I don't want to say 'I told you so' but...

Okay, short tidbit in regards to my post titled "The Trilogy"...The Red Eye said today that this year there are 23 sequels coming out...breaking the former record set in 2003. Moral of the story? They're outdoing themselves this year and I spotted it first. What?! Oh...yeah...that's the sound of triumph.


*Disclaimer: These numbers may be partially fabricated, as I'm writing this from memory and not actually looking at the article.

Song Suggestions

So I did say that this blog would also incorporate music, but I've been a little remiss in getting started on that portion. In part, this is because I love music so much and it's hard to pick just one or two things that I'm listening to at any one time...and in part (let's face it, the BIGGER part) because I simply dropped the ball. lol

Songs to listen to while reading:

1.) The Arcade Fire cover of Maps by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs.

2.) Hearing Damage by Thom Yorke

3.) Anything by Iron and Wine because it won't interrupt you while reading.

4.) Soundtrack to my Life by Kid Cudi

5.) Naturally by Slow Train Soul

Boom! Enjoy.

I Could Write If I Was Rich.

The Picture of Dorian Gray...reading it. Loving it. But there are some things you should know going in.

1.) Skip Chapter 11 altogether. Apparently Oscar Wilde didn't know how to show the passage of time without boring everyone to tears. It's simply an account of all the things that Dorian became interested in while he was aging (or, not aging, as it were) and it is too tedious to even go into in this short description.

2.) Even today this book may test some of your ideals. There is a character named Lord Henry who is pretty much evil incarnate. He espouses these outlandish ideas that he doesn't really believe fully himself, but that he can argue extraordinarily well. So these ideas take hold with our young Dorian Gray, who is both very naive and very impressionable and he actually lives them...which does not turn out well.

3.) Basically, you are reading the slow demise of morality in a formerly neutral person. And there's not much else to say about that.

4.) The title of this post is a mixture of the book and what I realized when I was on vacation. In the book, the only reason Dorian is able to do any of the bad things he does(like opium addiction, ruining of women (ooo-lala), and eventually murder) is because he has the means to do it. He's very wealthy. Not everyone could sustain themselves on completely idle pastimes like jewel collecting or fashion obsession because not everyone is rich beyond belief. It's easy to be creative when there's not pressure for your creations to sustain your living.

The Trilogy

Okay, so today is part rant, part review. As we know, I was reading Shiver. I have now begun the sequel, Linger which is good, too. I'm only a few chapters in, but the author has already incorporated some new characters and the plot line is just different enough to not annoy me.

Shiver concluded well. I liked the wrap up the author gave it and the fact that it could have been (should have been?) a book standing on it's own because it didn't give any clues into what the sequel would be about.

Now for the rant...ever since the movie Lord of the Rings came out, everyone has been a little trilogy-happy, don't we think? Right around that time, Pirates of the Caribbean came out and the Spider Man franchise was plugging along, and myriad of other books and movies were jumping blindly onto the bandwagon. Unfortunately for them, many of the 2nd and 3rd movies in these trilogies missed the bandwagon and landed in the mud...covered in shit and cliches.

I don't envy anyone trying to write a good sequel or threequel (yes, this is a made-up word for today's purposes)...it's hard. And I love watching/reading well-written series, but we have to come to a point where we put our foots down. At some point, I'd like a story to just be over. When do we come to the point where it's okay to say, "Yes, I DO still know what you did last summer...but I just don't CARE."