Or maybe that should be Booking Though Saturday this week… oh well.

Who’s the worst fictional villain you can think of? As in, the one you hate the most, find the most evil, are happiest to see defeated? Not the cardboard, two-dimensional variety, but the most deliciously-written, most entertaining, best villain? Not necessarily the most “evil,” so much as the best-conceived on the part of the author…oh, you know what I mean!

Cool question, but hmm… the “worst fictional villain … the one you… are happiest to see defeated” and “most deliciously-written, most entertaining, best villain” are not the same for me. I can’t think of a good one from the former category at all, probably because if they aren’t well-done enough to make me sympathetic towards them then they just aren’t as memorable.

That said, one of my favorite bad guys is Gerald Tarrant from C. S. Friedman’s Coldfire trilogy. I love Javert in Les Misérables too (even if he isn’t really a villain).

Today’s meme

1. Okay, love him or loathe him, you’d have to live under a rock not to know that J.K. Rowling’s final Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, comes out on Saturday… Are you going to read it?
2. If so, right away? Or just, you know, eventually, when you get around to it? Are you attending any of the midnight parties?
3. If you’re not going to read it, why not?
4. And, for the record… what do you think? Will Harry survive the series? What are you most looking forward to?

I’ll read it, but I’m not going out of my way to get it immediately. In fact, the last few have been given to me within a few days of the release, so I’m happy to wait a bit… and you could not pay me enough to go to one of those midnight parties. Well, that’s not true. On the scale of things that I’d require money to do, this is pretty cheap. So there’s still time, if anyone does want to make an offer

As for the last question, I’ve never really speculated about what will happen. I enjoy the books, but not enough to spend much time pondering them. He’ll die or he won’t, whatever. As long as the ending makes sense and doesn’t wind up being cheesy, I’ll be good.

From Booking Through Thursday:

1. In your opinion, what is the best translation of a book to a movie?
2. The worst?
3. Had you read the book before seeing the movie, and did that make a difference?

And, by all means, expand this to as long a list as you like. I’m notoriously awful myself at narrowing down to one favorite ANYTHING. So, feel free to list as many “good” or “bad” movie-from-books as you like.

Hmm. I almost always like the book more, and definitely so if I’ve read it before I see the movie… in that case my decision is almost always based on how close they kept the story.

So… let’s see.

I thought that they did a good job with A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick, though I think it suits a book format better than a movie one. I was pleased by the movies from The Lord of the Rings series. Another good one is One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. I liked the screen adaptation of Peter S. Beagle’s The Last Unicorn too (recently bought it… I hadn’t seen it since I was a child); he wrote the screenplay for it, which helped. And I liked Gone With the Wind better as a movie, but then I saw it long before I read it.

The worst… hmm… I tend to forget the bad ones. I’ve heard such terrible things about the movie based on Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea that I’ll never see it, so maybe that doesn’t count. Frank Herbert’s Dune has had some horrible adaptations. I didn’t care for the recent movie of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Except for Marvin. Alan Rickman did a killer Marvin. I’m sure there are others that I have mercifully forgotten.

On a somewhat different note, I recently saw Spam-a-lot, the stage version of Monty Python and the Holy Grail. I enjoyed it… but the parts I liked best were the parts that were different than the movie version, because I’m so used to the movie actors, and their voices and mannerisms, that any differences jumped out at me. But… “The Song that Goes Like This” had me cracking up for weeks. Heck, I’m laughing now.

From Booking Through Thursday

1. Do you cheat and peek ahead at the end of your books? Or do you resolutely read in sequence, as the author intended?
2. And, if you don’t peek, do you ever feel tempted?

Nothing like a prompt to remind me to blog.

I don’t look at the end of the book. I don’t think I ever have, and I don’t think I’ve ever been very tempted to, because I don’t really want to know the ending before I get there. That probably gives the wrong impression, though, since you can tell just from the way some books are written that certain things are going to be true at the end (certain characters are going to hook up, the bad guy is going to lose/get caught, the main character will live, whatever), and that doesn’t bother me at all. I don’t even mind if all my guesses about the ending are correct. But I still don’t want to know for sure before I get there. That’s also why I never read reviews (especially on Amazon!) before I read the book. And why I rarely even read the back-cover blurb, unless I know I won’t read the book itself right away, so I have time to forget it. I want the story to open up bit by bit.

That’s a little odd, maybe, because I’ll reread a good book a bunch of times and obviously I know what happens the second time through. It’s different, though. I know everything, not just the bit right at the end, and I’m not reading it the same way. The first time I’m discovering things along with the characters, but when I reread it’s a more leisurely visit. I notice things I didn’t realize were important the first time through, I meet my favorite characters again, and sometimes my opinions of a character change, either due to their actions at the end (or in a sequel) or just because I’m seeing them for a second time.

At any rate, I do, sometimes, flip a couple of pages ahead and read a sentence or two, or read a paragraph on the right page when I’m still on the left page. I have no idea why I do this. In fact, I think it’s funny when I catch myself doing it.