#live read

This was a really interesting reading experience, almost moreso than a lot of the other books I’ve live read on here specifically because I enjoyed their film adaptations. In many of those cases the works (Amadeus, Conclave, BBM) felt very complementary to their movie counterparts—often lacking some of their strongest elements but making up for it with fun details or scenes which couldn’t be included in a screen adaptation.

Midnight Cowboy though… I don’t know if I’ve ever had a reading experience that felt so much like the book and film were almost parent and child to each other. The base plot is obviously the same, the tone is the same, many of the details are the same, they’re clearly related. And yet the act of consuming them are such wildly different experiences. The best way I can describe the novel is that… reading it almost feels like you’re experiencing someone else’s memories as though they were your own. Like, how over time your ability to recollect your own childhood becomes very fuzzy. Or how often times it’s the really unpleasant memories that we can recall the easiest. Specific details in our memory like the smell of a certain room or the way we felt when we got lunch with a friend tend to stick out. As someone who has a lost a not-insignificant chunk of my own memory to grief and severe clinical depression, as well as having a very scattered memory of my adolescence due to severe ADHD, I don’t know if I’ve ever read something that so perfectly reflected how my brain worked? It was an incredibly sensory experience.

In comparison to the film, which is certainly very cerebral at times, but I’d largely describe as a straightforwardly great viewing experience.

Wow, genuine credit to Herlihy for managing to include two different devastating gut punches of absolute despair in the last fucking paragraph of the book 

God, fuck

You know, obviously I knew it was gonna happen because, both because I’ve seen the film many times and as @spookyshadows303 put it, the book has been practically holding up a neon sign saying RICO GON’ DIE since his introduction

Alright jeez, no need to kick a man while he’s down

In all seriousness, I do find it fascinating how the one time Joe sees Rico naked, it’s in an entirely de-sexed context. I’ve always argued that the fact their relationship isn’t sexual (to be clear, not that it can never become sexual, but that it has a strong basis of non-sexual companionship) is really important to both characters. For Joe, people only start paying attention to him after he hits puberty—sex is the currency he exchanges for others time and attention. For Rico, any sense of sexual desire is hidden behind every single wall of repression imaginable.

Again, I kinda joked about it earlier