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.

Book 7: Shadow of the Sun by Ryszard Kapuściński (reading notes)

-This reads like fiction - prose more beautiful than one has come to expect from non-fiction and many of the chapters are structured like fiction stories. There is little continuity between most of the chapters, although some of the narratives or stories spread over more than one chapter. This is therefore more a collection of short narratives than a cohesive entirety. You could pick it up and read the chapters at random and still get a good sense of what is going on. -Here is an author who is not trying to find himself, recover from a broken heart, set a record, visit 30 countries in 3 weeks or build a perfectly enviable home in a perfectly enviable location, which is a rarity within travel literature, but of course Kapuściński was in Africa to work, and not to travel for spiritual, mental or entertainment purposes (he was the Polish Press Agency's Africa correspondent for nearly 30 years). -I have no way of knowing how well Kapuściński knew Africa - I have never been there...

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...

Bibliophile discusses Van Dine’s rules for writing detective stories

Writers have been putting down advice for wannabe writers for centuries, about everything from how to captivate readers to how to build a story and write believable characters to getting published. The mystery genre has had its fair share, and one of the best known advisory essays is mystery writer’s S.S. Van Dine’s 1928 piece “Twenty rules for writing detective stories.” I mentioned in one of my reviews that I might write about these rules. Well, I finally gave myself the time to do it. First comes the rule (condensed), then what I think about it. Here are the Rules as Van Dine wrote them . (Incidentally, check out the rest of this excellent mystery reader’s resource: Gaslight ) The rules are meant to apply to whodunnit amateur detective fiction, but the main ones can be applied to police and P.I. fiction as well. I will discuss them mostly in this context, but will also mention genres where the rules don’t apply and authors who have successfully and unsuccessfully broken the rules. 1...

Reading in Reykjavík

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