True Grit

Now that spring semester is in session, I am enjoying one of the many perks of being an English major – reading books that I would never in a million  years choose to read on my own.  In this particular case, True Grit, by Charles Portis.  

Yes, this is the book based off the latest movie, which also happened to be a remake of an older movie.  And no, I hadn’t seen either the new movie or the old movie, because to be blunt, that type of movie does not interest me in the slightest.  However, for my Advanced Fiction Writing class, I was required to read it.  It still seems a bit strange to me that this book was an assignment for a writing class, but that’s not important.

At first, the book was a challenge.  Having no knowledge of the plot other than what I’d seen in the movie trailers on t.v. I had no expectations for the book.  So having little motivation and no interest in reading didn’t help matters.  The writing was slow, and the meat of the story didn’t really begin until 100 pages into the book.  The characters seemed dry at times, although now looking back at certain lines they do read funnier the second time around.  Perhaps this is a book that needs two reads to be considered a decent piece of literature?

The book remained dry and I felt as if I had to force myself to read it – something that I have not felt in a very long time.  Normally when I read, I can eventually get into the story to the point where I’m interested enough that it’s not tortuous to continue reading, even if I did not originally choose to read the book.  With this book, I did not experience that until page 178 out of 224.  Once I got to that point, I couldn’t put the book down, and I flew through the ending.  But getting to that point was painful and took entirely way too long.

Despite the pain that I felt for the majority of the novel, I will say that I thoroughly enjoyed the ending.  Whether that was from relief that it was finally over, I cannot say.