Culture in the English-speaking world

Well, everybody knows the legendary story of wizard boy, Harry Potter. The boy whose parents has die by you-know-who and lives with awful Dursley`s family, when he got the letter from Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.

I have to confess, I have never read this, one of the most popular book in the world; even I have read a lot other books. So now I had an excellent chance again educate myself. And did I enjoy my readings? I don’t even know.

Well I have seen many, MANY times all movies, so I knew what wait. Maybe it was little bit boring, when I knew what happen next. And It was very disturbing when all characters of the book get the movie`s look. I bet, I would enjoy more reading if I weren´t see the movies. But I was not- clever child and never get exited Harry Potter- books.

But there is one thing I wondering: how did Rowling imagine all this stuff?! All spells, the history, the whole new world! I have to give applause to Rowling, because everyone can`t create the most popular book series and then become a millionaire. And of course delight the whole generation with her books.

I have heard a lot about people who has been a child when the first book published and graduate at collage when the last book published. I think that is so amazing: grow up with the book series and at the same time with characters of book. Now, when I´m a little bit late with this Harry Potter- mania, it doesn`t feel the same. I don`t have to wait years to get the next book, I can (If I like to) read whole series in two weeks. There`s no point to do that because all excitement is already gone.

Or, maybe I just don`t want read the books, because I would cry, just like in movies.

The Fault in Our Stars is a story about 16 years old girl who has a bad cancer. Author is John Green and year of publication is 2012. Just a little bit later in July 2014 released also a movie. Main character is called Hazel Grace Lancaster. She is introverted and philosophic. She have had cancer from she was 13 years old. She prefers to stay home than to go somewhere. Then her parents want her to go peer support group where she could meet other teenagers in the same situation. Hazel don´t want to go but for her parents she finally does that. There she meets a boy, Isaac who becomes a good friend for Hazel. One day when Hazel goes to the group meeting there is a really handsome guy with Isaac. That boy asks Hazel to watch a movie with him. He´s name is Augustus Waters and he is really nice, handsome and he has a keen sense of humour. Hazel and Augustus soon notice that they have lots of things in common and as everyone can guess they soon fall in love.

I think the book is very well-written. Usually when I start reading some book I have no interests to continue. But this was different, it was interesting from the very first page and it just kept me reading. The story is really sad but it wouldn´t never became as huge sensation as it is without that thing they had a cancer witch made it different and more interesting in compared to other same kind of books for example other love stories. The language is mostly easy to understand. Maybe because it is written in this decade.

Athmosphere was mostly more positive than I thougt before. The teenagers still had their sense of humouf left allthought they were dying. If I have to choose my favourite parts are absolutely those funny little parts. The store evoked lot of different feelings. It maybe was the purpose. I really cried but for balance I also laughed a lot. I recommend it for everyone who wants to read a really lovely and touching book and amazing love story witch is same time so terribly sad but still just so lovely and sweet.

My (I think many agrees with me in this) favourite character was Augustus. He was still thinking positive and laughing. He had accepted the rough fact that he couldn´t change and learned living with it and enjoying the little things he had. Relationship between Augustus and Hazel is really warm and love between them is so hard and that´s one thing witch makes the story so impressing and sad. Sad but still so beautiful.

“The most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or touched, they are felt with the heart.”

The Little Prince is a French writer Antoine de Saint-Exupéry in 1943 published fairy short novel. The Little Prince is most read and translated a French book, and is sold around the world each year more than a million copies. It is one of the world’s best-known books and has received cult status.

The book is written many decades ago but it is still and will always be a very timely. The little prince is sort of a children’s fairy tale, but I think that the most appropriate reading experience, it is for an adult. The book is about a young boy who begins to question the methods of adults. It is difficult to tell about the book because it is not about the story but about how to interpret this story. Everyone should read the book itself because only then can interpret and understand the story and its teachings. One of the major themes of the book is child-mindedness glorification . The boy wonders grayness, superficiality and the seriousness of adults life.

Text of the Little Prince was difficult because poetic language and vocabulary. It was slow to read the text, but on the other hand when it began to realize it was really beautifuI. I’ve read Paol Coelho’s book “Alchemist” and this was kind of the same style. Both books tell us a relatively simple fictional story that allows the writer deals with depth issues.

It is great that the books are written so that they provide something for everyone, regardless of age or life situation. I really like this kind of books that will challenge your thinking and even to question my own thoughts and to develop and expand  own philosophy of life.

The Good The Bad The Weird (South Korea: Jo-eun Nom Nappeun Nom Isanghan Nom) is a movie directed by Kim Jee-woon and produced with Baruson Co. Ltd and Grimm Pictures. The Good The Bad The Weird was premiered in Cannes film festival in May 24. 2008 and released in South Korea in July 17. 2008. T.G.T.B.T.W. is a South Korean western film and it was inspired by Sergio Leone’s The Good, The Bad and The Ugly.

The story begins in the 1930s Manchuria occupied by Japanese army. The Bad (Lee Buyng-hun) – a hitman – is hired to acquire a map from a Japanese official traveling by train. The Weird (Song Kang-ho) – a mugger – who was just planning to steal some money and jewellery from the rich in the train unwittingly steals the map with other valuable things right under The Bad’s nose. The Good (Jung Woo-sung) -a bountyhunter – is sitting on the train planning to claim the bounty on The Bad’s head. The Weird escapes eluding both The Good and Bad pursuers. Soon the fourth party, Gang of Manchurian bandits whose target is to sell the map in the Ghost Market joins in the pursuit too. The Weird belives the map is a treasure map to gold and riches buried by the Qing Dynasty. This whole event starts a race trough Manchuria with an escalating battle for the map involving The Weird, The Good, The Bad and his gang, the Manchurian bandits and also the Imperial Japanese army.

The movie is really awesome and it’s a good change from America’s western films. I deeply recommed this movie for everybody who is interested in Asian movies and culture. I also recommed it for all of you because it’s so good and funny. The movie’s storyline is really easy to follow and the actors are teriffic for their roles and they are delved into their characters deeply.

This well-known classic is not just an entertaining romantic novel but also a brilliant description of society. I can recommend it to you if you like reading about the life in the 19th century and if drama and feelings are the thing of yours.

Hardly had I made it to the page 100 when I realised how insanely intensive touch the novelist has on psychological themes. Let’s think about the relationship between Jane and Mr. Rochester, for instance. That absurd relationship surely isn’t the easiest one created! Firstly, the man is so much older than Jane that he could be her father. Secondly, he already has a wife – who happens to be secretly hidden in the house. Just so ordinary, isn’t it?

Jane is an orphan girl having experienced cruelty and violence and cold attitude towards herself so it is not a wonder why she falls in love with her master (yes, like there wasn’t enough drama before: he is also her employer!). In my opinion she sees her master like a father, someone who gives her the parental safety she sadly has not been given in her childhood. At least that would make some sense from the psychological point of view, I think.

Mr. Rochester was a hard personality to analyze. I mean, what is he like – I don’t know, I really don’t! There is something dark and mysterious in him but also sensibility and pride. There is this one scene where Mr. Rochester invites Jane to come and talk with him. So, when they are small talking, he starts asking her opinion of himself. It was not like a proper thing to do because they were supposed to small talk. You cannot just ask a new employee to give you an opinion of yourself, can you?

So, is it self-love? Some personal disorder, maybe even the one everyone knows – narcissism? What is wrong with Mr. Rochester? He is a weird person, there is no denying it. Maybe it is an inevitable thing that your personality changes when you meet really difficult, hard things in your life. On the other hand, the past of Mr. Rochester is somehow unclear because the story is told by Jane’s point of view. The mental illness of his wife must have been serious issue in his life, though. I don’t know if he loved her but at least he doesn’t send her to a mental hospital. According to historians, mental hospitals were horrible places in the 1800s.

Jane is easier to understand and not only because the story is from her perspective but because her acting is simple and sensible. She loves Mr. Rochester, so she simply loves him – meanwhile the man is playing mind games and stuff. Jane might be shy and overly friendly but her soul is determined and she definitely lives with passion.

Maybe the most remarkable difference between Jane and Mr. Rochester is that they are from different social classes. As said before, Jane is a poor orphan girl meanwhile the latter represents the upper class. It was not socially accepted to marry someone who’s status differed much from yours. The upper class persons socialized with each other. So you might wonder why Jane feels so comfortable about socializing with Mr. Rochester? Well, although Jane is poor and unconnected, she has lived in an upper class family her first ten years. She was sent to school and she became educated young woman. That is the main reason why she feels like she belongs to the upper.

There is this snobbing though which can make the reader either irritated or amused. I did not know how to feel about the parts where the writer has been trying to sound elegant by writing in French and German instead of just English. Supposedly she has wanted to show her knowledge of languages and stuff but hey, still… What was the logic?

I could understand only the German parts so skipping the French parts was kinda boring. There were translations in the end of the book but it was not the same thing. Especially French was the language of education and civilization in the 1800s and all so it is understandable why she wrote the parts, though.

The author of the book is the well known crime novelist Aagatha Christie, who was born September 1890 in England and died January  1976 with the age of 85 in England. Christie was specially known for being the first female crime novelist, who had had such a big success with her novels. In that time people used to say: ”Naah you can’t write good crime books, you’re a woman”, but she said ” Ooh just wait, I will show you”, and yes, she did show us. In her career she wrote 66 detective novels and 14 short story collections.

The book  I read is called  Murder on the orient express, which is one of her most known detective novels. There is a movie made of it too. Christie had her own style that she show in many of her books it is that the plot handles in one single place, for example, us in this book, in the train. So the characters are in that one location from the beginning till the end of the book. There happens a murder and among a lot of people and the detective, which is Hercule Poirot tries to find out who it was. The thought that they all stuck in one room makes the whole story very thrilling and I love it. Christie also uses the same characters again in other novels, so it is like a criminal series where all episodes show a new story. I like her stories very much but if you read the or watch the movies for them a lot I’ll get bored, because they, as I already mentioned, are very similar. ”And then there were none” and ”the mousetrap” have similarities to The orient express.

Detective Hercule Poirot is the main character, plus all the suspects for the murder, which means all of the people that are in the train. Everyone gets a profile including the name, motive, alibi and evidence against her/him or suspicious circumstances , which are shown in the book too.  Hercule Poirot is in the train by chance, so in the beginning nobody knows he is a detective. After the murder happened he knew he can’t trust anybody, so he was quite quiet and  always had an eye open for every possibility. The other characters were very mysterious that you couldn’t guess anything. You could see both, friendships and enemies between the suspects. All of them had their own personality nobody was alike, some were arrogant, others helpless or kind of weird. They came from different countries too such as France, Sweden, England, America, Hungary, Germany and Poirot was Belgian. That all makes the book exciting.

The book was first published 1931 so the language felt a bit old too and the way Christie was writing. It wasn’t the words she used, which made it feel old, more the way how she expressed things.The story was told by Poirot and his thoughts when he was trying to find the murderer.

I liked the the plot very much the book was a bit challenging to read for me, because it had a lot of boring parts in it and this is a really big problem for me because I can’t even read boring parts in Finnish without reading it again hundreds of times. Other things that dist annoyed me was the book cover. It was so ugly, i hated it. I can’t red books with a cover i don’t like and it was so old that the pages fell out. It was the first book I read in English so I was happy that the language was easy enough for me to understand but I didn’t like it.

I’d like to recommend this book to people who like to read in English but aren’t so good at it because Christie wrote in an easy way so it’s not hard. And of course to those, who like detective books.

As you see from the title, Hercule Poirot and the Greenshore Folly is a detective story written by Agatha Christie. First she wrote the book The Dead Man’s Folly in 1954. It was published in 1956. This book I read, was a shorter version of The Dead Man’s Folly. I think the expanded version would have been more exciting. This was bored for the detective story.

The main character was ”surprisingly” M. Hercule Poirot. If you don’t know Poirot yet, he is Belgian detective and the most famous character alongside Miss Marple. Poirot is found in a total of 33 novels and 54 short stories. In my mind Poirot has a bit different manners than in the other books I’ve read. He is mealy-mouthed. As in the other Agatha Christie’s books many people goes to live in the same house at the same time and Poirot doesn’t know the people well. He’s also invited. Then happens murders when he’s in the house but he never see what really happens. It’s absolutely strange how he guesses everything and people tell the truth to him almost immediately.

The story teller is unknown and it didn’t knew all the things some characters didn’t. The language of the text is variable. Some of the people speak different even if their native language is english and some others are foreigners. This one is from book: ”They du say, too, as her du be wanting up here.” Some words I’ve just have never even heard, like ”bewilderment” and ”battlemented”.

The book says that Agatha Christie wrote the book to help raise money for her local church at Churston Ferrers, The Greenshore Folly novella was ultimately never published in it’s original form. Instead, it became the basis for one of her favourite novels, Dead Man’s Folly.

It was really nice to  read in english! I will read other books in english at my own time because it was easier than I thought. The book was a bad choice, I would rather read Harry Potter or Doctor Who -books. Still reading book in english was a good experience. I saw how much I understand.

Cannery Row is a novel by John Steinbeck. It was published 1945 and there is also a film version of it. Steinbeck is known for his comic novels Cannery Row and Tortilla Flat. Cannery Row is a short book, it only has 115 pages, so you can read it through in few days.

The main characters in Cannery Row are Mack and his friends Eddie and Hazel, and marine biologist Doc. There are many side characters. Mack and his friends are unemployed except Eddie, who works as a part-time bartender. Doc is a gentle and the smartest man in Cannery Row. The novel is set in Monterey, California.

Mack and the boys want to do something nice for their friend Doc, so they decide to throw a party for him. The party gets out of hand before Doc even gets there and his home and lab were ruined. The boys want to make it up to Doc somehow, so they decided to ask Dora what to do. Dora suggests the boys to throw another party where Doc could actually attend. The party is a success, and the novel ends the morning after the party. There are also few subplots tied to the main plot.

The book was quite easy to read. There weren’t many complicated sentence structures so someone with basic English skills could read this book,  though there were parts that had some strange words that i had to translate with my phone. The narrator in Cannery Row is omniscient. He knows what everyone’s thinking and feeling. The book teaches the reader that if you screw something up, you have to make it up somehow.

Cannery Row was a good book, even though i don’t really like reading books. The characters were funny and there wasn’t too much of them. Some books have a problem that they have too many characters, but i’m glad this didn’t. The plot was easy to follow and the novel was easy to read.