I don’t read many books. I blame the internet. I read hours and hours of blog posts every week. I read newspapers, work emails, and graffiti.. but rarely a book.
Still, in my younger years I would read books. And if there’s one book that for some inexplicable reason I loved as a kid, it was Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations. Maybe I like it because its the story of a boy who is tortured by the women he loves and I’m a masochist so I like that kind of stuff. It’s a very dark story, and maybe I like that sort of thing as well.
So tonight, after playing a show with my darling A in Haarlem, I had the movie version of Great Expectations waiting for me. (thanks to the magic of Bittorent) You may have seen this 90’s production with Ethan Hawke and Gweneth Paltrow. And if you did, you probably remember it as a crap movie, and you’re probably right. But as I watched, my love for the story came back, and I found myself feeling the anger of the main character, feeling the brokenheartedness. I bet the movie probably wasn’t that good, but I was too busy remembering the REAL story and thinking back to when I first read it and how great it was.