Hello Froggies: it is 4 Jan 2024 and I just finished reading "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" by Ken Kesey. I read the Penguin Classics publication of it shown. I started in New Year's Eve, so it took my 5 days to get through. I avered about 56 pages per day reading it. I have seen the movie of it a long while ago and will watch the DVD of it again soon just to compare it with the book. The fact that I seen the movie beforehand kind of took away from reading the book because some of the scenes are quite memorable from the movie. There were some differences from the movie from how I recall it at least and will surely pick up on more (hopefully) when I re-watch the movie. I am not going to turn this into a movie-v-book comparative analysis, i'm sure there are college papers written out there or professional critics who can and enjoy doing that; that is certainly not me.

If I put having seen the movie prior to it aside and imagine I had read this book 1st, I surely would have liked the portrayal of the main character as this loud mouth, over-confident, in your face, actually rather annoying character who finds himself in the psyche-ward as well as the big huge american indian who eavesdrops on everything and the overly controlling and wound too tight head nurse on the floor and the conflict between the two main characters from start to finish to see who comes out on top. I like books with a lot of conflict in them and like when characters are unique or well drawn up . . . like "Count Fosco" was in Wilkie Collins' "The Woman in White" which I recently read for example. It is difficult to draw out characters in a shorter book as I have experienced over the years and years of reading classic literature; that is one of the benefits of reading a longer novel is the characters are developed more so you can really sense them better; this book totaling less than 280 pages did an exceptional job at that. Speaking of drawing out characters, this publication of it also had illustrations which I read in the first part of the book that they were drawn actually by Ken Kesey in his writing of the book. I thought that was cool. He should have drew Candy or Sandy! But I didn't see them in there. So maybe I will! Should I?

If the book was going to be summed up in one sentence: I guess it would be "if the 'combine' has it out for you, you are not going to win." True enough.

If by chance you did NOT see the movie, I recommend reading the book first; then watching the movie. It is interesting because one of my favorite movies of all time is "The Last of the Mohicans" I watched that movie over and over and over and then discovered it is actually a book and a couple of years ago read the book. In that instance, I did not feel like watching the movie detracted from my reading the book like I did in this instance. I guess I need to think on that a little more to try to figure out why the difference. I don't know. Any ideas?

Pair that up with the short story "Ward No. 6" by Anton Chekhov which I recently read which also took place on a mental health ward; however, instead of in Oregon, that one was in Russia. The take on the situation was quite different though. That one, really focused on how fine the line is between the mental ward and carrying on life in society. It was a great story. Read both!

Anyway, I enjoyed the read a lot and now will be adventuring to a couple of works by Wilkie Collins: The Haunted Hotel and My Lady's Money. Of that author, The Moonstone, I already read and is my favorites of all time; and recently read "The Woman in White" which was excellent too; so I am confident I am going to enjoy these. The Question will be which one more and will either of them make into the favorites of all time?