Meme: I just don't like them!

I am breaking my rule of not posting twice in one day to post this excellent meme.

Tahleen of The Broke and the Bookish came up with this meme to name one’s top 10 most dislikeable characters in literature, and boy, did I have fun deciding!

I haven’t numbered them because I really can’t decide which ones I like the least.

Dolores Umbridge from Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix by J.K. Rowling. She is a cruel, sadistic, bigoted, bureaucratic toady who will use any means to achieve her goals – even ones she would be shocked to see others use. She is unable to accept facts that are under her nose and she shows not regret over her actions, in fact it never even occurs to her that she is anything but one of the good guys. Caveat: I just finished re-reading the book, so this was the very first character that sprung to mind. On a different day I might not even have remembered her, but re-reading the book brought back to me why I found it so uncomfortable to read (Harry’s stupidity throughout the story was another - I constantly wanted to yell at him to grow a brain)
Raskolnikov from Crime and Punishment by Dostojevski. The book is brilliant and the story about Raskolnikov’s breakdown utterly believable, but he is still loathsome and unsympathetic in the extreme, which just goes to show how well he is written.
Fanny Price from Mansfield Park by Jane Austen. She’s just so hopelessly wet.
Catherine Earnshaw from Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë. She’s a proud, bratty, selfish bitch...
...which brings me to Heathcliff from the same book. He is vindictive, cruel and a sore loser who can’t stand anyone around him being happy. I will never, ever understand how anyone could think him romantic.
Angel Clare from Tess of the D’Urbervilles. I hate double standards, especially when those double standards cause preventable tragedies. Alec d’Urverville may be a villain, but Angel is a monster.
Scarlett O’Hara from Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell. See the description for Catherine Earnshaw.
Rose Mortmain from I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith. Shallow, avaricious and stupid and may have destroyed Cassandra’s chance of happiness with her behaviour.
Tom Ripley from The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith. She manages to make him sympathetic but that doesn’t change the fact that he is a psychopath par excellence, devoid of conscience and unlikely ever to change. He is so evil, in fact, that you end up hating yourself for liking him.
The last is a tie between Mary Sues and Gary Stus of all kind.

Interestingly, only one of these characters (Umbridge) seems to have been written expressly to be disliked/hated by readers. The hero-villains Raskolnikov and Ripley and victim-villain Heathcliff are written in such a way as to make them somewhat sympathetic, and the others were not written as villains.

Note: This list is subject to change.

Icelandic folk-tale: The Devil Takes a Wife

Stories of people who have made a deal with and then beaten the devil exist all over Christendom and even in literature. Here is a typical one: O nce upon a time there were a mother and daughter who lived together. They were rich and the daughter was considered a great catch and had many suitors, but she accepted no-one and it was the opinion of many that she intended to stay celebrate and serve God, being a very devout woman. The devil didn’t like this at all and took on the form of a young man and proposed to the girl, intending to seduce her over to his side little by little. He insinuated himself into her good graces and charmed her so thoroughly that she accepted his suit and they were betrothed and eventually married. But when the time came for him to enter the marriage bed the girl was so pure and innocent that he couldn’t go near her. He excused himself by saying that he couldn’t sleep and needed a bath in order to go to sleep. A bath was prepared for him and in he went...

Book 40: The Martian by Andy Weir, audiobook read by Wil Wheaton

Note : This will be a general scattershot discussion about my thoughts on the book and the movie, and not a cohesive review. When movies are based on books I am interested in reading but haven't yet read, I generally wait to read the book until I have seen the movie, but when a movie is made based on a book I have already read, I try to abstain from rereading the book until I have seen the movie. The reason is simple: I am one of those people who can be reduced to near-incoherent rage when a movie severely alters the perfectly good story line of a beloved book, changes the ending beyond recognition or adds unnecessarily to the story ( The Hobbit , anyone?) without any apparent reason. I don't mind omissions of unnecessary parts so much (I did not, for example, become enraged to find Tom Bombadil missing from The Lord of the Rings ), because one expects that - movies based on books would be TV-series long if they tried to include everything, so the material must be pared down ...

How to make a simple origami bookmark

Here are some instructions on how to make a simple origami (paper folding) bookmark: Take a square of paper. It can be patterned origami paper, gift paper or even office paper, just as long as it’s easy to fold. The square should not be much bigger than 10 cm/4 inches across, unless you intend to use the mark for a big book. The images show what the paper should look like after you follow each step of the instructions. The two sides of the paper are shown in different colours to make things easier, and the edges and fold lines are shown as black lines. Fold the paper in half diagonally (corner to corner), and then unfold. Repeat with the other two corners. This is to find the middle and to make the rest of the folding easier. If the paper is thick or stiff it can help to reverse the folds. Fold three of the corners in so that they meet in the middle. You now have a piece of paper resembling an open envelope. For the next two steps, ignore the flap. Fold the square diagonally in two. Yo...

Reading in Reykjavík

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