Ce Monstre Delicat - an explanation

The purpose of this blog is to document books I have read (or listened to as audiobooks) and movies I have seen.  For a while when I was a teenager, I kept a journal of books I had read, and it proved quite useful: writing a summary of the plot helped me remember a book better, and writing a brief review helped me analyze the book and form a more considered opinion about it. Now as an adult, I will sometimes have a flashback to a scene or idea in a book I read years ago, and wish desperately I could remember the author or title and find it again.  If only I had kept up my brief practice of a book journal!

It would not have occurred to me then to document movies.   I liked watching movies very much, but for reasons beyond my control, I consumed (for lack of a better word) far fewer movies than books, and partly due to their shortness and vividness, and also to their rarity, I found them more memorable than books (thus there was no need to write down plots in case I forgot later).  I also took movies far less seriously; it did not occur to me to analyze or review them.  I was pretty old - 16 or 17, believe it or not- before I truly realized there could be such a thing as a bad movie or a bad play.  (Not because I saw only good ones - rather, I just liked, or believed to be good even if I didn't really like it, almost every one I saw.)  I was much younger- maybe around 8 - when I understood that a book could fall anywhere on a spectrum of abysmal to Great.   In other words, while I liked all movies, I enjoyed them uncritically, and therefore, didn't truly appreciate them - didn't love them.  I could read better than I could view; I could understood a book better than a film; at least on some level I could analyze a book, and I could certainly identify some good and Great ones to love with all my heart.  Why was I a better reader than viewer?  Partly due to practice - in my childhood, at least, it was easy to get my hands on a nearly infinite supply of books and rare to see a movie - and also I was taught from an early age not only to critique and analyze books, but specifically how to do so.  I think I got the message from my parents (and more arguably my culture) that movies are for occasional entertainment, while books are there to sustain life and make it livable.

I would still consider books to be more necessary to life than movies, but I have gained much in my appreciation of movies as an important art form, and worthy, side by side with the books I read, of a little record-keeping and reviewing.