ONTD June Reading Challenge: The "Wild Mountain Thyme" Spoiler Post!
Most news outlets, literary magazines, and bookstores have made lists of LGBTQ books or authors you should read for Pride month. LAME! Instead, you should take the ONTD reading challenge and read books inspired by epic ONTD posts. This month, the challenge is to read a book inspired by the post We need to talk about Wild Mountain Thyme, by just444. The movie spoiler is that the male protagonist secretly believes he is a [spoiler]bee and the female protagonist secretly believes she is a [spoiler]swan. Yes, really.
The Bees
Laline Paul
The novel The Bees is written from the perspective of a bee named Flora as she goes about life in her hive. However, she yearns to explore the world and soon discovers a dark secret about the colony's queen. Yes, this is a real novel.
Outside Mullingar
John Patrick Shanley
"Outside Mullingar" is the play that started it all. John Patrick Shanley is an Irish playwright who is supposedly acclaimed for writing plays, of all things. He wrote Doubt, which won the Pulitzer and a Tony. And yet, he wrote a damn play about a man-bee and a lady-swan and a falling in love. So.
Little Bee
Chris Cleave
This book's plot is apparently very spoiler-y, so the basic gist is that a young Nigerian teenager and an English woman have a tragic encounter on a beach and it leads to some consequences of some sort. It is also a critique of the British immigration system.
Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China
Jung Chang
Jung Chang's Wild Swans is a creative memoir that tells the tales of three of her family members: her grandmother, who was a warlord's concubine; her mother, who was an elite member of the Communist party in China; and her own life experiences.
The Swans of Fifth Avenue
Melanie Benjamin
Truman Capote famously referred to his high-society socialite friends as "swans." This novel is a fictionalized imagining of Capote's friendship with Babe Paley and other famous swans. Sure, the book is fiction, but it's also filled with gossip about the glory days of New York's most fashionable society members.
The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
This book is about unprobable events and why they happen. The writing, staging, and filming of "Outside Mullingar" and then Wild Mountain Thyme is indeed pretty improbable! It's a shame this book was published before the movie came out so the author could scrutinize the factors that enabled the play and movie to exist.
The Mountains Sing
Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai
There is a lot of singing in Wild Mountain Thyme. Not very good singing. So, how about a book that also involves mountains and singing? The novel The Mountains Sing is an acclaimed multi-generational family saga set in Vietnam...plus, you will not have to hear any actual singing.
Wild Mountain Thyme
Rosamund Pilcher
This novel has the exact same name as the film adaptation. Though it takes place in Scotland instead of Ireland, it also has a very bizarre and improbable plot: a woman's ex shows up to her doorstep with a random 2-year-old child, so they travel to a castle for some reason. Like the movie, which was too long and had many panning shots of scenery, the book is apparently filled with too-long descriptions of scenery.
Previous reading challenges:
January: ONTD University Is Back In Sesh
February: Armie Hammer's Sex Kitten Texts
March: Heidi Montag Crying On A Chair
April: Eli Roth Has Cybser Sex With Blueberries
May: SECRET POST