My name is Rachel and I'm a read-aholic. I'm Also a frozen coke-aholic but I don't have a problem with it.

Well the challenge of posting once a day, every day, for all of August is proving to be a tad difficult. I am more determined to post then I am to do my English homework. You can't blame me though, the homework is writing dictionary definitions of words. I was convinced that kind of homework had been left behind when I entered high school. Apparently not. An up side to the whole English thing is that I feel smart when I get all the words right on my spelling test. Yep you read that correctly, ninth grade spelling test.

Condescending tasks aside, I have recently read the time traveller's wife. At last, a book that hasn't been completely ruined by its adaption to film. It kind of made me hate the time traveller though, he just appears in the past and tells some little girl that he is going to marry her in the future. Poor girl had no choice in the matter. From the age of six she meets with her future husband and chats about this life they have together. Henry, the time traveller, shows up randomly every now and then at the back of her house until she is 18. Clare, the time traveller's wife, is raised knowing she will marry this guy that constantly disappears and gets into impossibly dangerous situations because of it.

If Henry hadn't shown up all through her childhood, if he had only shown up when she was, let's say, 18, she wouldn't have chosen him. Sure the fairy tale universe would say 'of course she would, it is true love!' but you know that isn't true. Even if he did say he was from the future where they were married, and he proved it to her, she would have walked away. Because, logically, no woman is going to choose a man who disappears all the time and gets beaten up, hit by cars, and at one stage gets stuck in the snow without clothes on long enough to get hypothermia, just because he tells her they are 'meant to be'.

I'm not complaining about the story, it was great I loved it and the movie, I am just pointing out how Clare truly got the raw end of the deal. Her whole life, until she is 20 and meets Henry in his present, she waits for Henry. Then a lot of crazy stuff happens, they live happily for about 15 years, then Henry goes to the future, finds out he is going to die and tells his wife all about it when he returns. Then Henry goes to the future, when Clare is really old, comes back and writes in a note to Clare all about it for when he is dead.

So Clare spends 20 years waiting for Henry, 15 years watching him disappear and waiting for him to return, then the rest of her life waiting to see him again just one last time. Clare had no choice but to have a life that revolved around the man that always disappeared. Can't help but feel sorry for the girl. If She had not met Henry when she was young, she probably wouldn't have believed so strongly that she couldn't live without him.

Well there is my days worth of ramblings. I just think the book would have gone by faster if Henry had just said "Make me a sandwich woman I want to go see nirvana live before Kurt Cobain dies!" It would have carried the same story, just a less detailed version.

-Rachel