30-Day Book Challenge: Day 11

Day 11 – A book I hated

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Atonement. I'm one of those people who refuses to see any book-turned-movie if I haven't read the book yet (and am planning to do so). However, I broke this rule with Atonement and severely regretted it. I went to see the movie with my mom's book club (who had just finished reading the novel by Ian McEwan). It was very depressing, of course, but I still liked the movie. The book, which I read a few months later, was a completely different story. First of all, I already knew I hated Briony, so it was difficult for me to read pages and pages about her childhood activities, including a particularly long diatribe on her watching her pinky finger bend and examining the knuckle and thinking about how it all worked. (Yawn.) This tedious writing style, coupled with the decent length of the book (480 pages), made Atonement very sluggish reading. But mostly (SPOILER ALERT) I didn't really want to keep reading when I knew everyone would just die unhappily in the end anyway. I did force myself to finish it and I was not rewarded. Ho-hum.