The Magic of Ink: Bridge to Terabithia

Monday, June 4, 2007

Bridge to Terabithia

Director: Gabor Csupo
Genre: Adventure/drama/family/fantasy
Rated PG for thematic elements including bullying, some peril and mild language
Starring Josh Hutcherson and AnnaSophia Robb

When I first saw the trailer for this movie I was shocked; What had they done to such a great story?! It didn’t look anything like the touching tale of friendship the novel tells. But, after reading positive reviews from others who had also enjoyed the book, I decided to go see for myself—and was pleasantly surprised.

Jesse Oliver Aarons, Jr. has been training all summer to be the fastest kid in the fifth grade, but that dream is crushed when the new girl, Leslie Burke, beats all the boys on the first day of school. At first Jess is against Leslie, both for beating him and for being weird, but then he figures, “Why shouldn’t I talk to her?” and a strong friendship develops. The two create Terabithia, a secret magical kingdom in the woods where they are free from bullies and worries, and where their imagination is boundless. Leslie finally has a friend, and Jess learns how to daydream. But a sudden catastrophe shatters Terabithia, and Jess wonders if it can ever be rebuilt again.
The movie adaptation sticks close to the main plot of the book, with only a few minutes of CGI—which is to show you what the characters see—and AnnaSophia Robb is the perfect Leslie, with her friendly smile and large sparkling eyes. Although I thought the animation took away from the quiet power that is captured in the novel, Bridge to Terabithia was a good movie and very worth watching for all ages.

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Thoughts on Novels, Books, and Reading

“So many people I know say they hate reading. What they seem not to get is that a book is an alternate universe, where you can go anywhere, or choose to just set the book down and leave that universe alone.” –Zeke Willey

“To read is to fly: it is to soar to a point of vantage which gives a view over wide terrains of history, human variety, ideas, shared experience and the fruits of many inquiries.” –A.C. Grayling, in a review of A History of Reading, by Alberto Manguel

“Read in order to live.” –Gustave Flaubert

“People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading.” –Logan Pearsall Smith

“Books have a sense of honor. If they are lent out, they will not come back.”

“Books, I found, had the power to make time stand still, retreat, or fly into the future.” –Jim Bishop

“Read the best books first or you may not have a chance to read them all.” –Henry David Thoreau

“One glance at a book and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for 1,000 years. To read is to voyage through time.” –Carl Sagan

“Book-love...never flags or fails, but, like Beauty itself, is a joy forever.” –Holbrook Jackson

“The love of learning, the sequestered nooks,
And all the sweet serenity of books.” –Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

“Poetry, plays, novels, music, they are the cry of the human spirit trying to understand itself and make sense of our world.” –Annie Sinclair in Annie, Between the States, by L.M. Elliott

“There is no frigate like a book to take us lands away.” –Emily Dickenson

“I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of anything than of a book! When I have a house of my own, I shall be miserable if I have not an excellent library.” –Jane Austen

“Where is human nature so weak as in the bookstore?” –Henry Ward Beecher

“I ransack public libraries, and find them full of sunk treasure.” –Virginia Woolf

“When I step into this library, I cannot understand why I ever step out of it.” –Marie de Sevigne

“A sure sign of a good book is that you like it more the older you get.” –Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

“Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.” –G.K. Chesterton

“Just the knowledge that a good book is awaiting one at the end of a long day makes that day happier.” –Kathleen Norris, Hands Full of Living

“A novel is never anything but a philosophy put into images.” –Albert Camus

“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.” –Jorge Luis Borges

“Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.” –Francis Bacon

“When I read a book I seem to read it with my eyes only, but now and then I come across a passage, perhaps only a phrase, which has a meaning for me, and it becomes part of me.” –W. Somerset Maugham

“When you sell a man a book you don’t sell him just 12 ounces of paper and ink and glue—you sell him a whole new life.” –Christopher Morley

“When we are collecting books, we are collecting happiness.” –Vincent Starrett

“I cannot live without books.” –Thomas Jefferson

“Books allow you to travel wherever you like. And no ticket is required. No toothbrush, even. Just pick your century, your continent, your character—and go.” –T.A. Barron, in an interview with WORD for Teens

“The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.” –Henry Tilney, Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey

“...a story was a form of telepathy. By means of inking symbols onto a page, she was able to send thoughts and feelings fromher mind to her reader’s. It was a magical process, so commonplace that no one stopped to wonder at it.”
—Ian McEwan (Atonement)

“A good bookshop is just a genteel Black Hole that knows how to read.” —Terry Pratchett (Guards! Guards!)

“Never put off till tomorrow the book you can read today.” —Holbrook Jackson

“You know you’ve read a good book when you turn the last page and feel a little as if you have lost a friend.”
—Paul Sweeney

“There is no mistaking a real book when one meets it. It is like falling in love, and like that colossal adventure it is an experience of great social import. Even as the tranced swain, the booklover yearns to tell others of his bliss. He writes letters about it, adds it to the postscript of all manner of communications, intrudes it into telephone messages, and insists on his friends writing down the title of the find. Like the simple-hearted betrothed, once certain of his conquest, “I want you to love her, too!”” —Christopher Morley

Monday, June 4, 2007

Bridge to Terabithia

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