Loving novels where the hero always wins

 This last year I've enjoyed following several favorite authors, sometimes re-reading some that I forgot some detail about.

Then the other day I happened upon a movie made from one of the Lee Child novels about Jack Reacher. He's a 6'-6" 250 pound guy who always pounds whoever, and however many thugs come up against him. But he's also somewhat a nice guy too. Defending the underdog, looking out for unjustly treated others.

Anyway, Hollywood has really messed up in using smallish hero actor, Tom Cruise to be Jack Reacher. I laughed when I saw him portraying the huge hero I had been reading about.

So one of the movies had started about an hour before I discovered it on TV the other day, and I was drawn into watching it. I knew I'd read the novel...but this story didn't match my memory at all. I kind of enjoyed it...but the next day I checked out the original book on digital from the library and started it again.

Wow...it really wasn't the same story at all. The bare bones maybe, but twisted all over the place. The movie ending is also nice and warm and fuzzy, but nowhere near the one in the book. How can they do that? Why would they do that?

Hollywood somehow had Major Turner have a connection to a girls prep school, and the daughter (maybe) of Reacher's ends up going there....and there's a big scene in Mardi Gras in New Orleans, which never occurred in the book. In the book the big ending is finding out who had high personnel clearance to have manipulated all of the illegal actions to protect high ranking officials in DC in having a private club where opium smoking was experienced. This never happened at all in the movie.

So I've gone back to another favorite author, who satirized many other authors' stories on purpose. 

Terry Pratchett's Maskerade...a spoof on The Music of the Night...aka Phantom of the Opera.

This is my own paperback, published in 1995. I have most of Pratchett's books, (and none of Lee Child's). I re-read these every few years. Unfortunately Pratchett died a few years ago from Alzheimer's.

I do think some of his rather fun fantasy books have been made into movies as well...with probably the same problems I see in the Jack Reacher stories.

what is this world coming to?

Today's Quote:

...No words or concepts can capture reality.  Maps are useful,
but they can only describe and point to the territory itself.
Eating the meal is what nourishes you, not reading the menu.
Take what resonates and leave the rest...  Don't believe
anything you read, but instead, question, look, listen, feel
deep into, and see for yourself.  The book that wakes you
up one day may lull you to sleep the next.  Always be ready
to see something new and unexpected.

...stay open to the possibilities, to seeing things in a new way,
to questioning assumptions and conclusions.  ...this living
reality is no way in particular.  It is ever-changing, evolving,
dancing, vibrating, unfolding...  It never resolves into some
final package, some ultimate formulation.  There is no
finish-line on this pathless path, no definitive model or map
that captures reality.  What all true pointers are pointing to
is the living reality, and the living reality is ALIVE - fluid,
spacious, open, ungraspable.  It is not frozen or solid or
only one way.  It can't be pinned down.

Sometimes everything opens up when we hear a teacher say
that there is nothing to do.  Sometimes we need to hear
there is no choice, and sometimes we need to hear that
there is a choice.

Nothing is just one way...

Joan Tollifson