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A Wholly Reluctant Blog
A blog by someone who prefers writing to writing about writing, but treats blogging like bad-tasting vitamins.
Currently reading
The Phantom Tollbooth
Ivanhoe
Cloud Atlas
Ishmael: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit
Bulfinch's Mythology
Stars in Their Courses: The Gettysburg Campaign, June-July 1863
A History of Mathematics, Second Edition
Tedious. For a book involving a shark killing people on a resort beach, there's quite a bit of content regarding marital discontent. It's not fair to this book that I saw the movie first and frequently, which offers a tight narrative, a lot of tension, and some great character interaction. The book offers melancholy rooted in marrying below one's class. I found this kind of disdain an irritating distraction of a side story that torpedoed the whole experience exploded the shark for me.
This is a more fitting metaphor.
While being disgruntled might be a genuine symptom of such marriages (even though cinema is notorious for trying to make you believe otherwise), I didn't understand what it was doing in this book. Class conflict would have been much better articulated between Flint and Hooper, which is a point the screenwriter (surprise!) clearly agreed with.
The rating here is buoyed by the fact that it inspired the Spielberg film, and because I always hum "Farewell Spanish Ladies" to myself whenever I go out on a boat... which really doesn't mean anything for the book, but means I'm thinking about the movie again.