Thursday, October 9, 2008

Have you ever read a book that had so many characters that you had to write them down to keep them all straight? I know that sometimes in school students are required to, although I can not personally remember being assigned to do so. The first book I can recall doing this with was It by Steven King. That book had (if I recall correctly) about eight main characters and it flashed back and forth between the past and present. I remember being frustrated at my inability to keep them all straight, so I wrote them all down. By the Way, I thought it was a terrible book and at the very end of the book he wrote the day he started it and the day he ended it and it took him, I don't remember exactly, but about five years to write and I remember thinking what an absolute waste of five years of his life and a month of mine. I am a quick reader and the fact that the book took me a month to read is an indication of what I thought of it. It would be years before I would pick up another Steven King novel and then it was when he, temporarily, switched genres. It was Misery, which I loved by the way.
I recently read the Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan. Again, eight main characters. It seemed as though the movie revealed more about their lives, although I don't remember more than two or three significant differences between the two. It just seems as though the movie was longer some how.
Now I am reading the Tale of Two Cities. Holy Smoke- talk about a lot of characters! I have index cards that I use to keep them all straight. Actually, I am not reading, but rather listening to it. I got for free from Loudlit.org . I got it in MP3 format and uploaded it onto my IPOD. Because the copyright for this particular text expired you can get it for free from a number of places. The reader is great from this particular sight. They are currently trying to raise funds and will be releasing The Scarlet Letter as soon as their goal has been met. Currently simplyaudiobooks.com is offering Count Dracula for free as a download. You may remember me mentioning simplyaudiobooks in a previous post.
I purchased a book titled the Compleat Cast of Characters in Literature published by SparkNotes, which contains over 8,000 entries. It helps, sort of, if you need a simple reminder of who's who. So, I want to know who else does this. If you keep a list of characters when you are reading let me know. I can't possibly be the only one.

I would like to note here that while a great deal of intellectual property is available on the internet for free, most of it is not available legally. Stealing is stealing, don't do it. If you can not afford to purchase it, you can not afford the penalty if you are caught, and if you have children you can not steal and tell your children not to steal. They are not stupid. They will know that you are being a hypocrite.

1 comment:

LoudLit said...

Thanks for the shout out for LoudLit.org. Not only is the copyright on A Tale of Two Cities out, but our audio book production can be legally distributed for free. Check out Huck Finn and Heart of Darkness too.

Todd Fadoir
LoudLit.org