For going highest on Jesus' Ladder of Literacy, I received a gift certificate to Barnes & Noble. I set out eagerly to find a couple of new scripts to read.
Full of anticipation, I head over to the section marked "Drama", where there is Jack Shit (Hi Jack, how ya doin'?). I wanted a legal copy of Proof rather than the photocopy I have now, but they didn't have it. I looked for anything new and modern and exciting that I had at least heard good things about. Nope. I even looked for Sam Shepard, nope. They had tons of monolouge books and scene books and books to turn you into an actor overnight. They had Neil Simon and Thorton Wilder and an entire section devoted to Shakespeare.
Disenheartened, I decided to look for a collection of Miss Marple's, having failed to keep up with the television series. Nothing. Poirot has her beat and I've seen all of those on television and since they really didn't fiddle with the stories much buying a mystery book that you already know the outcome to is really just a bit ridiculous.
Although, I worked myself into a rage when watching "Mission Organisation" on HGTV the other day. The professional organiser was advising a couple about ways to cut down clutter and she said that the worst thing to do is to horde books. "Books are one of those things, you read them, and you pass them on. Don't keep them."
Don't keep books? The woman was insane. I look at my bookshelf, packed with all of the books that I need, and think constantly of all the others I have at home that I want to get up here except that the bookcase won't hold them.
How could I get rid of 1984, of Trainspotting? How could I part with my LOTR and Douglas Adams? I can understand loaning books, and have no problems doing so as long as I get them back, but, give them away? The reason I bought them in the first place was so I could have them, forever, to read whenever I liked. Otherwise I would have got them from the library and given them a trial run before I bought them.
I do the same thing with films, if I don't know that I want it, I rent it first. No point in paying a lot of money for a crap film. Bye Bye Birdie for example, I should simply have rented, except that I wanted to know the whole thing by heart when it came time for high school auditions.
I don't see the owning of many books and films as materialistic. It's like having a wealth of knowledge and experience that you can open up whenever you want.
But back to B&N. Having been twice disappointed, I tried to recall all the books I've been advised to read, and I couldn't find any of them. They didn't have Middlesex, they didn't have Drop City, they didn't have Robin Hood (least I couldn't find it) they didn't even have the other Trainspotting-author books.
So I decided to go with some I might've gotten from a library instead. I've wanted to read both Gone With the Wind and The Three Musketeers for a while, but I figured I could get them out of the library. Two weeks is all I ought to need for a book that long. Well, since it was a gift certificate, and it wasn't my money it was like a free book anyway. I bought Gone With the Wind and I'm about four hundred pages through it right now. This was Monday I started reading.
I rather like it. From the little bits here and there that I have seen from the movie, I have to read it to see where they come. Besides that it was a metaphor in Leo the Russian's play.
There are places where I cannot believe it was written by a woman, places where it sounds a whole lot like Hermann Melville. When you read Jane Austen or the Bronte sisters, you know they're women. Even George Eliot sounds like a woman- Dickens knew she was.
I think principally women don't write characters like Scarlett. Men do. Read The Woman Who Walked Into Doors, that's a man trying to write like a woman and everybody says Tony Doyle does a fabulous job of it, but a woman wouldn't write her so stupid, so crass, so out of control.
In a lot of ways, Scarlett is the same way. She is vain and hard and selfish and totally without the ability to analyse anything (though Mitchell can't keep that consistant, some places she does, but when it comes to men she can't) and women don't tend to write women that way- not the heroines, at least. I don't know why, positive role models and fighting stereotypes to the core, I suspect, but they don't.
However, I bought the book in hopes that it would last me through the summer. Sighing, I realise I read too fast and will be finished before the month is out.