Thursday, September 6, 2007

2 Books

This past week I read two books kinda at the same time. One book I left in the living room and one in my bedroom and read them whenever I could spare the time. The funny thing is these books were polar opposites, but at the same time had a similar underlying theme. The two books were Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury and The Witch of Blackbird Pond by Elizabeth George Speare. They both were great but like I said they could not have been more different.
Something Wicked was such a boy book. It's about 2 boys and a dad who try to figure out how to save the town and themselves from something wicked. I wont tell you how it ends but I will say that is was really well written and fun to read (except for all the swear words! but I always just read over those) It was really fun to read from a male point of view. I realized that I don't remember the last book I read that was written by a man. It's so interesting how the tone of this book is so much different than say Harry Potter which is the story of a boy but written by a woman.
The other book, The Witch of Blackbird Pond, was very cute and fun to read. It was about a girl from Barbados who had to move to Connecticut to get out of marrying a really old dude. She was the granddaughter of a Knight and so was not expected to do anything but look pretty. Coming to the colonies was not exactly what she had expected as she had to work very hard to help her Aunt, Uncle and her 2 cousins with the chores and house hold duties. Girl book through and through! I loved it and would recommend it to anyone!
These books may not seem similar in the least bit, but they are in that both have the underlying themes of love and happiness. Not that the ends of these two books are at all similar, but they still seem, to me, to have the same feel. Sam told me that I see love in all the books I read because I'm such a LOVEly person. I don't know, maybe it is just me and I'm crazy and all, but what do you think? Have you ever read a book without love? All ya need is LOVE! ;}

4 comments:

Sam said...

I heard a segment on NPR recently. It was a group of literature reviewers who read the last 200 books on the NY Times best seller list. I actually missed most of the segment but one thing they said was that of all the books they read only one didn't have a happy ending, didn't leave you with the sense that the protagonists would all be okay. They went on to talk about the pervasive undelying belief of American's in redemption. Not only the opportunity to correct mistakes but the ability to continuously improve and reinvent ourselves. Assuming that's true it makes sense that you would always see love in books. I mean how can you have redemption without love?

andrea said...

I liked your observation of the differences of books written by male vs. female authors about boys. I read the witch of blackberry pond a long time ago...but I don't remember it at all.
Love is one of the basic human needs. It makes sense that it comes up..even in the self help books I read love is a theme. I recently read (listened to) Healthy Aging by Andrew Weil. Love was even mentioned in that a few times.

Buffy said...

Thanks for your comments Drea and Sam. I think that it is true that we need to correct mestakes and learn from others. That must have been a really interesting program.
Drea was Healthy Aging interesting?

andrea said...

yeah, boring because Dr. Weil overly explains everything. Which makes me believe what he's saying, but at the same time I could never have read it...but listening worked well. That sounds really negative...but I did come home and chick out 2 of his other books. He definetley knows what he's talking about. I guess what I'm trying to say is that it's more like studying that a fun read.

drea