Fahrenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury

Fahrenheit 451 is part of the classic dystopian triangle, along with Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four. It was the last of the three to be published, and the last of the three that I read. And I don't QUITE know how to feel about it.

It's the story of Guy Montag, who's a fireman. Except that in this weird, dystopian world, firemen don't come to save you from a fire. No, they come to burn down your house with you inside it. Why? Because you happen to own books. Why burn people who own books? Because books cause unhappiness and conflict in society, and they encourage people to think for themselves.

Except then Guy gets his hands on a book for the first time, and it changes his entire life.

I think my problems with this book was twofold:

1. I reads its 200-odd pages over the course of nine days, rather than reading it in one solid sitting. So from one day to the next, I'd forget a lot of the details of what I'd read and have to decide between backtracking to find out the details or press on regardless and have a few moments of confusion; and

2. It's the kind of book that's great to study in high school, where you have an English teacher pointing out all the symbolism and meaning and major turning points. And because I didn't have that, I finished the book feeling like I was missing something, missing what it is about this book that makes people love it so much.

The ending was pretty action-packed, but the middle was a little...draggy for me. So while I liked it, I'm not entirely sure I understood it. Because sometimes my brain doesn't deal so well with stories that have a lot of layers to them. And this was a prime example of that - the problem here was definitely me and not the book.

Have you read it? What did you think??

K xx

Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoevsky

I knew literally nothing about this book when I added it to my Classics Club list. All I knew was that I wanted to read more Russian literature, and that seeing as I've read Tolstoy and Chekov in the past, Dostoevsky seemed like the next logical step.

I had pretty high hopes for this when the back of the copy I borrowed from work described it as something along the lines of "the most accessible novel of all time". It...was not. I should really know by now that the word of academics on the back of Penguin Classics is to be taken with a hefty dose of salt. But no.

This book is the story of Raskolnikov, an indebted student who comes up with a theory that extraordinary people should be outside the law because they add value to society. In order to prove his theory - and counter his money issues - he decides to kill his pawnbroker. Except when he goes to kill her, he finds that her disabled and well loved sister is there too. So he kills her as well. The rest of the book is basically documenting his spiraling guilt and how this changes him.

I really loved the first fifty to one hundred pages of this book. It was tense and a little disturbing, and I was totally on board with it. And I loved the last hundred or so pages, where Raskolnikov's guilt finally drives him to breaking point.

But the 400-odd pages in between? Yeah, that was a little rough. It was slow and - as with my experience of reading Tolstoy - full of lengthy side plots involving characters I didn't really care about. Everyone seemed to have five hundred different names and nicknames, and I struggled - especially when I was only reading 25 or so pages a night - to keep all the characters straight in my head.

So overall, this came out at middle of the road territory for me. I'm glad I read it, and I can see why so many people rave about this book. But I definitely wouldn't describe it as "accessible".

Have you read it? What did you think?

K xx

The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde's only novel is a deliciously creepy one, full of the dangers of extreme vanity and always seeking out the beauty in life. My first exposure to this book was approximately a thousand years ago when my little brother's Year 6 teacher(!!!) made it assigned reading for their class. Which, WHAT?!?! Obviously, he couldn't get through it himself, so Mum read it aloud to him and I picked up bits of the story from that.

But I digress.

This is the story of Dorian Gray, a beautiful young man. His friend, Basil Hallward, paints Dorian's portrait and rapidly becomes obsessed with his subject, seeking to spend time with him at every opportunity. But once Dorian meets Basil's popular and somewhat foppish friend, Lord Henry Wolton, who believes that life should be spent pursuing beauty and enjoyment, he becomes equally infatuated and has little time for Basil.

In a moment of weakness, Dorian gives up his soul so that his portrait will grow old and ugly while he remains young and beautiful. What follows is nothing short of scandalous, both for the time of publication and today.

At the beginning of the book, Dorian is basically a blank canvas, easily influenced by those around him. It's his infatuation with Lord Henry's attitudes that ultimately leads him to give away his soul. As time passes and the loss of his soul has more and more of an impact, he becomes a deliciously evil and cold character, almost sociopathic despite having the face of an angel.

It's a book that's full of Wilde's typically beautiful writing, a hefty dose of homoeroticism, and some truly incredible characters. It's not one that I'll read regularly, but it IS one that I'll come back to over the years because it's such an astonishing piece of fiction.

Have you read it? What did you think??

K xx

One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

I'm going to be honest, friends: this book was MAJOR struggle bus territory for me. M.A.J.O.R. And really, I should have known that going in. Not long after I first published my Classics Club list, a friend emailed me to warn me about this book, and to emphasise the need to read it in physical form so that you could easily flip to the family tree five million times while reading. And hooooooooo boy, was he right.

This book tells the story of one family living in a small town in rural South America over several generations and one hundred years. It's part epic history, part magical realism, and it's a story told completely without dialogue.

It took me a while to wrap my head around the fact that one minute, it felt like historical fiction and the next, there'd be a plague of insomnia and no one in town would sleep for years, or a character would come back from the dead, or it would rain non-stop for months and yet nothing would flood, or a character would suddenly get blown away with the wind while pegging out the washing. In short, it was bizarre.

But ultimately, the magical realism elements were the least of my problems with this book. The lack of dialogue made it a very slow read for me. And that family tree moved completely invaluable, because every generation of characters has THE EXACT SAME NAMES as the generation before it, and it's impossible to keep track of the characters. Especially when one of the Aurelianos ends up having seventeen sons with seventeen different women, and ALL SEVENTEEN OF THEM are named Aureliano. Seriously.

Add in the fact that it features grown men falling in love with pre-teen girls and waiting for them to reach puberty before insisting on marriage, and aunts ending up in sexual relationships with their nephews, and it really wasn't an easy book to read. Or an enjoyable book a lot of the time.

There's essentially no plot a lot of the time - it's just a long rambling history. And while the writing was often beautiful - and don't get me wrong, there really were some BEAUTIFUL moments - there just wasn't sufficient payoff for me to find this book anything but a struggle.

Have you read it? What did you think??

K xx

Agnes Grey - Anne Bronte

Agnes Grey, written by Anne, the most overlooked Bronte sister, tells the story of a young woman who decides to become a governess after her father speculates and loses all their money. She works first for a horrible family with horrible children, then for a family with teenage daughters more in need of a companion than a governess. And then she falls in love, because of course she does.

In a lot of ways, this book feels a hell of a lot like Jane Eyre Light. Agnes isn't as passionate or compelling a character as Jane is, and there are - thankfully - far fewer mentally ill wives hidden in the attic. But Agnes is still quiet and loyal to those she loves, exactly like Jane.

It's quite a short book, and at times the story falls flat simply because it IS so short. Certain scenes could easily have been expanded upon to truly bring life to the characters. The writing, while it lacks Charlotte's turn of phrase and Emily's dark passion, is compelling in its own way. And despite being Jane Eyre Light, I found myself invested in Agnes' story and wanted her to get a happy ending.

So despite the inevitable comparisons to its more well known cousin, Agnes Grey is definitely worth the read, if only to the experience of reading all three Bronte sisters.

Have you read it? What did you think??

K xx

The Diary of Anne Frank - Anne Frank

I first read this book, as so many of us did, in my early teens. And at the time, I don't think I really appreciated just how significant a document it actually is. So I'm incredibly glad that I chose to reread this book as part of my Classics Club project.

It's always hard to review published diaries, because no matter how well-known they are, the fact remains: the author never intended them to be read by anyone other than themselves. Diaries are a place to dump the emotions you can't discuss with anyone, the thoughts you need to just get out so they're no longer floating around in your brain. Especially when you're a 14 year old girl.

So you'll find hundreds of reviewers out there complaining about how whiny and annoying this book is. Which, in some ways, I understand. Anne's a 14 year old girl. And to some extent, ALL 14 year old girls are whiny and annoying.

But I'd like to see any of those reviewers trapped in a tiny apartment with seven other people for YEARS, constantly fearing for your life, not knowing whether you'd be caught or blown up in an air raid, or starve to death if something happened to the people who were protecting you. I'd like to see those people go through what Anne Frank went through, and still retain the amount of optimism that flows through her writing. Because it really is astonishing.

It's not always an easy book to read. But it is a hugely significant one, capturing not only what life was like for Jewish people in Holland during the early stages of the war, and just how quickly things changed, but in capturing very clearly what life was like for one small group in hiding, and the lengths that people were willing to go to in order to keep them safe.

So yes, Anne was an occasionally whiny and annoying 14 year old girl. But considering that she was a 14 year old girl writing a diary? Her writing was often poignant and astonishing, and this book should remain a must read for everyone.

Have you read it? What did you think??

K xx

Lysistrata and Other Plays - Aristophanes

I first heard of Aristophanes at some point in high school, while studying something cheerful like Antigone or Medea during VCE. And in comparison, Greek comedy sounded like a hell of a lot of fun, which is why I figured I may as well add some to my Classics Club list, especially after hearing Lysistrata referred to as essentially a feminist story.

This collection started with The Achanians, which is essentially arguing for peace during a long war with Sparta. Next came The Clouds, which basically takes the piss out of the Greek philosophers. And finally, I came to Lysistrata, which features the women of the various Greek city states deciding that the quickest way to end a war is to withhold sex.

Of the three, I think The Achanians may have been my favourite. All three featured a hell of a lot of dick jokes, but The Achanians also involved a lot of poking fun at the other city states, which was still pretty damned funny thousands of years later. That said, Lysistrata is definitely a rare classic in that it's very female dominated and revolves around women having agency over their bodies, so it was definitely a pretty great read as well.

I had a few issues with the translation in this one. Obviously, a lot of the humour wouldn't translate well to modern English - thankfully, Penguin always provide plenty of footnotes on that front! - but Alan H. Sommerstein made the decision to make the Spartans have stereotypical Scottish accents and mannerisms, and the Corinthians have stereotypical Irish accents and mannerisms. Which DID work moderately well - it gave a sense of how the Athenians felt about each of their neighbouring city states. But at the same time, it was totally bizarre to have characters with Scottish accents talking about Zeus and Athena and Poseidon.

On the whole, this collection was funnier than I was anticipating - I thought it would be more like Shakespeare's comedies, where they're hilarious in person but on the page, they tend to be pretty dry, so I was pleasantly surprised to find myself laughing out loud while reading it, and I'm definitely glad I put it on my Classics Club list!

Have you read it? What did you think??

K xx

Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

This book was part of a very long list of suggested reading that my English teacher handed out when I was in Year 10. Obviously, given that "dystopian" wasn't really a genre in 1998, my teacher told us that it was a classic sci-fi story, and I immediately dismissed it as too boring to read because sci-fi novels meant spaceships, and that meant snoozeville. 

Oh, fifteen year old Kirsti. How foolish you were. 

In a lot of ways, it's not surprising that this book ends up on banned books lists as often as it does. The dystopian society that Huxley created is a fairly disturbing one. Humans are grown in laboratories, and their social status determined before they're even created. Those doomed to be menial Epsilons are cloned dozens of times and bred to be stupid and unquestioning, living only for the drugs provided to them by the government. Meanwhile, the Alphas and Betas receive hours of subliminal messages as children about how much better it is being their caste. 

All children are encouraged to participate in "erotic play", which creeped me out more than a little bit, and the whole society has a very casual attitude to sex. Relationships are discouraged in favour of a string of hook ups with people at your own level in society, and the whole world is basically a capitalist's dream.

The "real" world - where people form relationships, have children, and grow old - is confined to reservations for Indigenous populations, and these reservations are treated almost like a zoo by the Alphas and Betas. And yet it's the "noble savage" character who shows the most signs of what readers at the time of publication would consider a civilised attitude. He quotes Shakespeare, is disgusted by the decadence and throw-away attitude of the "civilised" world, and wants nothing more than a monogamous relationship and to know his father.

It's a disturbing book a lot of the time, and the ending was particularly chilling. Basically, I was expecting to be bored by this, but I found it the complete opposite.

Have you read it? What did you think??

K xx

The Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger

This book has been on my radar for years. I think the first time I heard about it was that Mel Gibson and Julia Roberts movie, Conspiracy Theory, in which Gibson's character can't calm down unless he has a copy of it, and in which the government apparently uses library patron histories to identify serial killers based on who borrows The Catcher in the Rye. Or something?? I haven't seen that movie in years, so I may be wrong.

Anyway, I put off reading this book for YEARS because a tiny part of my brain was convinced that if I borrowed it from my local library, I'd be flagged as a serial killer. But basically, all I knew about the book was that the main character is called Holden Caulfield, and it's J.D. Salinger's only novel.

And I kind of wish I'd left it that way. I was on the struggle bus with this book essentially from the get go. The opening few chapters - the stuff before Holden leaves school - reminded me a lot of Dead Poets Society, and more specifically Charlie. Seeing as Dead Poets Society is one of my favourite movies, I was moderately interested in the story.

But then Holden left school, and things went rapidly downhill. We're trapped in Holden's head for endless pages with few other characters to break things up. And this was hard for me, because I didn't like Holden AT ALL. He's full of rich white boy problems, where everything is someone else's fault. Holden always thinks he's in the right, despite however much evidence is stacked up against him. Essentially, I couldn't stand him or the narrative style.

I REALLY didn't like the writing. Admittedly, it's a product of the time. It's set in the late 1940s and is told by a teenage boy, so the amount of misogyny that comes through in the story is almost to be expected. But the amount of repetition in the writing drove me up the wall. Holden will make an observation about another character, then insert an anecdote about that character doing the thing he observed them doing, then repeat his observation. Like, "The girl could dance. [Insert long winded anecdote about said girl dancing here] I tell you, the girl could dance."

YES. WE KNOW. YOU LITERALLY JUST TOLD US.

By the end of the book, I just flat out didn't care, and when it featured a total non-ending on top of all the repetition and angst and misogyny that I'd already had to wade through, I was tempted to throw the book across the room.

I feel like this is a book that's more enjoyable if a) you study it in school and can unpackage all the things that Salinger is trying to say, or b) you're an angsty teenager when you read it. So maybe if I'd read this as a teenager, I'd see the appeal. But as an adult? NOPE.

On the plus side, this book marks the half way point for my Classics Club project!

Have you read it? What did you think?

K xx

The Chrysalids - John Wyndham

Remember when I used to review my Classics Club books in a timely fashion? Yeah. Me too...

I'd reread The Day of the Triffids just prior to creating my Classics Club list last year, and I absolutely adored it. So it made perfect sense to put another John Wyndham book on my list. Last month, I finally got around to reading it. (But not reviewing it. Because I'm the worst.)

The Chrysalids is a dystopian novel, pure and simple. Set a thousand years in the future, it tells the story of a group of young people living in an isolated community on the island of Labrador. The mainland, we're told, is a wasteland and the community prides itself on weeding out any genetic mutations, whether they be in plants, animals or humans.

As a child, the protagonist, David, witnesses a friend and her family being cast out into the wilds because said friend has six toes on one foot. This makes him uncertain about the way he's been raised, and when he and a group of other children develop telepathic abilities, they try to keep things quiet for as long as possible.

At its heart, this is very much a Cold War novel. It plays on the fear of the 'other' that was so prevalent in the 1950s, as well as including a nuclear apocalypse. It focuses on the destructive nature of Western society and its futile attempts at perfection.

One of the things I liked best about this book is when the characters find out about Zealand, a technologically advanced Utopia far across the sea to the south. And the reason I liked this so much is simple: so much of the time, dystopian novels are very US-centric, and I always find myself wondering if the rest of the world is in the same predicament or if they're all fine and just watching the chaos unfold. Here, clearly, it's the latter. So I loved that recognition that the rest of the world still exists.

On the whole, this was a short but important story, and it's definitely one I'll reread in the future.

Have you read it? What did you think?

K xx

Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert

I was a little hesitant going into this book. I knew almost nothing about it, except for the ending and the fact that a lot of people find it dense and unreadable. So imagine my surprise when I found it a surprisingly easy and compelling read.

Madame Bovary tells the story of farmgirl Emma, who marries provincial doctor, Charles Bovary, and almost immediately regrets it when she realises that it means she has to live in the provinces. She uses books as a means of escapism until her mother-in-law decides that all this fiction reading is making her hysterical, and orders Charles to cut off her access to books. So Emma turns to affairs instead.

I don't know if it was the translation I read or if I was just in the right headspace for this book, but I flew through it. The writing was beautiful, the story was pretty fast paced for a classic, and the characters felt surprisingly modern a lot of the time. Sure, Emma's occasional bouts of full blown hysteria weren't exactly modern, but it's a nineteenth century book. We can't expect everything.

While I was reading this, I was struck several times by similarities to Anna Karenina. Or at least the Anna-y parts of Anna Karenina. Unhappy marriage, one child, affairs, tragic ending. Except that I liked this approximately a thousand times more than Anna Karenina, with all its rambling side plots and segues about farming.

The ending was both more and less dramatic than I'd imagined, and while I'm not entirely sure how I feel about the "whip around all the main characters to find out their fates" chunk at the very end - because it seemed a little anticlimactic after the drama that preceded it - I still appreciate that it was included to demonstrate the impact that certain events had on those involved.

On the whole, I thoroughly enjoyed this book and I'd definitely recommend it.

Have you read it? What did you think??

K xx

My Brilliant Career - Miles Franklin

Oh, hi. Remember when I used to do this blogging thing? Yeah, me too...

I actually finished this one about three weeks ago, and just kept on forgetting to actually review it. Whoops.

So. My Brilliant Career. It's the story of Sybylla, a teenage girl growing up in rural Australia in the 1890s. Her father makes bad decisions and ends up dirt poor. The family try to scrounge a living together, but the drought hits and all the animals start dying. So Sybylla's reasonably rich grandmother takes her off her parents' hands with the hopes of marrying her off or turning her into a governess. But Sybylla wants to do something more with her life, and starts writing about her life.

Sybylla was a FABULOUS character. She's sassy and fiercely independent and often talks in all caps. She'd rather hang out with the shearers and the grooms than with people of her own class. In short, she feels like a teenager struggling her way through a world where she's expected to be an adult already.

It's full of incredible characters and funny moments and amazing writing.

But then I hit My Career Goes Bung. And...it was not good. The basic gist of it is that everything we knew in My Brilliant Career was what Sybylla had written. In My Career Goes Bung, she tells us that huge parts of My Brilliant Career were fictional. There was no Harold Beecham. She had no siblings. Her mother and grandmother were both vastly different characters.

So basically? We had to get to know Sybylla all over again. And I didn't like Writer Sybylla nearly as much as the character she'd apparently created. Especially when she was dumped into an all-new environment with all-new characters.

In summary, I gave the omnibus book 4 stars, but it was more like 4.5 stars for My Brilliant Career and 3 stars for My Career Goes Bung.

Have you read this? What did you think?

K xx

August reading wrap up

So. September is a thing that's happening now. If someone could explain to me how the hell it's possible for it to be September already, that would be fabulous...

Books read: 31.
New vs rereads: 15 vs 16
Most read genre: Fantasy! For once, my most read genre wasn't contemporary tralalalalalala. Don't get me wrong, I love contemporary books. But it's a delightful novelty to list something else here.

Favourite book: Based on the ratings below, it was The Assassin's Blade. But I think Pretty Girls might actually be my favourite book of the month, despite the fact that it was so totally squick-worthy that I couldn't bring myself to give it 5 stars.

Least favourite book: The Affair of the Poisons. The most exciting thing about it was the title. Everything else was so dry it may as well have been chicken that's been on the grill for an hour.

Favourite cover: Oh man. This is really hard, because the Throne of Glass covers are all super pretty and super similar. Maybe it's Akata Witch?? Let's go with that.

Diverse Books Project: I had kind of a mediocre month with my Diverse Books Project. All but one of the four books I read (the fifth one I read during July) were good but not great. Hopefully September is better?? Also, it was VEDA so all of my videos are part VEDA, part Diverse Books Project. So...yeah.











In August, I ended up reading 2 graphic novels, 2 non-fiction books, and 27 novels. There are links to all my Goodreads reviews below!

5 stars

The Assassin's Blade |

4.75 stars

Heir of Fire |

4.5 stars

Pretty Girls |

4.25 stars

Ms Marvel: Crushed | Crown of Midnight |

4 stars

My Love Lies Bleeding | This One Summer | Hold Me Closer | Making Money | The Whale Rider | How to Say Goodbye in Robot | Throne of Glass | Down Under | The Boy Most Likely To |

3.5 stars

Airframe | Of Silk and Steam | Angelfall | Akata Witch | The Deeds of the Disturber |

3 stars

Servant of the Underworld | Wicked | All Together Dead | Blood Feud | The Last Oracle | Men of the Otherworld | Middlemarch | Chasing Impossible | Cockatiels at Seven | The Kite Runner | Full Blast |

2 stars

The Affair of the Poisons |

What did you read in August?

K xx

Middlemarch - George Eliot

I have a confession to make: I got this book as a present for my seventeenth birthday. It's taken me fifteen years to get around to reading it. Why? Because I had to read The Mill on the Floss for first year university fourteen years ago, and it was non-stop struggle street for me. Essentially, it put me off reading George Eliot for a really long time.

So when I was putting together my Classics Club list, I figured I may as well put this one on the list and see if I could get over my preconceived notions about George Eliot.

I...had mixed feelings about this book. It's essentially the story of a town's worth of inhabitants. The story starts with one or two major characters, then moves on to focus on a couple of characters who appeared as minor characters in the previous section etc etc.

As a general rule, I struggle with stories that jump around between a lot of characters. I had the same feelings about Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell, and Shirley by Charlotte Bronte. Hell, I even felt that way about Game of Thrones. And it's not because any of those books were bad (although personally, I thought Game of Thrones was decidedly mediocre). It's just that they jumped around so much that I found it difficult to keep all the different threads of the story straight in my head, and I struggled with the sections dealing with characters that I didn't especially care for.

What I liked most about Middlemarch was that the characters weren't perfect. And I'm not talking flawed in the way that Elizabeth Bennet and Fitzwilliam Darcy are flawed where you can't help but love them. In Middlemarch, the characters are deeply flawed. They don't always get happily ever afters. They rush into marriage and then discover that their new spouse isn't the person they thought. They stand back and let people die. They hold grudges, they screw up, they're vindictive, they're petty.

And all of that was great. They were actual human characters leading actual human lives. But there were a lot of characters that I just didn't particularly care about. Either I didn't find them interesting or their stories dragged on and on without any real progress for hundreds of pages, and then all of a sudden things would be wrapped up in a neat little package with two pages to spare.

Really, I think the problem here was me more than the book. It was long and often dry, and there were times when I felt like I was reading page after page without making any real progress. The characters that I liked were enough to get this a three star rating from me. But I definitely didn't have the five star "OMG AMAZING" experience that so many others seem to have had. Which, frankly, makes me a little bit sad.

Have you read it? What did you think?

K xx

Strictly Ballroom - the musical version

On Saturday afternoon, Mum and I went to the matinee performance of Strictly Ballroom, which finishes in Melbourne this week. And while I found it thoroughly enjoyable, I also...had a lot of thoughts about it.

1. The staging was AMAZING. 
The stage rotates, and the sets are all in pieces that can be moved and assembled as required. All the sets are also double-sided so that scenes can take place, for instance, inside the dance studio or looking through the windows, at Fran's house or out the front of the milk bar, on the dance floor or backstage.

Source

2. The costumes are glorious. 
A lot of them are basically copies of the costumes from the movie, but they're still great. Plus, there are so many on-stage costume changes that it's basically Eurovision. There are even some on-stage hair changes. Basically, everything about the costumes, hair and make up is great.

3. The choreography is great.
Obviously, they're restricted by the size of the stage, so some of the big dramatic moves from the movie have to be altered (like Scott spinning across the floor). But on the whole, the choreography was totally brilliant and far more individualised than musical choreography tends to be.

4. The music felt...disjointed.
Look, the music was such a huge part of the movie, and obviously they were never going to be able to get the rights to all the songs they used. And obviously, they needed to include original songs to progress the story. But the problem for me is that there wasn't a single choreographer. There wasn't even a single lyricist.

The original songs are split between about four main composers, with input from a range of others. Add in the fact that there are half a dozen songs that aren't original - including Time After Time and Love Is In the Air - and the whole thing just ended up feeling like there was nothing to tie it together.

There's a great quote from an episode of The Office where Darryl shushes Michael as the orchestra starts playing because "If we don’t listen to the overture, we won’t recognise the musical themes when they come back later." And I think that's part of the problem here. There really weren't any recurring musical themes.

5. The demand for new steps was weirdly turned into a Les Mis style protest-y song.
In the movie, the argument in favour of new steps is about 30 seconds of people chanting "new steps, new steps!" while dance newsletters spin on screen with sensationalist headlines, ending with Barry Fife saying "THERE WILL BE NO NEW STEPS". But in the musical, that somehow gets turned into two separate songs: one in which Barry has nightmares about people asking for new steps, and one in which the entire company wave placards and flags and Scott dances around encouraging them to protest. Basically, it was all a little strange.

6. Insufficient anger.
Don't get me wrong, Thomas Lacey was great in the role of Scott Hastings. But what shines through so strongly in the movie is Scott's anger. It's not just that he's bored of the steps, bored of doing what his mother and his dance teacher tell him. He's frustrated. He's angry. He's sick of other people dictating what he can do with his life. It's that anger and passion that makes that finale paso doble so perfect. And Paul Mercurio does that anger so brilliantly in the movie. But on stage - and it's totally understandable, because portraying that much anger consistently over two hours, eight times a week? NOPE - none of that really came through.

Source

7. Fernando Mira's solo was FLAWLESS.
It was never going to be easy to follow Antonio Vargas' fabulous turn as Fran's father, Rico, in the movie. And really, Rico feels like a much smaller part in the stage production. But the "pffff, that's not paso doble" solo from Fernando Mira was pretty damned incredible. It's not entirely surprising that he and Natalie Gamsu (who played Abuela) got the biggest round of applause during the curtain call.

8. I have mixed feelings about the audience participation elements.
Having the theatre divided into blocks of coloured seats and having the audience cheer for the performers wearing that colour in the "competitions" was a fun idea. And I loved the opening of act 2 in which a couple from the audience were pulled on stage to become part of the performance in Beautiful When You Dance, which was definitely one of the strongest songs.

But trying to recreate the ending of the movie, where the dance floor is flooded with spectators joining in the fun didn't entirely work for me. There ended up being maybe 50 audience members on stage, but many of them just swayed back and forth awkwardly, despite having rushed up on the stage. One little girl looked like she was about to cry. And then giving those audience members a curtain call was just...strange.

9. Mike Snell WAS Ken Railings.
He did an absolutely phenomenal job of playing a character who's sleazy and a total drunk but still incredibly funny and somehow likeable. If I hadn't known better, I would have sworn it was John Hannan, who played Ken in the film, up there.

10. I think I'd give it 7/10?
I know I sound like I'm being overly negative here. It really was a thoroughly enjoyable musical production. But. It's also not one where I left singing any of the songs, unlike when I saw Book of Mormon last year and spent the next three days with You And Me But Mostly Me stuck in my head. It's not one where I came out of the theatre and wanted to go straight to the box office for tickets to see it again, like I wanted to with Les Miserables last year (but didn't because tickets were $125). Instead, I came home and watched the movie. Which, strangely, does a better job of recurring musical themes...

So yeah. It was an enjoyable afternoon. But I can't help but think that it might be better if you had no prior exposure to the story and went in not expecting certain moments, certain pieces of music and certain characters portrayed in a particular way.

K xx

A Tale of Two Cities - Charles Dickens

Yes, I'm aware that this cover is hideous. But after discovering that ALL THREE copies we have of this at work are abridged, I had to resort to the free Kindle version...

My first exposure to this book came at the age of ten or eleven. Somehow, I got my grubby little hands on a Dickens omnibus, and I slogged my way through A Christmas Carol, Great Expectations, and half of this before I left it at a friend's house in England, only to be reclaimed four years later.

So when it came time to assemble my Classics Club list, it seemed appropriate that I should put this on there. And for the most part, I found it enjoyable if not especially Dickensian.

Set during the French Revolution, A Tale of Two Cities is a lot more serious than the other Dickens books I've read. Which isn't to say that other Dickens books aren't serious. Many of them are! But there's usually SOME element of comic relief to the story, one or two utterly ridiculous characters who provide the reader with a few moments to come up for air before diving back into the depths of opium addiction or child abuse or debtors prison or traipsing barefoot across the moors in fifteen feet of snow or whatever other horrors Dickens put his characters through.

Dickens apparently considered this his best work, and while I'm not entirely convinced I agree, it's definitely a fabulously written book that tells a compelling story. Admittedly, it took me a while to get into things, but once I did, it was full steam ahead.

I think what's most fascinating to me where A Tale of Two Cities is concerned is that it's historical fiction. There's a great tendency, I think, to consider historical fiction a product of the twentieth century. But here, Dickens is writing about events that happened some 80-odd years earlier. This is the French Revolution seen through nineteenth century eyes. This is, in effect, the French Revolution as we view the World Wars today. And that gave me a new appreciation for the story.

Having studied the French Revolution in high school, the story made far more sense to me this time than it did at the age of 10. (Shocker, right??) The villains are spectacularly villainy. The heroes are long suffering and make sacrifices to save those they love. It's a story almost entirely free of side plots, which must have just about killed Dickens to do, because the man really does love a good side plot (not to be confused with Victor Hugo, who loved a good 100 page tangent). And it's a story full of some of the most amazing quotes to come out of nineteenth century literature.

In short, I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Have you read it? What did you think?

K xx

Virgil - The Aeneid

Another book crossed off my Classics Club list, and this one was another CLASSIC classic. I'd heard a lot of amazing things about this book, most of them from my little brother, who did Latin all through high school and is still a big fan of Greek and Roman literature.

First things first: this is basically fan fiction. Virgil wrote it at a time when Rome was in upheaval, and this legitimises not only the origins of Rome, but the reign of Julius Caesar and, by extension, Augustus who was emperor at the time Virgil was writing. So yeah. It's basically rewriting Roman history to authenticate it and give it a basis in the existing history of the classical world as it was known at the time.

In The Aeneid, Virgil takes a minor character from The Iliad whose fate is ambiguous. He has him lead a party of Trojans away from Troy as it falls, and they travel across the Aegean and around Sicily to Carthage before heading up into Italy and fighting a series of wars to claim their homeland and found Rome. Virgil died before finishing the poem, so it finishes in the middle of a series of wars, prior to the founding of Rome.

I...had mixed feelings about this. I really loved the initial books, the story of Aeneas and his family trying to get out of Troy, the story of the Trojan horse, the story of their flight across the Aegean to Carthage. All of that was really compelling stuff, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I even enjoyed the slightly weird sixth book where Aeneas visits the Underworld and his dead father gives him a prophecy about Rome's future.

But then the second half of the story is battle after battle after battle. We get introduced to character after character just before they die in horribly graphic ways, interspersed with discussions from the gods about what's going on and debates about who should marry who to end the wars. And uuuuuuuugh.

Honestly, it doesn't surprise me that I felt this way. The first half of the story follows the style of The Odyssey, which I very much enjoyed. The second half is more like The Iliad, which I found to be kiiiiiind of a repetitive snorefest.

I ended up giving The Aeneid three stars. Like I said, I very much enjoyed the beginning of it but by the end? I kind of just wanted it to be over. And then it ended all too abruptly. Sigh.

Have you read it? What did you think??

K xx