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1. Day 09 – A book you thought you wouldn’t like but ended up loving
Eh. What often happens is I'll hate a book the first time I try it and then will pick it up months later and enjoy it. It's so dependent on my mood. And this has happened with so many books over the years...that I'm sort of drawing a blank.
It surprised me that I liked James Joyce's Ulysess as much as I did. It also surprised me that I enjoyed..Harry Potter, which I'd avoided when it was first released, because of the hype. A co-worker talked me into trying it. Loved it to pieces. Same thing happened with 50 Shades of Gray actually - thought I'd despise it. Tried a sample and it hit my mood - it was like reading an absurd parody of all the bad contemporary romance novels and fanfic that I'd read in the last three years. I was laughing my head off, and oddly moved by the crazy hero of the piece. Granted I was the only I've met who saw it that way, but such is life.
I think...it surprised me a bit that I fell in love with Dorothy Dunnett's Chronicles of Lymond - not my genre. Also surprised me that I loved Song of Ice and Fire, although love is too strong a word.
( rest of the days )
2. TV SHOW MEME: Day 12 - An episode you've watched more than 5 times
This category is much easier than the last one under the TV Meme. Less controversial.
Which one to choose? Because here's the thing, I've watched a lot of episodes more than 5 times. Actually I think I've watched both Buffy and Angel more than 5 times. Although granted not the entire series, there are quite a few episodes I've skipped over after the first two viewings (such as pretty much most of Angel S1 and S3). When I say I was an insane Buffy fan, I'm not kidding. Granted...I had good company.
So which one to pick? I think I have Fool for Love and Beneath You memorized. There's a reason for that - both episodes worked for me. Another episode that I have memorized is Restless - which I thought was a crazy puzzle with lots of forshadowing for future episodes. Loved the fact that the writers did reference Restless in various ways, but disappointed that it wasn't as neatly planned as I thought. (Discovered this through interviews...which pretty much goes to show you, you should not read writer interviews. I don't anymore. I really do not want to know what the writers are thinking or what they intended. I agree with the writer of The Kite Runner who stated that once the story is out there it becomes an interactive work of art, readers minds are interacting and perceiving bits and pieces of it differently. Something he may have meant literally or thought nothing of at the time, a reader may come up with a brilliant metaphor for. Often, he stated the readers come up with better stuff than he ever intended. The problem with our current culture - is there is too much interaction with the writers/creators of the art we enjoy. We spend too much time interviewing and talking with them or reading their interviews - to the point that we only see the Doylist version and not the Watsonian. I prefer the Watsonian, it's more often than not, more interesting and compelling, not to mention satisfying - than the Doylist. I lost my Buffy fandom by reading Whedon and various other writer's and actor's interviews and listening to commentary. One of the pitfalls of becoming an obsessed fan is that you feel this need or compulsion to read every interview or bit you can find on your favorite series...until eventually the writers/actors/collaborators views either piss you off or disappoint you. It will eventually happen. It's inevitable. It was a mistake that I'm attempting to avoid repeating. That said - I love Neil Gaiman's blog more than I like his books...so there are exceptions to this rule. LOL!)
Sorry for the aside.
I think I watched the final scenes of Beneath You a hundred times, almost killing the DVD with the rewinding. It's a weird episode. The tonal quality doesn't quite match. We have bright techn-color, then faded blue light...with everything washed out. It is almost as if you are watching two different shows at the same time. This happened quite a bit with Buffy and I always found it compelling and jarring at the same time. Almost as if we had two different production writing staffs. Production quality sometimes varied from episode to episode - some had better quality than others. Which is understandable. But when it happened in the same episode...I was thrown by it. Examples? Seeing Red (which is an episode that is admittedly very hard to watch multiple times but it does have that weird tonal shift in quality), Beneath You, Fool for Love, actually a lot of the Spike centric episodes for some reason, which may explain part of my obsession with the character?
At any rate the ending of Beneath You is pure poetry, a prose poem delivered as monologue. Marsters delivers it well..in a restrained performance. And the words ...can mean many things. You can literally interpret it various ways. Hence the rewatching. I tended to rewatch episodes that could be interpreted more than one way. (Seeing Red and Lies My Parents Told Me - are difficult episodes to re-watch - but also fit in that category. You can interpret both multiple ways.) This may explain why I was obsessed with the series - I like things that you can watch a million times and see something new, interpret differently each and every time you watch it. Particularly things that deal with moral quandry's or emotional arcs of characters. I'm not really a plot person - more character oriented, so the episodes that I got obsessed with were about characters.
I remember re-watching the Angel episode "Destiny" multiple times for much the same reasons. Also re-watched "Home". Once More With Feeling was rewatched multiple times, along with Tabuleh Rasa, HUSH, and Intervention. As great as The Body was...it couldn't be interpreted in multiple ways and it was too bloody painful to watch it more than once, unless of course you like bawling your eyes out.
Buffy had a lot of episodes that you could look at it in more than one way...which is also why I joined the fandom and got involved in writing and discussing it online. The episodes I watched more than five times - had one thing in common - they could be interpreted multiple ways and be discussed to death.
( the rest of the days )
Eh. What often happens is I'll hate a book the first time I try it and then will pick it up months later and enjoy it. It's so dependent on my mood. And this has happened with so many books over the years...that I'm sort of drawing a blank.
It surprised me that I liked James Joyce's Ulysess as much as I did. It also surprised me that I enjoyed..Harry Potter, which I'd avoided when it was first released, because of the hype. A co-worker talked me into trying it. Loved it to pieces. Same thing happened with 50 Shades of Gray actually - thought I'd despise it. Tried a sample and it hit my mood - it was like reading an absurd parody of all the bad contemporary romance novels and fanfic that I'd read in the last three years. I was laughing my head off, and oddly moved by the crazy hero of the piece. Granted I was the only I've met who saw it that way, but such is life.
I think...it surprised me a bit that I fell in love with Dorothy Dunnett's Chronicles of Lymond - not my genre. Also surprised me that I loved Song of Ice and Fire, although love is too strong a word.
( rest of the days )
2. TV SHOW MEME: Day 12 - An episode you've watched more than 5 times
This category is much easier than the last one under the TV Meme. Less controversial.
Which one to choose? Because here's the thing, I've watched a lot of episodes more than 5 times. Actually I think I've watched both Buffy and Angel more than 5 times. Although granted not the entire series, there are quite a few episodes I've skipped over after the first two viewings (such as pretty much most of Angel S1 and S3). When I say I was an insane Buffy fan, I'm not kidding. Granted...I had good company.
So which one to pick? I think I have Fool for Love and Beneath You memorized. There's a reason for that - both episodes worked for me. Another episode that I have memorized is Restless - which I thought was a crazy puzzle with lots of forshadowing for future episodes. Loved the fact that the writers did reference Restless in various ways, but disappointed that it wasn't as neatly planned as I thought. (Discovered this through interviews...which pretty much goes to show you, you should not read writer interviews. I don't anymore. I really do not want to know what the writers are thinking or what they intended. I agree with the writer of The Kite Runner who stated that once the story is out there it becomes an interactive work of art, readers minds are interacting and perceiving bits and pieces of it differently. Something he may have meant literally or thought nothing of at the time, a reader may come up with a brilliant metaphor for. Often, he stated the readers come up with better stuff than he ever intended. The problem with our current culture - is there is too much interaction with the writers/creators of the art we enjoy. We spend too much time interviewing and talking with them or reading their interviews - to the point that we only see the Doylist version and not the Watsonian. I prefer the Watsonian, it's more often than not, more interesting and compelling, not to mention satisfying - than the Doylist. I lost my Buffy fandom by reading Whedon and various other writer's and actor's interviews and listening to commentary. One of the pitfalls of becoming an obsessed fan is that you feel this need or compulsion to read every interview or bit you can find on your favorite series...until eventually the writers/actors/collaborators views either piss you off or disappoint you. It will eventually happen. It's inevitable. It was a mistake that I'm attempting to avoid repeating. That said - I love Neil Gaiman's blog more than I like his books...so there are exceptions to this rule. LOL!)
Sorry for the aside.
I think I watched the final scenes of Beneath You a hundred times, almost killing the DVD with the rewinding. It's a weird episode. The tonal quality doesn't quite match. We have bright techn-color, then faded blue light...with everything washed out. It is almost as if you are watching two different shows at the same time. This happened quite a bit with Buffy and I always found it compelling and jarring at the same time. Almost as if we had two different production writing staffs. Production quality sometimes varied from episode to episode - some had better quality than others. Which is understandable. But when it happened in the same episode...I was thrown by it. Examples? Seeing Red (which is an episode that is admittedly very hard to watch multiple times but it does have that weird tonal shift in quality), Beneath You, Fool for Love, actually a lot of the Spike centric episodes for some reason, which may explain part of my obsession with the character?
At any rate the ending of Beneath You is pure poetry, a prose poem delivered as monologue. Marsters delivers it well..in a restrained performance. And the words ...can mean many things. You can literally interpret it various ways. Hence the rewatching. I tended to rewatch episodes that could be interpreted more than one way. (Seeing Red and Lies My Parents Told Me - are difficult episodes to re-watch - but also fit in that category. You can interpret both multiple ways.) This may explain why I was obsessed with the series - I like things that you can watch a million times and see something new, interpret differently each and every time you watch it. Particularly things that deal with moral quandry's or emotional arcs of characters. I'm not really a plot person - more character oriented, so the episodes that I got obsessed with were about characters.
I remember re-watching the Angel episode "Destiny" multiple times for much the same reasons. Also re-watched "Home". Once More With Feeling was rewatched multiple times, along with Tabuleh Rasa, HUSH, and Intervention. As great as The Body was...it couldn't be interpreted in multiple ways and it was too bloody painful to watch it more than once, unless of course you like bawling your eyes out.
Buffy had a lot of episodes that you could look at it in more than one way...which is also why I joined the fandom and got involved in writing and discussing it online. The episodes I watched more than five times - had one thing in common - they could be interpreted multiple ways and be discussed to death.
( the rest of the days )