Embuggerance is an amazing word, don’t you think? I’ve only discovered it this very night, whilst reading through the news articles of the day on the Sydney Morning Herald website. I stumbled upon this article here regarding Terry Pratchett’s recent diagnosis of early onset alzheimers. It would appear that I am one of the last people to have read about this, apparently it’s old news, however, I only found out all about this whole ordeal on Saturday and I was pretty shocked and saddened. I am a huge fan of Terry Pratchett’s work, so I’m relieved to read that he is going to continue writing.
In another article on the same page I discovered that Warner Bros. intend to turn Harry Potter & The Deathly Hallows into not one, but two movies! Genius! I doubt I will actually go and see either of them, as no movie could ever live up to the books in my humble opinion, but it seems a good idea to me. Especially from a financial point of view, why cram all that suspense and action in to one movie when you can charge the foolish cinema patrons twice to see something they could just read instead! Pure, unadulterated liquid-genius! I’d imagine that such forward thinking is what has kept Warner Bros. going all these years (PS: Please don’t sue me!) Luckily for the financial team behind the Harry Potter films so many people these days will proudly proclaim that they’d rather wait and see the movie than waste their precious time reading the books. It’s a sentiment that I completely fail to comprehend, and yet it is a popular view! Even when One tries to explain how much more detail there is in the books, and how the ambience of certain scenes is captured so perfectly by the use of specific words and adjectives, and how satisfying it is you use your own imagination to paint the scene and how no movie could ever live up to anything created in your own mind, I still recieve blank looks and my impassioned speech is met with statements like “Ohh, but the books are so long!” or “But reading is boring, and there’s no pictures”.
I find it so difficult to understand people who don’t like reading. When I was much younger I honestly believed that everyone loved books just as much as I did, and when other kids told me they hated reading I laughed because I thought they were being scarcastic. Although, thinking back on it now, literacy wasn’t really a popular concept with kids my age when I was in school, reading anything that you didn’t absolutely have to was the epitome of lame, but it’s cooler now I think.
