Gone with the Wind

This may be controversial, but I adore Gone with the Wind. I love the movie, and the book. They're very different from one another with different things to love.

The book is spectacular. Does everything age perfectly? Absolutely not. Is some stuff white-washed? Of course. No question of it.

But Margaret Mitchell didn't even know the South lost the Civil War until she was nine years old, or something like that, because many of her family members were Confederate soldiers. She was very close to her grandmother who lived through the war, and I have a hunch Scarlett was based on her.

The book is a very rich historical novel with hundreds of characters all moving around seamlessly, like a beehive in Mitchell's mind on the page. When I read it, I felt so immersed.

I also loved the theme of gumption - the gumption to survive, and embrace a different life when the one you had can't be led anymore. Most of the people in Scarlett's world cracked after the war and lived in poverty remembering the South's glory days, while she was like "no thanks."

There's a reason one of Hole's albums is titled "Live Through This." It's a Gone with the Wind line.