Have you ever liked a villain more than the hero? Who and why?
The more kleptocratic billionaires take control of the world, the more sympathetic The Joker (as played by Heath Ledger in Dark Knight) is over billionaire Bruce Wayne, with the latter’s willingness to abandon principles and listen in on everyone’s cellphone to win.
Have you ever regretted reading a book — which one and why?
“Hostage” by Robert Crais. The ending was terrible. The protagonist had zero agency in his own survival. They made a movie with Bruce Willis which improved the defect. While the movie may not have been good, per se, it’s my go-to refutation whenever someone squawks that pretentious cliche, “The book is always better than the movie.”
What’s the most annoying trope in books or movies?
The McGuffin. A thing chased for the sake of being chased. It only works because humans, like dogs, are programmed to chase certain things without a good sense of whether it’s worth it or what would happen if one ever caught it.
The world of H2G2 would at least be amusing in its absurdity. That said, I don’t know that I want to read much that’s set in a place that’s fun, and I know writers disdain them. Literary utopias always have a dark side. Story tension and interest do not build from a place where everyone is having fun.
Like many, I feel that for such an excellent and powerful book, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has a muddled ending.
Far be it for me to rewrite Twain, but I might’ve done some chopping.
at rest on a hill,
clouds form & shift shapes;
i read their story.
I think sequelization is a pox upon the literary world. I would hazard to say that anything good I’ve ever read was a standalone work. Seldom does the “resolution-to-hook” ratio lead to a satisfying, let alone illuminating, reading experience. A popular book series is far more likely to end like the television series Lost than to pull all its outstanding narrative strings together coherently.
Unless you’re talking nonfiction, in which case I would be open to another volume of The Complete History of the World at some point.
