#seenonlyfromadistance

duuude Level 7 is one of my favorite books! I love the way it crumbles towards the end… it’s a great piece of writing. I’ve read it three or four times. Didn’t know it was dramatized! I’ll have to find that!

Seriously? Awesome!

Oh yeah, the way it ends is so good- the random words -I don’t know if it’s the same in every edition but mine has them really widely spaced as well- like final blind scribbles, and the bit about the tape... When I first read it (when I was like 11- my granddad loaned it to me for part of a school project I was doing on the Cold War), the thing that really struck me was how there are absolutely no references to either the US or the USSR or anything and no way of telling where X-127 is supposed to be from, which I thought was really clever

It’s terribly disappointing, but I understand the need for completeness. I think Playback is a book better ignored. Read the short stories. Read “Poodle Springs”. Hell, even read “The Black-Eyed Blonde” which does Chandler better than Playback does.

Yeesh. That bad?

oh man I have never agreed more with anyone. That movie doesn’t do any part of the book justice (the characters, the emotions) and it bums. me. out. I recognize that maybe it’s a good movie, but it’s not at all a movie of a book I genuinely love.

Exactly. As a movie on it’s own it’s fine, but as an adaptation of The Long Goodbye, it falls down and misses so much of what got me so emotionally invested in that book.

oh man no book has ever been more utterly heartbreaking to me than The Long Goodbye. I read it a year ago and it continues to wreck me daily.

It’s been a while since I had TLG-related feelings meltdown...

I love how the mystery manages to be both central and irrelevant. Its language and its atmosphere are so sad, the sadness of it permeates everything, and the kind of loss it touches on is the kind that happens so slowly that once you’ve realized it has happened, you’re too far away to do anything with it. You learn nothing other than what you already suspected.

The writing is out of this world beautiful.

“When I got home I mixed a stiff one and stood by the open window in the living room and sipped it and listened to the groundswell of traffic on Laurel Canyon Boulevard and looked at the glare of the big angry city hanging over the shoulder of the hills through which the boulevard had been cut. Far off the banshee wail of police or fire sirens rose and fell, never for very long completely silent. Twenty four hours a day somebody is running, somebody else is trying to catch him. Out there in the night of a thousand crimes, people were dying, being maimed, cut by flying glass, crushed against steering wheels or under heavy tires. People were being beaten, robbed, strangled, raped, and murdered. People were hungry, sick; bored, desperate with loneliness or remorse or fear, angry, cruel, feverish, shaken by sobs. A city no worse than others, a city rich and vigorous and full of pride, a city lost and beaten and full of emptiness. It all depends on where you sit and what your own private score is. I didn’t have one. I didn’t care. I finished the drink and went to bed.” 

-Raymond Chandler

At first I thought this was going to be tough but then I was like hang on a sec. (In no particular order)

1. J.K. Rowling2. Jensen Ackles3. Jared Padelecki4. Jewelry making5. Jenna, my first/previous dog.