This evening I finished reading The Three Musketeers. I found it to be enthralling, inspiring, romantic and tragic all at once. The Disney movie is certainly very different to Dumas’ novel (although, I like the movie for what it is). The novel is a tale of intrigues and comradery, and shows how men in positions of power can use that power for their own ends. If anyone wants to read it, let me know because I own a copy of it.
Yesterday I bought a copy of The Count of Monte Cristo, another of Dumas’ novels. This was written at the same time as The Three Musketeers. This was my grandpa’s favourite book, so I’ve been meaning to read it for quite some time. I’m finally getting around to reading these classics, and I wish I’d started a long time ago. Tess was brilliant, The Musketeers I enjoyed thoroughly (but being a translation from the French, the quality of English writing can’t compare with that of Thomas Hardy’s; he was a master, as I’ve said before), and I’m sure I will be kept absorbed by Monte Cristo having seen the film and knowing that the book is always better than the film. I’m buying any classics that I wish to read, so slowly I’m building a Penguin Classics library.
I think in the last entry I wrote about my reading, I’d just finished Tess and was starting on Last Chance to See. The latter is an amusing look at some of the world’s endangered species, Douglas Adams style. If anything, that book caused me to reaffirm my status as a vegetarian! I must thank the great book lender in the sky for the loan of this book. Since finishing that, I’ve read The Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels. The Manifesto itself is only forty pages long (as published in the Penguin Classics format), but the 2002 Penguin Classics edition has 187 page introduction, most of which I found boring, and is published with seven different prefaces! To be honest, I’m not quite sure what to make of it all, and will reserve judgement until I’ve had a bit more time to digest it. I daresay I’ll be reading the forty pages again. On my first reading, it seemed like a call to the Proletariat to rise up against the Bourgeoisie, rather than being an all-encompassing ideology or economic paradigm. That brings us up to date with my reading (not that most of you care, I suspect :). I now start Stupid White Men by that most engagé of activists, Michael Moore. Courtesy of RW. (Thanks mate!)
Nigel and I went to see Pirates of the Caribbean yesterday (Saturday, though by the time I submit this, yesterday will be Sunday). Highly entertaining cinema, though by no means a great movie. Johnny Depp was very amusing as the perpetually inebriated Captain Jack Sparrow. See it if you want to laugh a bit or if you like lots of swashbuckling.
