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Monday, September 13, 2010

Book Meme - Day 26

Day 26 - OMG WTF? OR most irritating/awful/annoying book ending


Tim Winton, The Shallows. Everybody I know raves on about Tim Winton.  I always had it in for him because he won the Vogel Prize the year I entered it.  OK, my MS was a pile of crap, but even so, it was personal!


I found this is the library a couple of years ago and thought I should at least try to read one of his books.  I didn't like it that much but I did persevere - it was short, he's meant to be one of Australia's best living writers, yada yada yada. It was OK.  It was the short of book that forces you to put quite a big emotional commitment into reading it.  I started to care about what happened.  And then all the whales died anyway.  I hated the ending!  I don't automatically expect a happy ending to a book, but it felt like a cop-out.  It felt like a kid knocking down his Lego creation because he was bored with it.


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Wombat has a Drama assignment to do.  I usually have to help him with school work, but at least one was fun!  He had to pick a film or TV performance and analyse it in terms of use of voice, movement and space.  He made it really easy by choosing Christopher Lee as Count Dooku in Revenge of the Sith.  He's only on screen for a few minutes, which made it easy to analyse fully.  And his performance is a real gift!  It was so simple and fun to answer the questions.  And Wombat was able to pick up most of it himself with me making notes (and even showed knowledge of some quite sophisticated dramatic conventions - I guess at those countless hours watching TV has paid off!).


On Saturday we went to a book signing by Andy Griffiths, childrens' author extraordinaire , who was delightful and genuinely pleased to meet his fans.  He was also obviously genuinely thrilled that Baby Bear produced two first editions of his earlier books to be signed.  Pictures may appear on Facebook when I download them.  Maybe even here.


George and I made a major effort in book sorting yesterday.  We have sort of finished, in a sense - the boxes of books still exist but they have been sorted into SPECIFIC boxes.  This counts as progress.

1 comment:

2paw said...

Tim Winton: I cannot read his books, I never understand why they are so good, I have tried a little reading, but I cannot related to them. At all.