Connor’s Comments (group member since Jan 07, 2013)

Connor’s comments from the Classics Without All the Class group.

In "A Study In Scarlet", Holmes and Watson talk about Edgar Allen Poe's Dupin. No specific story, just discussing his merits (or lack of them) as a detective.

Game of Thrones is my religion. Boardwalk Empire is also amazing. Re runs of The Sopranos and The Wire are revealing the absolutely amazing potential of long form (like, reeeeeally long form) storytelling to me.

Banshee has been pretty good. I watched the first episode of The Following and that seems right up my alley, so that's on my watch list too.

But the all time greatest show I'm watching, the one I force on everyone else like some mental case with a pillow, is BREAKING BAD. Seriously, that show is mindblowingly amazingly incredibly awesome.

I really loved the movie. It was amazing, and so well done. But, as is almost always the case, the book wins out. I saw the movie first, so I was surprised to find the scene with the Frenchman in there. I guess movies tend to be more 'Politically Correct', so implying that (SPOILER) your main character is a cannibal may turn the producers off a bit. It completely changes the way you view Pi after he gets to land. Now there's the question of how much eating human flesh has changed him, whether he'll do it again.

I dunno, maybe I just enjoy looking really deep into things like that. I mean, he was blind in that scene, which would have been extremely difficult to film.

Overall, though, the movie is an excellent and, mostly, true adaptation of the novel. The love story is the only part where I waver, because it seemed pretty unnecessary.

Orange seems to represent life, and the things that keep him alive. The obvious one is the orange life vests, which are elf explanatory. Richard Parker, who is also orange, is explicitly stated in the novel to be the main reason Pi is still alive. He is the driving force that keeps him going, for fear of death. The orange whistles are the key to his control over Richard Parker, keeping the tiger afraid of him an preventing him from being eaten.

The orang-utang is not immediately obvious until the very end when, in the second story he tells to the investigators, he replaces it with his mother. A mother is the very definition of life, having brought him into this world at the very start.

This could all be some coincidence and I've over analysed this completely, but it is an interesting connection. Thanks, Jennifer, for bringing it up :)

I've got about 40 pages to go until I've finished Life of Pi, to get a good head start for this month. Next up: Beowulf!

Andrew wrote: "TheRebelReads wrote: "I'm almost finished with Les Miserables and American Gods. I'll be reading Life of Pi and The Mark of Athena next."

Did you like American Gods? I haven't read many books by N..."
American Gods is amazing. It's right behind Gaiman's Sandman comics in pure originality.

I've done a loooot of reading graphic novels in the last half a year or so. I can say that the Sin City series written and drawn by Frank Miller are some of the best noir stories I've experienced in any medium.

The greatest of all graphic novels, the epic Sandman series from Neil Gaiman, are a must read for any lover of stories of all ages. Seriously, they are ridiculously good!

A Sound of Thunder - Ray Bradbury

Finish all of the 20 or so books on my bookcase which I haven't yet, and read 50+ books overall, hopefully mostly 20th Century classics

Well, I'm starting my last year of High School so there will be plenty more books to come, but so far I have had to read Owl (A New Zealand novel), The Poison Apple (William Blake Poem), A Tell-Tale Heart, Of Mice and Men, Merchant of Venice, and The Kite Runner. Will be doing Scholarship English this year, so LOOOOTS of reading coming up :)

Hello everyone :D My name is Connor, and I'm from Christchurch, New Zealand. Ever since I could read I've been searching out the 'classic' books, and I'm 17 now. I try to avoid the more 'romantic' books, but that said I enjoyed Wuthering Heights and other books in that category (most likely because they're depressing...)

I'm a huge fan of John Green (who is bound to be categorised as 'classic' in a few decades!), as well as Tolkien, Poe, Raymond Chandler, George R. R. Martin and way too many to list!!

I found this group in my search for a good reading group, and I think I hit the jackpot :P I think I'm going to love learning about more and more books and taking part in engaging conversations about them. As for my superpower, I'd love to freeze time, and take someone into that frozen time state if I wanted to :)

Wheel of Time NEEDS to be a TV show. I reckon if they approached it like Game of Thrones, it could be EPIC.