Last week before falling asleep I caught some of a old black and white movie version of Goodbye Mr. Chips, and it occurred to me that surely I must be the only person in the country who never read the book. Since it's been on my shelf for about 20 years I picked it up, and, having read it now, have no earthly idea why this ever became one of the most wildly popular must-reads of all time. I was expecting an endearing old man with many tales of him greatly affecting young men's lives, but instead got an old fucker who sits around a fire literally crying about the good ol' days. But while I'm no stranger to the cheap payoff that some treacle sentimentality can bring, it turns out that the old fucker was really kind of a shitty teacher. It was acknowledged that his methods were as old as the hills and remained unchanged, and he had an remarkable lack of ambition, and the entire system seemed to merely move around him, just waiting for him to fucking die already. Everybody knew he was a shitty teacher, but he'd been around so long it was just "Chips being Chips," so he got a free pass. What the fuck?
I decided to compare it with To Sir, With Love, which I grabbed this morning (also sitting on a shelf collecting dust in my room since I last had a girlfriend), and so far I like THAT teacher a lot more. At least he seems to enjoy titties, and is greatly irritated by everything. The writing is billowy and plumped up with needless description, and I can already tell it could be trimmed down to the size of Goodbye Mr. Chips, but I'm pretty sure I'm gonna like it a lot more.
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