*book five spoilers ahead, for losers who haven't read that book yet* *but no book 7 spoilers don't worry!*
last night, thanks to my dearest little sister raheela, i finally got to see a movie in the theater for the first time since before musa was born! if you can believe it, it's been long enough that i was shocked by the price ($9.50 adult)... i remember paying 2 pounds 50 p at the odeon on nicholson st in edinburgh in 1997... (which at the time was a little less than $5). okay so it hasn't been THAT long, but still!
i had forgotten the size of the faces onscreen, the occasional flickering (i get a better picture on my widescreen TV at home... in fact that's a big reason i haven't tried to get to the theater sooner, b/c we have blockbuster.com membership and such a great screen at home). and i had forgotten the crowd - when sirius was killed, the soundtrack suddenly dwindled to a few moments of silence, in which we heard a woman actually begin to sob out loud in the audience. the last time i heard that was actually in the nicholson street odeon, while watching titanic, in the scene where rose wakes up all frosted on the floating door in the wide cold atlantic under the stars, and tries to wake jack up where he is floating frozen to death in the water - actually more than one girl in the audience was sobbing. that scene actually has always haunted me - not the jack and rose scene, at all - but at one point the camera pans out from the gigantic carcass of the boat and the struggling, screaming blue people in the water so that they are all just specks in a tremendous nightbound ocean, and just the thought of all those lives, those tiny brightnesses, lost in such a mass of black water underneath such a mass of black sky...)
BUT i digress, tangents and tangents away.
so of course i enjoyed the movie and the cast - particularly radcliffe, rickman and bonham-carter. OOTP was the longest book so of course they could not include everything... but i still felt like aside from harry, we didn't really get to see much
character in any of the other characters, even ron and hermione. they were sort of flat or shallow support on the side. little things helped - like just showing the look on ginny's face whenever harry seemed to prefer cho - but then there wasn't much of harry and cho, just that one kiss, then the betrayal of the D.A.... and ron was basically just there for a few one-liners, maybe a good idea here and there. i thought harry and sirius's relationship was very well done. i'm looking forward to the sixth movie precisely because it explores voldemort's character in depth - why he is who he is - and through the process we end up understanding harry and dumbledore better, too. of course, best of all is how we finally come to understand snape in book 7, but i won't say anything more about that!!
anyway. i've been so consumed by knowing at last how harry's story ends, particularly the snape-related bits, that it's been difficult for me to get into other books. i couldn't even get into kiran desai's
inheritance of loss, and ended up having to return it without reading it (i couldn't renew it because it was on request). i do still want to read it, though. well, when i returned my books i got a new batch, including
anna karenina (which i've tried unsuccessfully to read before but am determined to complete because i once had a colleague, when i worked at borders in 1999, whom i respected very much, named stephen becker, who told me if he could recommend one book in the whole store to read above all others, it was anna karenina. becker - we all called him that - was a 40 or 50-something man who biked 8 miles to work every day, lean and mustachioed, who once told me how he dropped out of school and went to australia with no more than $20 left, and never went to college, yet his knowledge of the english literary canon and much more beyond was better and deeper than mine, and i had just completed my master's) and a children's story by tolkien i never knew existed,
roverandom, and of course morgan llywelyn's
1972. this last one was just as "unputdownable" as the other irish century books, but i didn't find all the characters as compelling. well, to be specific, barbara kavanagh, who was a ditzy brat who was even anti-republican, without even really understanding what it was all about. i don't find it believable that barry could have truly loved her - i can't see true love existing between people who can't meet on a mental level - she would be something like his solace, the fire he turns to in order to escape the cold realities of the violence in his life, but that means he can never share his true passion, for a unified ireland, with her. but, people get married for different reasons... other than that, i found it fascinating as usual. i sometimes get lost in the politics and names - the IRA first split into three, then it was two (the provisionals and the officials?) - and somewhere along the line i lost the connection of religion to the whole affair (why is it that catholics are nationalists and the protestants are unionists? or do i have that wrong?) if abu sinan ever finds his way to this blog entry maybe he can explain it for me :)
anyway, i'm assuming that llywelyn is presenting a certain vision of history in these books, although i think she tries to maintain a sort of objective view by not blanketing anyone as "the badguys" (except for maybe the english), even though she's most definitely sympathetic with the idea of a unified ireland. can't say i blame her :) and can't wait to read the last one
1999 which i didn't realize until i went to the library to find it that it's not coming out till next february :(
i am so excited because in the last few days i've noticed musa (now 16 months old) is starting to bring me books to read to him, and actually staying long enough to hear one or two pages, sometimes more, and point at pictures on the page and babble. he's
showing interest in
books! mashallah! i've been waiting for this since the day he was born... i just hope it lasts inshallah. they say to help instill a love of reading, parents should let their children see them reading a lot - well that's pretty much all i do at home for leisure, other than websurf. for musa's education, for all my children, what i want more than anything else is to instill a love of reading, because i feel like that's the foundation for every other part of education - the willingness and ability to seek, find and understand information. for now, i already know he has the determination... just have to focus it on this other than climbing the sofa to reach that plant or squirming and screaming until you take him out of the high chair to let him run around... inshallah! :)
oh btw, we found three more teeth coming out in the recesses of his mouth! in the process of finding them i got bitten on the cuticle hard enough to draw blood... ah well, stick your hand in a shark's mouth, expect to see blood! MUSA!
anyhoo. now he finds his nose, and ears, and occasionally hair, on request, and he goes to pick up the green ball when you ask for it, and goes "wuhwuhwuh" when you ask what the dog says, if he feels like it... such fun! mashallah. love this age, can't wait for more communication though. inshallah.
okay must go "accomplish something" today...
