Chocolat

What a delicious book to end the year: Chocolat, Joanne Harris' novel. I loved loved loved the movie, so was looking forward to the book. But this is one of those rare ones where the movie was more satisfying to me. There were many integral differences, for example the book didn't have the Count character; the conflict was between Vianne and the priest. There was completely different backstory for their individual motivations. As I read, I tottered on not liking the book at all, then decided it was just a different story. I could like them both as their own separate self.

The book was full of internal wrestling, of love and responsibility, of guilts and temptation.

My parents gave me this book, as they'd culled it from their collection. My mom or dad had underlined some lines, an interesting insight to them. Not the same lines I kept. You can tell my dad's a pastor.

Here are some of Mom's (or Dad's) quotes:

Page 23:  The devil is a coward; he will not show his face. He is without substance, breaking into a million pieces that worm their evil ways into the blood, into the soul.

Page 48:  "They don't care about God. They just go." (Anouk says to her mother, Vianne, about the kids at school attending church.)


These are my quotes:

Page 33:  My mother was a witch. At least, that's what she called herself, falling so many times into the game of believing herself that at the end there was no telling fake from fact.

Page 103:  And I, her daughter, listening wide-eyed to her charming apocrypha, with tales of Mithras and Baldur the Beautiful and Osiris and Quetzalcoatl all interwoven with stories of flying chocolates and flying carpets and the Triple Goddess and Aladdin's crystal cave of wonders and the cave from which Jesus rose after three days, amen, abracadabra, amen.

Page 121:  Funny, how you always imagine dying in bed, surrounded by your loved ones. Instead, too often, the brief bewildering encounter, the sudden realization, the slow-motion panic ride with the sun coming up behind you like a swinging pendulum, however much you try to outrun it.  

Page 131:  ... our breath made pale dragons in the still air. 

Page 224:  Her hair is a pirate flag in the wind. 

Page 288:  Anouk was asleep on the sofa, a thumb corked into her mouth.  


Careful; don't read too much in to my choices.