Gone with the Wind (Gone with the Wind) (Penguin Joint Venture Readers S.)

by Margaret Mitchell

[jamiereadthis]

I am torn between liking this book better than I thought I would and not liking it at all. I think the highest praise is that I finished it, which is more than I can say for even the first half hour of the movie. It’s the melodrama; oh, the melodrama. I do not have a melodramatic bone in my body.

On the other hand, I’m genuinely glad to have read it. It was my grandmother’s favorite story, always, and now I can see how: she was, in a person, the Irish, hot-tempered, embittered Scarlett. Always with the driving, fearless, reckless impatience to fly in the face of others, never with the imagination, will, or desire to see life from any other perspective, somehow rooted in a deeply personal, misguided sense of love and duty. She was a hard woman to understand, and for that reason alone I’m glad to have found Scarlett out.

But, oh, the melodrama.