Contact by Carl Sagan

     When the movie Contact first came out I had no idea it was based off of the work of fiction with the same name by Carl Sagan. I didn’t have an idea until a couple of weeks ago. The movie happened to be on tv and I, one night, randomly decided to wiki random people. I knew Carl Sagan was an author that a friend of mine had mentioned a few times and I wanted to know more about him. So I wikied (you know, kinda like googled). Well, lo and behold, I learned that he was the author of the book Contact. Further reading naturally informed me that this same book was adapted into that film with Jodie Foster and Matthew McConaughey (yup, I had to look up how to spell his name, lol!), the same one I had just been watching on tv the other day. I always liked that movie – not in a drooling fan kind of way, but enough to watch it when it was shown on tv and occasionally of my own volition. I remember wondering almost every time I’ve watched it through to the end, who Carl was of the “For Carl” dedication; I get it now.

 

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

     My feelings about the sixth installment of the Harry Potter movies are mixed. I try to watch the movies from an objective point of view, or, at the very least, in two minds. One mind focuses on the movie in context of strictly the films and how they have developed – and how the characters have developed – without influence from content within the books. My second mind is from the point of view of someone who has read all the books and notices what is missing, changed, hinted at, and assuming what is to come. Warning! Spoilers (for both book and movie) follow. Read at your own risk .

 

A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini

     I began reading this book simply to pass the time, but quickly it became more than just a filler. Perhaps it is cliche to say so but this tale following the lives of two women from the late 1950’s to the early 2000’s is heartbreaking. Of course that is not the only quality to this book. It is filled with round, quietly compelling female heroines supported by a variety of others characters from gentle, kind-hearted men to dispicable abusive husbands and the terror of war.

 

Lit Bit Book Club

     After this month (May) I am putting the Lit Bit Book Club on hiatus. Since I am getting ready to head off to the UK for grad school, I have a lot of things that I need to focus on and get prepared; like applying for my student visa . With this in mind, and my recent attention to grad school stuff, I haven’t been as focused on the book club as I’d like to be. So I’m going to shut it down for awhile (I’m not exactly sure how long at this point), and think about what I want to do with the book club as well as taking more time before choosing books. I’ll let everyone know when I decide to get it going again.

 

Getting Personal

     I’ve recently been toying with the idea of starting a personal blog. I hate mixing my personal posts and literature based posts here on Lit Bit. I’m okay with some overlap (because I consider this inevitable) as long as a semi-personal post has something to do with literature: like what book I am currently reading or plan on reading or struggling with writer’s block, etc. But the full blown personal, I-just-need-to-bitch posts generally drive me crazy and cause me some embarrassment, no matter how necessary they may have been when I wrote and posted them. So in comes the idea of a completely separate blog that is dedicated to me just saying whatever personal thing I need to say, no matter how irrelevant, mundane, exaggerated. I seriously tried to give this avenue a go. I could really use a place to just unload my thoughts. But I can’t. I tried to write posts for a personal blog. I can’t do it. I can’t be that blatantly personal, that open. I can only do it in vague, round-about ways like this post. How frustrating. I will have to come up with some other solution I suppose. I’ve tried just normal journaling… I only get on my own nerves doing that. :/ And I’m sure before an hour has passed I will be embarrassed by this post as well. *sigh*