Last Friday H donated office copies of The Economist to me (these will go directly to father), along with their lifestyle magazine Intelligent Life (bet you didn't know The Economist has a lifestyle quarterly!), which is pretty interesting, in the way airline publications are interesting - you'll look at it if you're strapped to a chair, but not otherwise. H also made sure I studied the Economist Intelligence Report on Challenges Facing Healthcare in Asia; It's a survey of diseases and killer statistics and I'm not sure where all this will lead, but it's not weekend reading material, I can tell you. Inspired by the Tim Burton movie, I've dusted off Alice's Adventures In Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass to remind me what wonder really is because watching the coldly re-imagined movie has made clunky a beloved book.
I didn't like the movie, except for Helena Bonham Carter's brilliantly imperious, campy queen, did you? Ms Bonham Carter alone, as the Red Queen, with her Elizabethan head, was pitched accurately to the temper of the book.
The first ever film version of Alice was made in 1903 (highlights, below) has that magic that all of the Burton film lacks. Alas, I don't understand Johnny Depp at all.
Tonight, I start on Barbara Hardy's A Reading of Jane Austen (1975), about Austen's contribution to the modern novel.
i too tried to re-read alice in wonderland recently. but now that i'm a jaded middle-aged adult-lescent, i found alice's behaviour unbearably coy and cloying, very irritating with no redeeming feature at all. an unlovely calculating prepubescent coquette as it were.
ReplyDeletesorry, i guess 19th century/Victorian books just aren't my thang.
Anon: It is rather unreadable actually... there are too many good things to read out there without having to resort to this self indulgent exercise which isn't in the end particularly witty.
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