All the rest of us are just acting like we understand

On Friday evening, I was driving one of my friends home when I saw a strange pattern of light on the back window of my car. It looked like sunlight does when it filters through leaves in the summer, or like light that is reflecting off of water and has a shimmering appearance. My friend saw it too when I called her attention to it, so I know I'm not going crazy. Despite our jokes about demons, I'm sure it was just some quality of the street lights in the area we were driving through.

But looking at it and thinking of how it looked reminded me very strongly of a description in a book I loved when I was younger: The House With a Clock in its Walls, by John Bellairs. That book was one of my favorites, and I reread it yesterday and today, and it turns out that it is still one of my favorites. (Most of my favorites are kid books. I know, I know, but I don't care.) There are a whole lot of books by John Bellairs, and I've read many of them and enjoyed them all.

After I read the book, I got online and looked it up. It has a favorable rating on Amazon, and then I decided to search IMDb to see if it had a movie adaptation. It did not, and I was relieved.

I just know that I can't be the only person who doesn't like it when my favorite books are turned into movies. I love reading, and I do have some favorite movies, but it just seems like it takes all of the imagination out of my favorite books to see them as movies.

For one thing, they never make the movies long enough, because obviously, they can't fit in ever little detail from the books, or else the movies would be like 24 hours long in some cases. Harry Potter books are a perfect example. I saw the movie this summer when it was in the dollar theater and it wasn't bad, but it wasn't that great, either. (I usually refuse to see movies of the books I like, but I make exceptions for Harry Potter because of Harry Potter. Guys who look like that are my favorite...) There was so much stuff that annoyed me because it was different from how it is in the books. Maybe I should just relax and enjoy it, but it's irritating because they're RUINING my BOOKS!!

There have been a lot that have gone in that direction, too. Harry Potter, obviously. The Chronicles of Narnia. Most recently I discovered that Inkspell, a book that doesn't seem to be that well-known, is also going to be made into a movie. ARRGH!! There's another one that I won't go to see.

What's also frustrating is that a lot of my friends want to go see these movies. They never want to go with me to see the little kid Pixar/Dreamworks movies like Ratatouille, Shrek, and Happy Feet, but they all want to go see Harry Potter and Narnia. *sigh*

Speaking of books, I recently read one that was absolutely terrible. I knew that it wasn't likely to be a masterpiece because it was at Dollar Tree which sells everything for $1, but I thought I'd go ahead and give it a try. I tend to like fantasy and it had a dragon on the cover, so I thought it would surely be entertaining enough to be worth a dollar.

I started reading it a week or so after I bought it. I didn't get out of the prologue before I realized that this book wasn't going to be the greatest. For starters, wouldn't you think that a book that had a picture of a dragon on the cover and has "Dragon" in the title would be about, well, dragons? Instead, this book has like TWO characters that can turn into dragons. One of the characters is only in the prologue and is mentioned a few times later on. The other character who can turn into a dragon doesn't do it very often, so mainly the book is about humans in a world that can only be described as stupid.

It was a huge disappointment, and it really wasn't worth the $1.07 I paid for it. I did not want that thing in my house because I knew I wasn't going to read it again and I didn't want anyone to ever find it and think that I enjoyed it, so I decided to get rid of it. I didn't want to just throw it away, though, so I decided to give someone else a chance for it. I wrote a note in it saying that anyone who found it could take it and read it and then keep it or get rid of it. I stuck a note on the cover and left it in the bathroom of the biology building at my school. Haha, maybe that was a crazy thing to do, but maybe someone took it. I hope it didn't just get tossed in the trash by a janitor or something.

I wrote an old email address in it, hoping that someone might email me about it, but so far, nothing. :-( I guess I shouldn't expect that because I probably wouldn't email some random person who left a book lying around, either, but I thought it would be cool if someone wrote to me about it. Oh well. Maybe next time.