I Just Couldn't Embrace the Ape - A Book Review

 

Congratulate me. I finally made the switch. I got rid of my Blackberry and joined the real world and got myself an Android phone. I feel much smarter. Now what with my new smartness and all, I have two things. One is a budding addiction to Temple Run and the other is access to The Girl's Nook on my phone. Yes, I know I have Nook access on my computer, but I don't like reading books on my computer. And yes, I know that I could have had Nook access on my Blackberry but I didn't like how the program worked on that phone.

I've read two books so far. One is Princess Bride, but we all know that I read it before and disgraced myself at Powell's Bookstore in Portland. You can refresh your memory on the incident here.

The other book I read was Forrest Gump. I can't decide if I liked it. I know that books and movies often differ. Sometimes characters are combined and scenes, descriptions and back stories or omitted adapt a story for the big screen, but most of the time, the spirit of the book is still in tact.

The book Forrest Gump and the movie Forrest Gump were almost exactly, but not quite, entirely unlike each other.
In the book, Jenny marries someone else, Forrest's mama never sleeps with the school principal to get her son into school and she doesn't die. Forrest doesn't wear leg braces as a kid or run across country multiple times as an adult. He does get shot in the buttocks, though, and he does meet a few different Presidents. He also plays football starts a shrimping business.
Also, in the book, but not in the movie, Forrest becomes a professional wrestler, plays chess for money, lives with cannibals and goes into outer space with a male orangutan named Sue, who becomes his closest friend and confidant, which is probably why he has to drop out of the race for the Senate.

While the movie was a heart warming story with cute little catch phrases, the book has none of that. I found it hard to finish the book because it just kept getting more and more hard to believe, and not in a fun way.  Plus it was written first person in the voice of Forrest. That took a little bit of getting used to.

I didn't like it very much.