after seeing the promos for the movie, i ordered the book "the other boleyn girl" and i have to tell you, i was not disappointed.

i spent the next two days doing nothing but reading (a guilty pleasure i have not been able to do for, lordy, i don't know how long)

i poured through all six hundred and something pages, pausing hardly for anything. it was the most blissful two days i spent in a long time. no guilt, no feeling like i had to put my book down to serve someone else's needs. wonderful!

as a matter of fact, when i finished the book, i wanted another. desperately.

i love historical novels. not those silly romance things (do i seem like a girl who especially now would be into romance novels) but rather, i like the mystery, intrique, scandal of it all mixed with history.

julie, if you're out there, still waiting on yours...

one of my favorite books was "the alienist" that dealt with turn of the century new york city, and a man who actually (in the book) was a profiler before profiling was cool (or even a "science"). i didn't much care for the second book, but the first was amazing.

last summer, i read another historical fiction book also, which sadly, i can't remember the name of. but i'm going to try and find it because there was another sequel to it as well (again, probably not as good as the first)

i find it so hard to get into a modern day novel. it has to deal with unusual subjects, and they all have the same plots, the same formulas to them.

at any rate, i simply don't know how the movie will encompass and incorporate all of the facets of the novel. after all, the novel was over 600 pages...how can all that be incorporated into a 2 hour movie? how? i'm glad i actually read the book before the movie because most of the time, the book is sooooooo much better (house of sand and fog, divinchi code, in the garden of good and evil, phantom)

and speaking of reading, i read these short stories by such "greats" as nabokov and flannery o'conner (which I LOVE, and i think most will see in my picks for cfs those are the sorts of stories i like and pick most) and i think i write many of my stories like them, not really a "point" or a "plot" but in the characters themselves the actual theme emerges and so i wonder...are we now a society that demands some sort of action plot? something that drives us to those mainstream struggles of "good vs evil" as opposed to the exploration of personal conflicts and how they affect each of us as individuals. i mean, i think of the book "the old man and the sea" which, frankly, i didn't like, but i had to read TWICE, once in high school and then again in college...and why? because that book was about the old man, and the major conflict was within himself, his need to haul this big fish in just to feed himself and his family. the struggle with the fish and the elements (including sharks) was really secondary to the story, but the crux of it was about him, his thoughts, his struggles.

and honestly, nabokov and o'conner weren't even as blantant as that. in there stories, you must "read between the lines" and understand the times in which they were written.

hmmmmmm....