been reading: The Notebook by Nicholas Sparks

The Notebook perplexes me. I felt the first half was terribly written and the second half was incredibly moving. Seriously, night and day. I'm still trying to figure out how Sparks can write so differently, especially within the same novel, and how I can want to gouge my eyes out at the first half and then weep throughout the second.

I read the book over the weekend, so it's not that my mindset was different or that I just forget the first half. I suspect it's at least partly do with the fact that the first half is written in third person and the second half is in first. As a writer, this intrigues me because I often struggle to determine which way to tell a story. Invariably, I feel I lose my voice when I go with third person. For me, stories are more powerfully told in the voice that has experienced them, even if that voice is a fictional one. In fact, I could better relate to the first half of this novel, but it was so poorly written that I was left unmoved. The second half was much more foreign to my experiences, and yet the telling stirred me deeply (other than a few parts so sappy I had to stop reading so I could roll my eyes).

I haven't seen the film. Rarely do I like a movie better than the book on which it is based; however, the essence of this story is such that I think perhaps it could be better told in film. (To be honest, it could have been better told in prose. The fact that this novel is a #1 New York Times bestseller....? Surely that happened only after the movie came out.) I'm eager to see what the filmmakers did with a story so beautiful and with so much potential.