plot twist for me. Just a book where I found myself skimming over entire paragraphs because he couldn't stop spending 3 pages describing a summer day. What a drag!

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