Posts Tagged ‘reading’
I Am Legend the movie
I first reviewed the original I Am Legend book back in October 2011, it was a really great book but there were things I didn’t understand at the time, some of them were explained nicely in the movie but some are still left hanging.
Here be spoilers, but as I’m sure you’ve already seen the movie it won’t matter much.
The premise of I Am Legend, the movie starring Will Smith is very similar. There is a new cure for cancer which causes a plague, 90% of the population around the world die while most of the rest become very aggressive to the point of throwing themselves at their target, whether it be a person or a wall, until it breaks, not the person but the object, the others are immune. Robert Neville, played by Will Smith, is an army scientist and immune. His family were accidentally killed while being evacuated from New York city, he is left alone with his daughter’s puppy there seem to be no other immune survivors. He uses his own blood to help find a cure and manages to do so just in time to pass it on to Anna and Ethan who have heard his message of hope broadcast every day, they then take it to a survivor’s colony while he protects them.
This helps. If Neville is already a scientist and understands the virus before the book/movie begins then it makes enormous sense for him to continue working on the process of finding a cure, it wasn’t clear in the book what his occupation beforehand was and how it would help him work through the chemistry needed.
There were many differences between the movie and the book but it made no difference to my enjoyment of both of them. They’ve taken the essence of the book, distilled it and made it into a really good movie. Yes, I know I’m partial to Will Smith and that’s one of the reasons I had to see it but it is still a good movie. It has all the horror of being the only person alive while other beings are trying to kill you, it shows animals roaming the streets, it has some awesome special effects and it shows how nature will take over a city when people vacate it.
I bought the DVD and watched some of the extras as well which were well worth it. The movie only looks at the situation from a specific viewpoint in one specific city, it does its best to show some old news programmes showing the problem being replicated world wide and Neville does explain using some numbers how it’s affected the entire world but it still seems rather distant. The extras change that. They’ve been organised by Smith’s wife, Jada Plunkett-Smith, who is a very good actor in her own right, and they are four animated stories of different people in different cities around the world. They show stories of immune survivors and of plague ravished survivors, they are really powerful in their own right and support the main film immensely. I sat back having watched the movie and all four back to back stunned, in shock, it was challenging to come back to normal life. One of them was written by Orson Scott Card who is an excellent science fiction author in his own right but also co-authored The Abyss with James Cameron, you can find this book and two others by Orson Scott Card available for sale here.
Squid Ink – Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Dreaming of a new life
Squid Ink has hit the nail on the head with this one. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Phillip K. Dick is a classic science fiction novel, it was made into a movie with Harrison Ford as Rick Deckard under the title of Blade Runner. It’s the story of androids who don’t want to be decommissioned (i.e. killed) and they fight back, I think we all dream of a new life. One of the questions that could be asked is whether the androids are considered sentient and this question could be extended to all life that isn’t human.
It’s one of those books I really recommend everyone read. I have one copy of Blade Runner available for sale.
Mondayitis – Gnomeangel
What do you read?
I’m not that picky, but I’d say my main go to for reading is romance; paranormal, chick lit, urban fantasy, etc. I like to escape. But I do have a passion for the classics so I have been known to spend days immersed in Jane Austen (which lets face it is old school chick lit).
I’m partial to a good thriller, although I haven’t read one in ages. I’m also quite fond of a good bit of literature.
Every year I attempt to read 60 books in a year. If you’re interested you can see my lists of books read since 2007 here.
…some of our book collection…
Why do you read?
Good question… I’ve been reading since I was young, my Dad actually learned to read at the age of 21 when I was a only a small child and as he learnt to read he taught me to. So it’s always been something I cherished because it was something he taught me and we did together. I read now as an adult because I really prefer it as a medium of entertainment over most of the stuff on television and the internet can only hold my attention for so long.
Reading for me is really about escapism and letting your mind be taken on an adventure. It’s also a great way to increase your vocabulary for Words with Friends!
Do you read for work or for pleasure and is there any difference between the two?
I definitely believe that there’s a difference between the two. I read as part of my job, so that’s reading as work, but predominantly I read for pleasure. I think there’s a huge difference; I tend to see any reading that I’m being made to do as a chore and unless the material is really captivating I resent having to read it. (I’m like a petulant child that way!)
Do you read to your kids or to someone else’s kids?
We don’t actually have children, although that’s set to change mid June with the arrival of our first child. I have big plans of reading to our child(ren), in fact one of the first things I purchased to celebrate our pregnancy was a book. I’ve been slowly collecting books to populate the nursery library. I’ve been hunting for all the books that my husband and I read and loved as children. Reading to our kids is one of the things I’m more looking forward to doing.
…nursery library taking shape…
Can you do the Safety Dance while reading?
I’m a pretty flexible reader but I’m not 100% sure that in my current condition I could pull this off.
Are you a rabid Discworld/Twilight/Harry Potter fan and would you attend a flash mob dressed as your favourite character?
How to answer this without being lynched… I appreciate the wonderful things for encouraging reading in teenagers that these books have done but I’m a little scared for the future generations if they consider Twilight to be well written. But each to their own… As for the flash mob, I think those days are behind me.
Angie is the creative genius behind GnomeAngel; a blog filled with snippets of life from the Australian Capital. She’s happily married to an imperfectly perfect man and shares her house with a Beagle named George, a golden retriever named Tyson and a screeching budgie called Reg. If you’d like to find out more about her you can stalk her on Twitter.
Mothers’ Day 2012
I sometimes write about Mothers’ Day, generally when the day or the presents have stood out. This year is one of those.
My OH gave me slippers which I’m wearing as I write, he generously let me have them a week and a half early to stop my toes touching the floor in my old ones.
After seeing our respective mothers we came home and the kids tell me to open my hands and close my eyes. A couple of packages in one hand and something around the other wrist I’m allowed to open my eyes again.
If you look at the photo you’ll see my loot. Around my wrist was a watch, one that won’t stop working or go backwards as normal watches do with me, it’s going to be correct twice a day! The earrings say ‘In one ear’ and ‘Out the other’, I think they came from my sister – I don’t want to know what she’s suggesting. On the card you’ll see four badges the kids picked up on Free Comics Day, specially for my collection, and a book. Richard Gordon is one of my favourite authors and I’m still trying to decide if I have a collection, I posted on this topic almost three years ago. I don’t have The Captain’s Table for sale but there are a few others here, some of the covers are really lovely. Some of Doctor books were made into movies with the gorgeous Dirk Bogarde in the lead role, he’s written his own autobiography, I’ve written about him before and have some of his books available for others delictation.
Richard Gordon! Earrings!
Moomin greets Squid Ink
Some of my favourite books as a child were the Moomin books by Tove Jansson. They have a magical, pleasant, gentle quality that many books don’t have. The covers match those qualities and you can see three of them here.
Apology
Mondayitis didn’t happen today as you’ve probably guessed. I’ve not been well lately and I’ve tried not to overwhelm people with the details, but it’s been one thing after another and I’ve been struggling to keep my head above water. I’ve reminded a number of people about Mondayitis only to have them remind me they had already provided their answers, when I checked they’d even been published. I have two people providing me with answers today so the next two weeks are covered and I could have thought of something to fill in this morning’s Mondayitis but I had some more health challenges and ended up sleeping most of the morning.
Instead I’ll restate the questions for you. If you’re interested in providing your answers leave a comment here and I’ll get back to you. Please bear in mind I endeavour to have a G rated blog and your answers will be vetted.
What do you read?
Why do you read?
Do you read for work or pleasure?
Can you do the Safety Dance while reading?
Safety Dance – Men Without Hats
Are you a Discworld/Twilight/Harry Potter fan?
Would you attend a flash mob dressed as your favourite character?
Audio books
I love audio books, mostly. They can be a great way of ‘reading’ a book in a place I wouldn’t normally be able to read; while walking or driving are two typical times. I’ve ‘read’ a lot of books over the years in the car and have enjoyed or not the delivery of the reader. My most recent book was Gilgamesh by Joan London read by Deidre Rubenstein and I’ll talk more about that another day, it’s a great book and, I feel, made better by a great reader. One of the best parts of ‘reading’ a book while I’m driving is it limits the things I’m doing, I have to concentrate on my driving and the book so it eliminates any ability to think of other things and ruminate, it’s a great way to clear my head of unwanted and unnecessary thoughts.
Audio books are fabulous for reading books in awkward places, they’re even better for people who have vision problems and are unable to see the printed page, they’re also great for people with mobility issues who can’t hold a book or turn a page. There should be more and they should be cheaper. There are definitely more than there used to be and they’re more easily available. When I first started listening about six years ago the range available at the library was rather limited as was the range at book shops. The library has now tripled their range and also introduced books on CD as well as audio cassette, it’s still challenging to find them in book shops but there are more around. At the time I was sent to a book shop that only sold audio books I never made it there but it looked very promising, a good business niche.
I looked up Deidre Rubenstein and found very little information on her audio books, she does have a brief mention of it on her Wikipedia page and at the bottom in the References section there’s supposedly a link to the Louis Braille website with some information about her and the awards she’s won but it appears someone has hijacked the domain and inserted a rather useless blog instead. What I’d really like is a website listing the audio book readers and the books they’ve read. Rubenstein was really very good and I would like to be able to ‘read’ more books read by her. If you happen to know of a suitable website I’d appreciate hearing about it.
The best readers are those who are accomplished actors and can do a wide variety of accents and characters. When you have a poor reader it’s hard to distinguish between the book and reader to be able to tell if the book is good or not. I was listening to a Terry Pratchett book some years ago and the reader was just okay and it made a big difference to my liking of the book. I’d like to suggest Miriam Margolyes would make a good reader, I’ve seen her do a range of different characters, all excellently.
Gone – Michael Grant
This is the first in a series of books where all of a sudden there is no-one over the age of 15, it seems to be the magical number and as soon as you turn 15 you ‘wink out’ and go somewhere else. It’s an interesting book in that it illustrates, at least for me, how books can polarise people. I read a couple of reviews of it on GoodReads and was quite interested to find people who hated the book enough to struggle to the end and then had to defend themselves whereas I found it a fascinating book.
The basic premise is that one day everyone over the age of 15 disappears, parents, teachers, garbage collectors, everyone. Later on in the book we find people disappearing the second they turn 15 and that scares everyone. Just imagine what happens when the oldest person in the village and surrounding areas is almost 15, my first thought was of Lord of the Flies and judging by the reviews I wasn’t the only one. There are two factions in the place, the village kids (Perdido Beach) and the private school kids (Coates) – the ones who were sent to a boarding school as their parents had money to be able to afford to send them away when they were trouble, not in trouble but trouble with a capital T. Then they start finding out some of them have powers. Different types of powers, Lana is able to heal, Sam is able to create a light which can burn, others can teleport and others can run so fast no-one can see them.
Sam is a reluctant hero, he’s the one who keeps his head and we keep being reminded of this, one day he was in the school bus when the driver had a heart attack, he saw, took the driver out of the seat and brought the bus to a safe stop, ever since then he’s been called School Bus Sam. This is brought up constantly as a reminder that heroes can be anywhere and also that sometimes it only takes a clear head to be a hero. Everyone looks to Sam to lead them but he doesn’t want to do that. Caine is the opposite, he wants power, he wants to lead and he thinks Sam will get in the way so he does everything he can to destroy him. Drake is crazy and loves his guns far too much, he’s just waiting for Caine to ‘wink out’ at 15 so he can take over.
I loved this book. It’s aimed at the young adult market, there is violence and it’s rather more controlled than in Lord of the Flies by William Golding. I had so much trouble putting it down and at 560 pages it took a while to read. I was constantly wondering what was going to come next, what would happen when Sam and Caine came to the point of ‘winking out’? Other things going through my head were that with that kind of stress the kids of Perdido Beach would be maturing much faster than normal but would it be fast enough to replace the population? Would they ever rejoin the world? Would they figure out they needed to grow food and would it be fast enough?
Other things I found interesting about this book were the characters. Little Pete is autistic, he’s lost in his own world and is only interested in his game, but it turns out that when he’s threatened he can remove himself from the scene and saves himself and his sister, Astrid from Drake. Astrid is interesting in her own right. She’s 14, 10 years older than Little Pete, she’s brainy and has no friends as she alienates them by being too brainy and pointing out different parts of speech after they’ve said it. For example:
‘Demand of who’ Sam said. He zipped his jacket. It was chilly. ‘You want to go demand justice from Caine?’
‘Rhetorical question,’ Astrid commented.
Pointing out that it was a rhetorical question was totally useless but this is the kind of thing she did. She did this continually throughout the book, not just this but also helping to steady Sam and keep Little Pete quiet. I suspect she was also on the Autistic Spectrum but much higher functioning than Little Pete.
I’m waiting anxiously for the next book called Hunger and the one after that, Lies. This is one of the books I was given at the Digital Parents Conference last month by Hardie Grant Egmont, it’d be nice if they gave me the rest of the series but I suspect I’ll have to buy or borrow.