Okay. Since seventh grade I've heard nothing but accolades for Brian Jacques's Redwall and have never read it. Now i'm ten years older and a quarter of the way through the book, and i'm bored to tears. For about fifteen minutes I've searched high and low through book reviews seeing if anyone else in the world dislikes it quite like I do, and the result leaves me a little lonely. Am I an ogre? First, there's only so much rodent chivalry I can handle. If you're going to write a book about mice and badgers, make it good. Now, The Wind in the Willows, that was quality animal fiction. I suppose if animals are talking and carrying on like humans in any story, it has to be above average to get me to enjoy it. I'm more willing to care about characters in a story if they're bigger than my thumb.
I mean, I find fieldmice just as cute as the next person finds them, but, I'd rather see them scuttling across a dirt road doing normal mouse things, like eating, not thinking, and scaring the mercy out of my Grandmother. (Not that I want to see my Grandmother terrified...)
I hate starting books and not finishing them. I hate it. It makes me feel like an unfinished person. I can't stand starting a story and not finishing it. But I think it's something I've got to get over, because...there are more books out there like Catcher in the Rye and I'd rather spend my time in that arena. Maybe it's because I have a hard time starting books. Maybe my brain's still on hiatus from graduating and all. But I flew through Catcher, because it was good from the get-go, it made me think, it made me wonder and relate and I loved it.
And okay, one more thing. There may be swearing in Catcher in the Rye, there might be some questionable material, but it is not to be written off. The book is phenomenal. Holden swears because...he swears. Because he's a kid who has never realized it's bad to swear. You see a messed up world through his eyes and it's enlightening. It's worthwhile, because there are Holdens in our lives, in our world. There's a little bit of Holden in us. And it might be beneficial to slip into the kid's mind so we as Christians, as humans, can understand/deal with our sicknesses and the desperate longings in others'.
Stepping down off my soapboxes and inviting your criticisms...
until next time.
