Friday, June 10, 2011

30 Days of Books, Days 10 - 12. (Yeah, it's an epic one today.)

As I have been excessively lazy and I'm attempting to catch up on my missed posts, I have decided to bore you all with an extremely long post.
Bear with me, please? I promise Day 12 is very short.

[Favourite classic book.]

This is my cover of the book. Well, it was. I'm looking accusingly in the direction of one Liska Shomanla, whose real name isn't as brilliant as that one.
Thanks, Liska, for stealing my copy of Animal Farm.
Anyway, I very much liked this book. It's far better than 1984 (don't spear me!) and I gobbled this book up in an afternoon. It's not big, so it's not like it's that hard to do, but to understand it... I was poring over it over and over - and not only because I had an assignment to do on it. I'd never read overt satire like this. I'd never read a novel with such amazing depth to it. We were also learning about the rise of communism and the Russian revolution in history, and these two together nearly made me weep with joy.

I really need to re-read this.

To close this, I'm going to quote a conversation between Nathan and I last weekend.
Nate: You've read Animal Farm, right?
Me: Of course. It was very depressing.
Nate: WHAT? It was amazing. How can it be depressing?
Me: [knowing this would rile Nate up exceptionally well] Buster learned to write his name. I mean, that's pretty hard, being a horse. And he had hooves. But he still learned to write his name. And they sent him to the glue factory.
Nate: Satire. Russian revolution. Communism. Do those words mean anything to you?
Me: The horse died, Nate. It died.
Nate: [facepalm] ... you're stirring me, aren't you?
[A book you hated.]

It was always going to be a Winton.
Rather than a rant against - actually, screw it, this is going to be a rant against Tim Winton in general with a few choice references about the stupid book.

Dear Tim Winton,
I don't like you very much.
Well, not you. I'm sure you are a lovely person. You seem like you could be, what with your penchant for writing across the ages and putting Australian literature on the world map. Kudos to you, by the way.
What I don't like about you, and this is more criticism against your writing style than anything else, is that your ability to not use a full stop is now legendary.
If I were to do the same thing that you do you know that thing where you refuse to use any sort of discernable punctuation and just keep going on and on
and then suddenly go onto a new line and describe it as post-modern -
I. Would. Be. Shot.
If I had an essay like that in high school, no amount of pleading with my English teachers would allow me to get away with writing like you. I would be a laughing stock.
Heck, if I wrote like that in primary school, I'd not pass into the next grade.

The sad thing is, you are apparently the golden boy of Australian literature. This depresses me a whole lot. I may not be excellent with my grammar and whatnot, but seriously, I have mastered the usage of punctuation pretty effectively.
Your rant in Lockie Leonard where Lockie goes into a wave as a boy and comes out a machismo man? It was ridiculous. Any child could have seen the moment where Lockie stopped being Lockie and started being you. Separate yourself from your characters, man! What thirteen year old child is going to start spouting off "We're just kids, Vick, I don't know what love is and nor do you"? What thirteen year old kid is going to start up like that?
Also, that whole wave as a phallic symbol thing? Really, really creepy.

I have blocked out most of An Open Swimmer, but I do remember that I didn't like the story. The plot was not effectively mastered. The dialogue was ridiculous. I hated the 'postmodernism', whatever that was. (Why is the exclusion of a full stop so inspired?)

Mr Winton, in order to be postmodern, I've been told you need to learn the rules first. You can't start toying with rules if you don't know them. And I might just be a nineteen-year-old girl with the ability to rant, but I don't believe you know the rules. Just saying. If you want to understand postmodernism, and surrealist writing, and generally being awesome, I say go and look at Salvador DalĂ­'s paintings. And do it  when he's showing at an exhibition. He starts off painting realism. Then he starts melting clocks.

Like I said, I think you're probably a lovely person.
But I just don't like your books.
And I (and my year 9 classmates) all hated this with a passion, where we actively petitioned our teacher to please never make us read one of your books ever again.

[A book you used to love but you don't anymore.]

I really don't have one for here. I associate books with my memories, much like I do with music.
So my books never get hated, they just stay in my mind, associated with a time and with a place within these last nineteen years.

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