Another must-read

I DON’T normally follow hype and try to avoid anything that is labelled ‘must-see’, ‘must-read’ or ‘block-buster’.
I think I may be one of the only people in the civilised world who hasn’t even seen one of the Lord of the Rings trilogy and have no intentions of doing so, much to my friend’s lament.
Not even the newfound love of Orlando Bloom that I am experiencing since watching Elizabethtown can convince me to watch them, or the fact that they have just been on terrestrial TV, thus cutting out the effort needed to go and buy or rent them.
I have only seen the first Harry Potter film, and while I did enjoy it, after seeing recent interviews with the stars I’m boycotting the rest. I understand these youngsters have grown up in the spotlight, but don’t they just know it.
I don’t like watching or reading things that I can’t believe in, like schoolboy wizards, or aliens fighting intergalatic wars, or strange little things with giant feet traipsing about New Zealand looking for a ring (I presume).
The only time before now that I have become involved in the ‘hyping’ process was for Bridget Jones and her two diary instalments, making sure that all those within my reach were told to read the books and watch the films.
This time I have given in to the peer pressure, and can be found at most free points of the day with my nose in Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code.
I’ve had it from all sides — ‘you’ll really enjoy it’, ‘what, you’ve not read it?!’, ‘you won’t be able to put it down.’
Every time I was on a train or a bus there would be at least three or four people with the tome. When my friend returned from a holiday earlier in the year she said there were at least two people in each row of the plane reading it.
I was determined that I would not follow the hype, but since hearing that it was going to be made into a film, which I would end up seeing, if only in a series of trailers, I decided I should at least try it. Now I literally can’t put it down.
I tried to get into it a few times, but I was too caught up in the terminology to concentrate and move forward through the story.
I started it from the beginning again on Friday. It’s now Monday and I am more than three quarters of the way through it. And that’s only been reading a few chapters in snatched minutes throughout the day and night.
Every time I think: “I’ll just read to the end of this chapter,” something else happens and I have to read on.
In this case I think the hype is well-deserved, and agree with narratives used on the dust jacket such as ‘breathless chase’, ‘exhilaratingly brainy thriller’, and yes even ‘the pulp must-read of the season’.
With music, it’s entirely different. My Favourite Ex is my ‘trendsetter’ in what I should and shouldn’t be listening to at the moment.
He gives me tips about what is going to be big, or just goes out and buys me it, which is nice. Already I’ve been able to get Jack Johnson, KT Tunstall, Stephen Fretwell and Jamie Lidell in my collection before the universal hype explodes.
I’ve been avoiding a bit of self-generated hype myself of late.
Although I’m still utterly confused about how I’m now feeling about him, I’ve continued to stay successful in ‘distancing’ myself from him in the last few weeks. Which is a joke considering we live more than a hundred miles away from each other.
I found out last weekend that he’d been out with his most recent (and probably favourite) ex on a date-ish night out.
The problem was, because the two incidents of my lack of communication and his reunion coincided, he put two and two together and got a jealous ex.
But I felt nothing — no jealousy, no hurt, no malice — just complete indifference.
Of course the Law of Sod came into play: the more I denied it, the more he believed it. But I just left him to it — I knew that I wasn’t jealous. It was a real turning point for me.
Which in turn worried me. I wasn’t about to fool myself that years of hype were only going to lead me to one day when I would just lose all feelings for him.
I do feel like I’m on the road to recovery. And I’ve got ‘the pulp must-read of the season’ to help me along.