Bones of the Moon
Also posted on BookCrossing.
Bones of the Moon by Jonathan Carroll
A Secret Atlas by Michael A. Stackpole
A Secret Atlas
Also posted on BookCrossing.
This is It
This is It: I didn’t expect to find rehearsal footage from a Michael Jackson concert to be all that interesting. I wouldn’t consider myself much of a MJ fan – I like his Big Hits like “Thriller” and “Beat It”, but I’ve never owned an album (until a recent acquisition of Thriller at my husband’s urging) and never even had a desire to attend a concert. I hadn’t realized what an amazing concert it would have been. The new video footage, the amazing dancers, the fact that every song was performed completely live – it was almost breathtaking. I loved seeing all the details that went into putting together such an elaborate show. And watching MJ himself was amazing, especially considering he could still move like that at 50 years old. Make no mistake: Michael Jackson was a weirdo. And because of this weirdness, it’s easy to forget that he was also extremely talented and a consummate performer. This movie is a solid reminder of that fact.
Up
Up: The adventures of a crotchety old widower, a fat Boy Scout and a talking dog in a flying house suspended by balloons. It’s clever and well-written, like most Pixar films, but I cried pretty much the entire way through it. See, the film begins with the widower meeting his wife as children and goes through a montage of their wonderful life together. He misses her, he talks to her, and every time she’s even mentioned I start bawling again. But don’t let that deter you: this is a gorgeous film, funny and wonderful and touching. Just not one I’d want to watch again.
Crash
Crash: A complex story of strangers whose lives intersect in unexpected ways. I can’t really explain the plot very well (though the film starts with a car crash, that’s not really the central focus), but most of the story deals with race and racism. All the major “color” groups are covered: blacks, whites, Middle Easterners, Hispanics, and Asians. There’s a lot of anger and self-righteousness and paranoia and defensiveness, and no one is completely innocent (except maybe one guy). It’s a pretty hard movie to take at times, but I’m glad I watched it. It gave me a lot to think about, much of it pretty uncomfortable, and had I watched it with a group I’m sure the discussion afterward would have been lively. Definitely deserving of its Oscars.
Cirque du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant
Cirque du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant: I’d heard this movie was pretty bad, but when you’re on a fourteen-hour flight your movie-watching standards tend to go through the floor. But you know, it was actually a lot better than I’d feared. Two teenage best friends – one the perfect son and student, the other a trouble-making son of drunken and abusive parents – attend a freak show called Cirque du Freak. The perfect kid is obsessed with spiders; the troublemaker is obsessed with vampires. This isn’t brought up early enough in the film, and is in fact presented like an “oh by the way” to explain things that have already happened. Anyway, spiderboy steals freakshow spider, spider bites vampireboy, spiderboy has to make a deal with vampire to save vampireboy, serious rift forms between spiderboy and vampireboy. What saves this from sinking into cliche hell is that it is extremely self-aware. The teenagers and the freaks all know about horror movie stereotypes, and make some great comments that save the moment from turning to complete melodrama. The only unforgivably silly element is the vamp factions: the ones who drink blood without killing people are called vampires, and the ones who kill their victims are called vampaneze. Yes, it’s true to the book, but every time they said it I was all, “Really? I mean, really?” So while it was more than entertaining enough for a long flight, it’s not the sort of thing I would go out and rent. I am, however, interested in reading the books now.
The Blind Geometer by Kim Stanley Robinson/The New Atlantis by Ursula K. LeGuin
The Blind Geometer/The New Atlantis
The Blind Geometer by Kim Stanley Robinson: A blind mathematician in nearish-future Washington, DC, is approached by a colleague to aid in a strange puzzle in the shape of a woman who draws esoteric geometric diagrams and talks in jumbled phrases. The intrigue is less interesting than the experiences of the blind narrator. It’s a novel way of telling a story, since you can never mention what anything looks like. This story was my introduction to Robinson, and I think I might pick up more of his stuff.
Return from Rainbow Bridge by Kim Stanley Robinson: This bonus novella tells the tale of a teenage boy in the 1960s and his strange experiences with Paul, a mysterious Navajo Indian friend (though in this story it’s spelled Navaho). It’s not strictly science fiction, but it’s a fun and slightly spooky story that rekindled my desire to visit Arizona again.
The New Atlantis by Ursula K. Le Guin: I love Le Guin, but I had a terrible time following this one. I got that they were living in a strange fascist state, and there was talk about new continents rising in the oceans, but all the italicized parts completely lost me, and I have no idea what was going on at the end. It felt almost like it was building up to something and then just sort of stopped.
Also posted on BookCrossing.
Holidays on Ice by David Sedaris
Holidays on Ice
Also posted on BookCrossing.
Brief Hiatus
I’m off to Japan for vacation. I’ll probably have at least intermittent email access, but I won’t be doing any blogging while I’m there.
And before you ask: no, I’m not concerned about robbers seeing this because (1) you don’t know where I live, (2) I’ve duped my friends into house-sitting, and (3) I don’t own anything worth stealing. Well, unless you count all the tons of books I give away for free. :P
In honor of my trip, here are some terribly trippy (and somewhat nauseating) animated stereograms of old Japan. Enjoy.
Weekly Geeks – Author Interviews
WG 2010-08 is about interest in authors. The prompt puts forth the possibility that “there are two types of readers…those who stick to the books versus those who like to know more about the author’s background, thoughts, motivations and writing process.” I am definitely in the former category. I don’t seek out author interviews and I’d have no idea what I’d ask an author were I to interview them. I don’t subscribe to author blogs in general, though from time to time I’ve been pointed to specific posts. I can probably count on one hand the number of times I’ve visited an author’s website just to learn more about them, since Fantastic Fiction provides all the book information I need.
It all comes down to separating the work from the worker. My opinions are solely about the work. For example, JK Rowling may have invented Harry Potter, but I won’t like her books any more or less by learning where she grew up or how she gets her ideas. I don’t feel any special desire to get to know her personally. She’s a complete stranger, and reading her books doesn’t change that. Do rumors of Lewis Carroll’s pedophilia change the quality of Alice in Wonderland as a story? Of course not.
The only exception to this are authors of memoirs. Clearly my enjoyment of writers like David Sedaris and Laurie Notaro have quite a bit to do with them personally, since they write autobiographical essays. I’m still not sure I’d go out of my way to read an interview with them, but it’s possibly more likely that they’d have clever answers on the fly than, say, your average novelist.