Granted... I only read Eragon and Eldest and mostly I just now like sporking the Alagaesia Cycle/whatever it's officially called, because Paolini made it way too easy. And Harry Potter isn't my most favorite series of all time, I've never read the Hunger Games, and LOTR is superior to Narnia in every way.
But you get the point.
Actually, Narnia may be the only series where I will admit that the movies are, on the whole, better than the books. Like Tolkien, I find Lewis's mishmash of mythologies and critters in Narnia a bit puzzling (*whistles innocently, as my own fantasy universe contains centaurs, elves, dwarves, nixes, kobolds, dragons, oaves, and aliens who look like chickens and drive spaceships*). I also find Lewis's writing really dry and frankly boring in places; Perelandra is a philosophical masterpiece, however, and Out of the Silent Planet contains the only genuinely funny moment in any of his writing.
I really think that stories can be geared to children while remaining readable by adults, which I have found is very much the case with The Hobbit. (And, yes, I consider TH:AUJ better than the book in some respects, but I think that if Tolkien had completed his re-write of The Hobbit I might not be saying this.) However, to me The Chronicles of Narnia never seemed like they could draw in adults as well as children. Hmm.
My favorite of the books might actually be The Magician's Nephew. I've always loved the part where the animals think Uncle Andew is a tree and plant him, and where the plants keep growing at a prodigious rate. (The gold and silver saplings were just amazing.) However, the end of The Last Battle genuinely made me tear up, so, yeah... Well-done death scenes tend to do that to me.
What was it we were reading for literature the other day... something by Flaubert, I think. "The Faithful Heart"? Anyway, it was about a French serving-woman named Felicite who is (probably) happy despite her miserable existence and who is devoted to her parrot. After it dies she starts thinking how the Holy Spirit could be more appropriately depicted as a parrot, since parrots are more intelligent than doves and so forth. When she dies, she sees something like a parrot descending out of the clouds to her.
My first reaction, I will admit without a shade of reluctance, was to tear up. I thought it was quite beautiful. It was once I got to class and sat down and heard the rest discussing it that I realized how ridiculous it actually was (my mom laughed outright when I told her about it), and so now I'm ambivalent about it. I think it's a sort of A Form You Are Comfortable With, but it veers into Narm territory. (The proper literary term for Narm would probably be bathos.) Narm Charm for me, however, at least at first.
How did I get onto parrots? o.O I had better just post my next picture...
I have this problem. I totally have this problem. I'm double stacking books again and all my Rick Riordan books (Percy Jackson, Kane Chronicles, Heroes of Olympus) are lined up on top of another.
Problem is, I don't know where I'd put another bookshelf...
I've tended to call this "new book syndrome", but, yeah, "book hangover" works too and I have totally experienced it... on numerous occasions... Symptoms include: headache from staying up to 1:00 AM in order to finish said book, as well as from lying under the covers awake for the next hour giggling to oneself and rehearsing all of one's favorite parts in one's mind. Also: decreased productivity throughout the next day as one is still mentally rehashing the book.
Nerd problems.
True. Except I don't know that I've ever passed out of the "young enough for fairly tales" stage. I'd rather read fantasy than pretty much any other genre (other than historical fiction, I suppose), hands down.
I'm with G. K. Chesterton. If a man can't be free to believe in fairies, what's left for him...
I would totally do this. I might even actually throw a dictionary. For good measure, I might toss a thesaurus after it. (Yes, I have a thesaurus. It is ancient. It also has words in it that aren't even IN MY DICTIONARY, for goodness's sakes. - And I mean the good dictionary downstairs, not just the pathetic one I keep in my room that doesn't even have "psychosomatic" in it. - Yes, I actually know what that word means.)
I mean, I'm so bad that I can be reading the paper and when I randomly call out, "Grammatical error," or, "Spelling error," no one in my family even blinks. I'm so bad that IN ONE OF MY STORIES a character is a total Grammar Nazi and does the same thing that I do. XD I have really found that bits of myself lodge themselves in my various characters and well Sierel just seems to have taken the Grammar Nazi part of me to heart.
Weird. I used to also hate that character and now I love him.
But I have promised not to ramble about my stories on this blog, so on we go to the next picture!
HAHAHAHAHAHA... The funny thing is that the last one is so totally true! I will become the Master of Solitaire!
I also love Nerts.
(Nerts is basically multiplayer solitaire. Yes, a contradiction in terms, I know. Several members of my family came over yesterday for Easter and we had a nice game of Nerts on the kitchen table. It got very fierce at times, since we are a competitive bunch. We had to turn the ceiling fan on because it was getting hot in the room. I did pretty well though... I never scored below twenty, so, yeah... I will become the Master of Nerts!)
Because I'm just nerdy this way... Hahahahaha...
Oh, and I'd like to share this one also, because I think we can all find it very relevant when we are on our computers and intend to get useful, constructive things done and somehow find ourselves not doing useful constructive things... and instead looking up silly pictures on Pinterest, for instance...
Oh, and bonus points if you also automatically get that song stuck in your head. XD *smiles evilly* I am such a troll.
In Pace Christi,
Elyse
Permission to re-blog that picture about the writing on my blog? Because--that is my life... :D
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