Non Sequitur by Wiley Miller for September 15, 2013

Katie the Anti Danae!

Wiley, insert my applause here.

That’s about the LAST thing Danae needs!

Literacy, Literacy… Wherefore art thou oh Literacy…? Going, going soon to be gone by way of social media.Alas Literacy I knew you well I wish I had known you better.

I’m a member of the illiterate book club. We meet once a week to judge a book by its cover.

Katie and I are bookaholics and proud of it!

The best opening and closing of any book published (and the middle ain’t bad, either).

I’m not so fond of Dickens, myself. The man was paid by the word, and it shows!

plus, movies edit out a lot of stuff from books and real life. watch new world, and then read christopher columbus bio. columbus was not a really a good guy. watch pocahontas and read about her. she was bald, 14, and prancing naked in the market square.

Books are much more satisfying than movies…..And in a book you know what the characters are thinking, what motivates them…Unless it’s narrated, a movie doesn’t do that…

It is a far, far better thing that I read, than I have ever rented.

I put off reading A Tale of Two Cities for years, figuring if it was a book that was required reading in high school, it was pretty bad. (our class had to read Moby Dick, Lord Jim, etc.) but after I ran out of the other Charles Dickens novels at the library, I finally read it, and it was one of the best books I ever read!!! (And I’ve read thousands)

Thanks for capturing the sheer joy of reading!

Katharin Foster

Scarlett O’Hara was not beautiful….. Call me Ishmael….Prince Raoden of Arelon awoke early one morning, completely unaware the he had been damned for all time…. There once was a boy named Eustance Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it…Marley was dead…. etc.

I put off reading A Tale of Two Cities for years and when I finally did, it was one of the best books I ever read.

I often prefer the book; the pictures are better.

To make a movie out of a novel, first, boil it down into a short story, and pluck out some of the other background to pass on to the set designers and costumers, maybe special effects. The flavor is just never going to be the same.

We don’t need more bookcases; No, we need more WALLS!

Support your local library; it’s Banned Book Month.

Read a banned book today!

Samuel Clemens wrote, concerning The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn:

“Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.”

This suggests that authors and reviewers do not inhabit a common plane of reality.

Wow!! You go Kate!

I’v never read a book by Cover?

Speaking of Dickens, I just finished rereading The Mystery Of Edwin Drood, his unfinished final novel. Amazing how a mystery thriller with all the proper components of the time it was written could be so funny! Enjoyed it immensely.

Melville and Hubbard too

My favorite toast

You remind me of an anecdote about another adaptation: while she was writing her Oscar-winning screenplay for Sense and Sensibility, Emma Thompson heard from a fan who was very eager to see how she handled her favorite character. Thompson says she didn’t have the heart to tell her that she’d completely cut that character from the movie.

The Dickens is it? Kate really has it…..Will Danae find it?….

Never got through the tale of two cities but this inspired me to try again!!!!

The African Queen is my favorite movie. Partially because it was so faithful to the book.

The movies made from older works aren’t as good as the books because the books are the cream of their eras, the “classics.” All the dreck from those times has been discarded.However, the movies made from modern works, e.g. Devil Wears Prada or Julie & Julia, are often much better than the books because they improve on books that would never stand the test of time.

I only know the old B&W classics….would much rather read since most of today’s offerings are b o r i n g when it comes to story content.

How does that matter?

Aw, gawdbless them ‘hollywood screen-writers’ and their teen-view on Great Works. Hard to work in a car-chase and crash+explosions into a Classic, but somehow they manage to mangle it for the slack-jawed masses.

Just sayin’……..

The one blessing of modern technology is that the world of literature is right at your finger tips on your Reader or Tablet or iPod or even on your laptop. I live in an area where books written in English are scarce and expensive. The joy of going to my Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 and downloading ( mostly for free ) any book I choose, is like carrying the public library with me. It is an opportunity to reread those authors like Melville, Dumas, and Twain that I loved as a kid but didn’t have the adult perspective to really appreciate their style.And it is also an opportunity to read new authors, who ordinarily wouldn’t have necessarily have found an audience.

As great as the 20,000 Leagues Under the Seas Disney film was, it did not match Jules Verne’s book.

Linguist, that is very true about most things we read and saw at the movies when we were children. I haven’t gone back to many of the classics I was forced to read(the 200 year old English being hard to translate), but watching some of the classic movies on the movie channels have given me a lot more perspective about how my parents and grandparents thought.

“Never trust anyone who has not brought a book with them.” — Lemony Snicket

This strip should spend more time on Kate. Danae’s constant naysaying is becoming tiresome.

Alexikakos & dukedoug

Thanks for the smile today, both of you :0)

“So many books, so little time.” [some smart person, somewhere, said that.]

“Now now, Danae.. Reading shall stimulate your imagination..”Her imagination needs stimulating?

1. Some movies are better than the books they’re based on – cf.The Wizard of Oz.2. I can remember reading the end of A Tale of Two Cities in 12th-grade English and sniveling to myself.3.Fried Green Tomatoes was a good movie and captured the spirit of the book. I read the book later, and was glad I did. It had several interesting and informative subplots. I can remember Naughty Bird Peavy leaning into her mirror as she put on makeup to conquer the world, after learning that her faithless boyfriend had been killed by a toy truck (or something) thrown by his toddler. She rose from her deathbed and resumed life.

Make a post – on a comic – only to denigrate and recruit sentiment against someone with whom you don’t agree?…how cynically ironic of you – based on your history of commentary on gocomics !

Great comic. Thanks, Wiley!

Glad to see you weighing in on this subject. I love reading. Almost anything. I even like “pulp fiction”, “space operas” and some of the Western writers. Dickens was fabulous and his descriptive powers were superb. One could SEE the landscape of his time, down to the clothes the characters wore. My only regret is that English is my only language. I’ve read many translations but there are some Spanish and other writers that you can see the rhythm is bumpy in translation. Books have given me a peculiar perspective on life and the world. Reading has fed my empathy, I cannot feel apathetic. It has fed my outrage at times and mostly been my best friend. I feel sorry for our children and their children. They are hard put to think critically and their apathy is showing. I’ll quit rambling, but I guess I just wanted to say READ A BOOK, it’ll do you good. Not you singly, Linguist, but everyone.

Habogee: De gustibus… I found it to be the only book that was considerably improved in the movie. Most are ruined. Some of essentially independent. To Have and to Have Not does not have the Bacall character in Hemingway’s book, and the screenplay was by William Faulkner.

This charming little comic evoked 83 comments — no comment on quality or lack of. Point here: Even reading ABOUT reading stimulated thought. THAT’s the point.

Katie is so cute.

Biggest part of our recent move was my 1,400 book library! My Kindle only has 135 on it, but is much easier to move!! BTW, movies aren’t necessarily bad, but scientific references, medical books, etc, don’t work as movies! Nor do engineering, physics, and mathemetics.

I think he got paid by the comma. I’ve never seen anyone else use so many.

Go, Kate!!

I’ve been a reader all my life (cut my reading teeth on Dr. Seuss; thank you Mom and Dad). I enjoy both books and movies. They are different media and are made by different people (regardless of the ‘based on the novel by . . . ’ credit), so yes, they are going to be different. I always thought the movie The Godfather was choppy and not very well done, probably because I had already read the book. It had very detailed omniscient narration that was impossible to squeeze into a movie script. Then there’s Planet of the Apes – the movie took almost nothing from the book except the title, but I loved both. So it goes.

Anybody fond of old editions of books? My best recent reading experience was the following: I found a copy of Gone With the Wind, printed in 1936, at a rummage sale. When I sat down to read it, I found myself savoring the feel of the book and the paper and thinking about what the world was like when the book was printed. It was a fascinating experience to slip out of the 21st century into the pre-WWII era the book came from. I could block out the phones and the TVs and the computers and just imagine sitting down to read the book in 1936. It made it all the more fun to jump into the book (just like Kate!) and go back to 1861. Nothing wrong with new editions of books, or reading them on Kindles and so on; it’s just another way to keep them alive. But there’s something special about old editions like that one.

Been reading Bernard Cornwell’s Sharpes series. Then got the DVD’s from the library. While Sean Bean is great in the series, can’t match the books.Good stuff!

Read “Bleak House” about 2 years ago, and decided it was one of the best books I ever read. Nothing bleak about it. The last third of the book (a big book, mind you) got read during an all-nighter on a Sunday night – by 10am the next day (still reading), realized I wouldn’t be going into work that day, because there was no way I was going to stop reading until I got to the end. Read “Our Mutual Friend” earlier this year, and am reading “Little Dorrit” right now. Reading Dickens requires being a little patient toward the beginning while you spend time on the side with minor characters (Bagnets, Buckets, Boffins, Jo, Guppy, John Chivery, Jenny Wren, Miss Flite, even Pancks) who always end up being very interesting), but there is a huge payoff if you stick with it.