SarahJanet's Books

Girls in Pants

I caved on Sunday and bought the third of the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants books. I generally don't buy books anymore, what with the working in the library, but (a) it has a lengthy hold list at the library, (b) I had a gift certificate, and (c) I own the other two already so I thought it would be nice to have all of them.

Anyway, I read it that night (and am paying for the lack of sleep still), and it was very enjoyable, though not quite as good as the first two, I don't think. I like the characters in it a lot, but I don't feel like much happened to them in this one. In the others, major life changing events happened to them, whereas in this book it felt a little like major life changing things were happening to other people and they just happened to be around for it.

I thought it did an excellent job of summing up pre-college feelings, though, and does a killer job of creating the friendship between the four girls. I like books about friends, and these three are good ones.

After finishing that, I went to work the next day and found myself reading (or, more accurately, rereading - what is WRONG with me?) Confessions of a Shopaholic, a book I HATED the first time I read it. Why did I reread it? I don't know. But it still sucked ass the second time. Bleah.

And, finally, after reading those two, I finished up What Noone Tells the Bride, which was a fairly satisfying read and also quite comforting, because it made me feel like it's ok to not feel like all aspects of wedding planning are puppies and sunshine. The thing it focused a lot on was that it's strange and not entirely blissful to abandon your single life, and since that's my big sadness about getting married - not getting to live with Erin and be goofy with her all the time - it made me feel less guilty about feeling that way.

Anyway. Three books this week, and it's only Wednesday! I need to start going to bed earlier.

posted by SarahJanet @ 5:41 PM 0 comments

Return of the King

Well, I ripped through Return of the King and finished it a couple of days ago. It was quite a satisfying read, actually - by far the quickest of the three to read, although that's probably because it's the shortest. (Nerd confession: I read most of the appendices, as well.)

So now I've read them all again since seeing all the movies, and I have to say, I agree with a lot of the decisions that Peter Jackson and co. made. In the books, Arwen is so practically non-existant that people would have been confused beyond all reason when they randomly got married at the end. And as much as I thought Arwen was completely lame and was annoyed that she stole a ton of screen time that could have been Eowyn's, I can see why they made that decision.

That said, I think Movie Eowyn is cooler than Book Eowyn. Book Eowyn is basically just a miserable suicidal ice queen, as far as I can tell, whereas Movie Eowyn was just frustrated by the role of women in her society. I might be biased by the hotness of Miranda Otto, but I like Movie Eowyn better.

The decision to leave out the Scouring of the Shire was understandable, I think, but I did like that it made a fairly powerful statement about how far reaching the effects of the war were. It's not too believeable that the Shire was completely unchanged by such an epic battle, when the rest of Middle Earth was under siege. Mind you, they sort of ignored the attacks on Mirkwood and Lothlorien and the Dwarves and everything in the movies as well, so at least they were consistent.

Anyway. The massive book of doom can now stop taking over my life and I can go back to reading the large pile of other material I've accumulated. I am now working on What Nobody Tells the Bride, which is a surprisingly good book about the parts of marriage people don't talk about so much. I read the Concious Bride a while back, which is in a similar vein, but it was all kind of earth-mothery hippy crap, which I'm not wild about. This one is much more amenable.

posted by SarahJanet @ 2:15 PM 0 comments