64.) The Light Between Oceans [9/9/2016]

Recently, I have been reading a lot about empathy and literature. One article I read discussed the difficulty of empathizing with the charactrers in Toni Morrison's Beloved as the characters resist catharsis. They can never move away from the slavery in their past, and as such, the reader is unable to fully immerse into the story. 

While I am not entirely sold on that argument, I like the idea of characters which are difficult to empathize with. Catherine and I saw this movie, and had vastly different reactions to it, hinging on how we related to the actions of the main character. For Catherine, she found Elizabeth Greysmark's (played by Alicia Vikander) behavior entirely unconscionable; while I didn't agree with her actions, I could understand (and found heartbreaking) the life-altering decisions she made. There are massive swaths of grey in the characters here, and though we didn't agree, it certainly occupied more than a few nights of conversations. If for nothing else, the movie is worth seeing as a conversation piece.