{"id":10468,"date":"2007-03-17T12:20:19","date_gmt":"2007-03-17T16:20:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2007\/03\/17\/10468.html"},"modified":"2018-03-12T16:56:24","modified_gmt":"2018-03-12T21:56:24","slug":"book-report-the-westing-game","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2007\/03\/17\/book-report-the-westing-game\/","title":{"rendered":"Book Report: The Westing Game"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Your Humble Blogger has very fond memories of The Westing Game<\/a>. Reading it through this time, it didn’t work for me. Perhaps it dated badly. I’m not sure. I suspect that if I read it again in a few years, I’ll go back to liking it again.\n

Anyway, rather than harshing on what was once one of my very favorite books ever, I’ll just note a few things that I came across whilst Googling the Westing Game. First, I had no idea that there was a movie version<\/a> ten years ago, presumably part of the Showtime After School series. It appears to be terrible, but the great thing about the user comments is that more than one person writes in to say that they haven’t seen the movie<\/I> but can tell that it sucks just by the IMDB page. I mean, yes, so could I, but why would anyone bother adding a user comment to say that? Particularly as the comments already made it clear that this was neither a close adaptation nor very good in its own right. What kind of person thinks This site’s viewers will benefit from my reviews of movies I haven’t seen<\/I>?\n

On the positive side, there is a lovely site at the Cooperative Children’s Book Center<\/a> of the University of Madison-Wisconsin that has information on Ellen Raskin, including a sort of audio tour of the manuscript of The Westing Game<\/I>. I haven’t listened to the audio, yet, but the images of her development of the design of the book are fascinating. Sadly, my copy has a very weak cover illustration, far inferior to the mansion of money on the original.\n

Also interesting to visit is a Westing Game site put together by 4th Grade students of River View Elementary School in Plainville, IL<\/a>. There’s a lot of idiosyncratic stuff that’s fun to look at. For instance, the character page for E.J. Plum<\/a> has information about wills and lawyers, some of it nearly accurate. I should warn you that the page has massive spoilers. For instance, the page for Dr. D. Denton Deere<\/a> doesn’t have information about cosmetic surgery, but about neurology; the ending mentions that Dr. Deere becomes a neurologist, rather than a plastic surgeon as he expects to be throughout the book. Well, and the pages for Barney Northrup<\/a>, Sandy McSouthers<\/a> and Julian Eastman<\/a> all mention that they are actually Sam Westing in disguise. I suppose that’s a bigger spoiler.\n

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/I>,
-Vardibidian.\n<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Your Humble Blogger has very fond memories of The Westing Game. Reading it through this time, it didn\u2019t work for me. Perhaps it dated badly. I\u2019m not sure. I suspect that if I read it again in a few years,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[194],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10468","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-report"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10468","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10468"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10468\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17982,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10468\/revisions\/17982"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10468"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10468"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10468"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}