I started this book and read through to the end of the first half, and put it down. I thought it was outrageously boring, and stiff. The stilted trappings of wealthy New Yorkers was deeply uninteresting to me. I picked the book back up last year because I am a sadist, but this time read the whole thing. It’s deeply romantic, beautiful.

I saw that they had the film version on Netflix a few weeks ago and turned it on because I loved the book. The movie stars Daniel Day Lewis, Michelle Pfeiffer and Winona Ryder and is directed by Martin Scorsese, and is one of the worst movies I have ever seen. The movie was so bad that it entirely shifted my view on Scorsese’s work and of Daniel Day Lewis. First of all, Daniel Day Lewis is not a good person to play a charming upperclass New Yorker. He has a really scary face, and I could not believe him as someone genuinely capable of feeling emotions. Second, the movie was basically all narration, which was such a weird choice to make. All the narration made me feel was that the book was really good, and that this movie I was watching was so so bad. There is one good exterior shot of a brownstone in New York City that catches you off guard because