Couch 82: If you're happy and you know it, be a number!

Hi Lola! Great to see you again!

Is that the one where being a librarian is the worst fate ever for a woman? I watched it a few years ago. It was pretty awful, though the librarian bit was unintentionally very funny.

I didn't know there was a movie called White Christmas. I've read about it now on Wikipedia and I don't think I'll watch it - it doesn't look like my thing at all.

I do not like Christmas said sam I am. i do not like it here nor there. I do not like it anywhere

It is mainly set in Vermont. And there are only like 4 scenes not set there. It is a musical-plot is not its strong point perhaps, but it is just silly fun with some good music and dancing.

I have not seen it in a long time. I did not remember there was a librarian in it.

I love that film. I think James Stewarts wife became a librarian in the story where they did not marry. I'm surprised someone doesn't like the film. My kids don't but it is too slow for them I think.

Tastes differ I don't like films that are too speeded-up, but I also dislike romance (in movies, books, real life), and the premise that being an unmarried librarian equals unhappiness is really rather offensive - or would be if it weren't so hilariously off the mark.

I honestly don't remember anything other than the librarian thing from the film though, so I shouldn't say more about it. I don't remember why I disliked it, only that I did. I've only ever watched it the one time, and don't think I'm likely to watch it again. H liked it, I think.

I love White Christmas and Holiday Inn, and don't care for It's A Wonderful Life or that one where "you'll shoot your eye out!" My dad watched Bing and Fred while I was growing up and the dancing and singing hooked me. There was a TV movie called The Best Christmas Pageant Ever that I loved when I was little, also.

Now I'm more Scrooge than Elf! Bah humbug and when will it be over?

I love romance everywhere. Wish my H was more romantic. I love romance in books - things like Pride and Prejudice (I enjoyed the film too). This may sound absurd, but I really enjoyed the romance in the Twilight books. (am connecting with my teenage kids by reading the teen books, I enjoy them more than they do).

I like happy movies and singing and dancing. I love the silly old musicals. I like reading Jane Austen more for the way she uses language than the plot lines but I don't mind the plots. Happy romance is fine with me but more because I like happy rather than romance.

I am not a huge James Stewart fan in general - so that did not help. It did not have clever or witty language so that was two. I hated the child and thought the plot was stupid with no redeeming songs or dances.
The one rather smaltzy one I do like is the Bishop's Wife.

I like sad. I liked The Fault in our stars(two teens with cancer). (More teen stuff, I liked it more than my daughter). I think my T would say I like sad because I see pain expressed that I don't express myself. I don't usually like musicals.

I see enough sad in real life. I don't want to pay for it or have it in my entertainment.

Hi Lola!! Good to see you!

My favorite book and movie of all time is Wuthering Heights, the old movie with laurence olivier as heathcliff and merle oberon as cathy. I have an old copy of the book that I treasure. I have read it probably 15 times.

I never could get into any of the Bronte Sisters.

I haven't read any but Emily.

They were not a cheerful nor hardy lot.

Yep - that's what amazes me so much about the passionate love story that is Wuthering Heights. How with the sad life that she had, she wrote that!! Blows me away.

Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom is my Christmas movie. It used to be on TV every Christmas Eve when I was a kid and my mom used to make me turn it off because I was supposed not be preparing for the birth of our Lord So now I watch it and relish the fact that no one is dragging me to Midnight Mass

I'm a huge Jane Austen fan. I haven't been that impressed with any of the adaptations I've seen, other than BBC's Pride and Prejudice from 1995 (with Colin Firth), but the books are staple reading for me. The romance in those books is actually pretty much a side plot, to my mind. Jane Austen's own opinion is expressed by Charlotte Lucas in P&P: "Happiness in marriage is entirely a matter of chance" - I like that view because it tallies with my own experience and opinion. And at least some of the people in Austen's books have a sense of humour - Henry Tilney for instance, and Elizabeth Bennet - and I like that.

The only Brontë book I've read is Jane Eyre, and I don't like it very much, I'm afraid. I'm not a big fan of Victorian novels in general, though Dickens and Trollope are exceptions to the rule. Oh, and Elizabeth Gaskell, too.

So many books, so little time. I have more than fifty books on my "to read" list right now.

I've been wanting to read books other than the non-fiction educational and work-related books I've been reading for the past 15 years. It's time for a change. Can you recommend a book by Jane Austen to someone unfamiliar with this type of literature?

There is a book I have to read for work that's been sitting here for weeks. I'm on page 33.

I guess I never really saw Wuthering Heights as all that passionate romance. And reading it was, to me, just boring - the sentences were plodding. I am not bored by Austen - she is witty. And I also really like Trollope. I also enjoy a good 18th century epistolary novel from time to time

Sense and Sensibility is my favorite - then Pride and Prejudice and Emma.

Thanks, I'll check them out and buy myself one as a New Year's gift to myself.