A Potpourri Of Movies and Books: Our Heroine Is Having Trouble Focusing

Not much is on my mind today, though I apologize for the surfeit of movie posts this week. I did start two books, gave them the ol' college try, found them to be ridiculous (despite my best efforts), and abandoned them. The books were Through A Glass Darkly, by Karleen Koen and Breaking Dawn, the final Twilight book, by Stephanie Meyer. I think I've covered enough Twilight stuff here, so I'll touch briefly on Through A Glass Darkly, a sweeping historical saga set in England and France in the early and mid 1700's, which is what prompted me to check it out of the library.

I don't know, there's nothing wrong with it, really, I just felt like I'd read it all before: naive young heroine gets married to a much older libertine whom she adores, her grandmamma is a clever and fierce matriarch, her mother is a scandal magnet, etc. etc. etc. I put it down before the libertine and the naif actually married, but I would guess he grows to love her because she's both beautiful and spunky, and she grows disillusioned with what she imagined the glamour of court would be. I DO like that kind of love story, but I like it when it's less than 500 pages, otherwise I'm reading too much about draperies and carpets and servants polishing the silver.

Yowza! The above makes me sound like a terrible snob, and that's not true at all. I just have a very short attention span (thanks for nothing, MTV), so a book must be amazing to keep me from skipping over whole sections of detail to get to the action, and I get bored quickly - even with action - if my attention is not immediately grabbed. I need my historical romances short and sweet; more Georgette Heyer (thanks, Anchoress) than Herman Wouk.

Without a book to read this week, I've been watching movies in the evening, and last night, I decided to try From Here to Eternity (I know! It's crazy! First time!) WHOA. That is an awesome movie. I'm not even going to say anything else except if you've seen it, you'll know what I mean, and if you haven't, you should see it. I think First Sergeant Milton Warden goes into Our Heroine's Pantheon of Most Romantic Male Fictional Characters Of All Time, and you know what, they don't call this kiss iconic for nothin'.




Iconic kiss aside, this is the scene that really got me. RIP, Maggio.