I'm happy to say that this week, I'm not initiating the rebellion against the redundant Top 10 Tuesday theme (I know it must be hard to come up with stuff, but rebelling against it is half of the fun), but I am follow the lead from Meagan, from The Blue Bookcase. Here are the ten literary characters I would punch into oblivion:
1-John Galt from Atlas Shrugged: He's a pretentious Edward Cullen. That's it. He's a pretentious economic-sexual fantasy from the demented brain of Ayn Rand. I kept wanted to see him appear for six hundred pages, and when he did, I wanted to shut his mouth really bad.
2-Baron Danglars from The Count Of Monte Cristo: That guy is an opportunist pig. He built his life on fucking people over and became a renowned banker. I have "victory danced" at his demise, yet Dantès has been way too cool with him. Assholes always crawl out alive, like rats.
3-Gary Lambert from The Corrections: I know he's supposed to live an unhappy, dead end life and all, but SNAP OUT OF IT, MAN. He flinches in front of his tyrannic wife and acts like a raving douchebag in front of all his family. He's a self-interested prick and yet he doesn't have enough self-respect to clean up his life.
4-The Buchanans from The Great Gatsby: I don't know which one of them I want to punch the most, so I will line them up together and punch them together. Jab to Daisy, and backfist to Tom. Does it make it OK to punch a girl if you knock out her husband at the same time?
5-Noboru Wataya from The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle: The prototypical annoying nerd, who simply refuses to face you on neutral grounds, because he would lose the great asset that his mind is. He's a cheater, a hater and you will grow aggressive towards him, guaranteed.
6-Baby Kochamma from The God Of Small Things: OK, I don't really want to punch her, but I want to hurt her. I want to shake her up and make her understand that she wasted her life on such petty things, and that there's no way to turn her life around, but to stop making people suffer. And that's why she's an amazing villain. She makes you sad as much as she makes you angry.
7-Henry Rearden from Atlas Shrugged: I kind of dig Hank's balls and rhetorics, he's nothing but a horny motherfucker. Throughout the whole novel, you keep asking yourself if he would have done any of this if it wasn't for Dagny. Which, yeah, contradict the whole point of the novel, I know.
8-Andy Evans from Speak: He's part of why Speak is so convincing. High schools of America are crawling with gullible assholes like him, who thinks that their smile and their smooth talking skills is a passport for whatever they want. His frustration factor is heightened by the fact the novel ends before he's really punished.
9-Marion Socia from A Drink Before The War: The reason why Socia is not higher on that list is that he's a bit of a cardboard villain. Way too mean and dangerous to be a believable human. Nonetheless, he's a gang leader, a pimp, a crack dealer and so much more. His contempt for any other soul gets unnerving around page eighty...then you have more than the double of pages to endure him.
10-Robert Cohn from The Sun Also Rises: People who read this novel know what I mean. What a humongous party poop that guy is. While he's one smack down away from shutting the fuck up, you always have to remember that he's a middleweight boxing champion, so all you can do is sigh and roll your eyes.
