Friday, February 02, 2007

Books I've read in 2007, part 3

This was one of my favorite books when I was in the 9th or 10th grade. I thought it hilarious and very sexy -- so sexy that I took it to school and had classmates read some of the "goood parts." I've been looking for this book for years, and I finally found it a couple months ago at a book store in Myrtle Beach.
But in rereading it, I found it hard to remember just what those "good parts" were. It doesn't seem sexy nor particularly funny -- a young woman nearing thirty decides to kill herself because she is unmarried and nobody really notices that the poor girl is depressed. Now part of the reason that I didn't find this book-length suicide note as uproariously funny in 2007 as I did in 1974 is because I used to be in the second category of Jean de la Brevure's famous quote ""Life is a tragedy for those who feel, a comedy for those who think" - and now I find myself more and more of a feeler rather than a thinker -- which sounds like I grope women on the bus or something, but I just couldn't laugh at this. It seemed too tragic. I kept thinking she needed to quit worrying about getting married and get on with her life.
Maybe another part of the problem is the cover of the new edition which shows a Twiggy-like model nothing at all like the zaftig Ms. Levine.
One other thing I remember about this book was how excited I was when the movie based on the book came out -- and how disappointed and angry I was after watching the piece of celluloid crap that had nothing to do with the book other than the title. I have never trusted that any movie based on a book will be any good from that day on. And in fact now when I find a book I love, I just hope and pray that they won't make a movie of it.

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