Stoked!

Well, this is what I learned from the doctor's visit:

- Must get my BP down
- Must put on a few pounds
- Must get my ears cleaned out 

And now it's Julia's turn to go to the doctor's today. 

*

Here are the new movies opening up this weekend:

Jack the Giant Slayer    Yep, it's Jack and the Beanstalk.  Good director (Bryan Singer), good cast (Nicholas Hoult, Stanley Tucci, Bill Nighy, Ewan McGregor), but I have no earthly desire to ever see this film. 

Phantom    It's been a while since we've had a submarine thriller.  We're on a Cold War Soviet submarine, with Ed Harris as the plagued captain of a crew faced with a deadly mission... Sound good?  Not really.  Good cast, though: David Duchovny, William Fichtner, Jonathan Schaech. 

Stoker    Now this one sounds intriguing: Acclaimed South Korean filmmaker Chan-wook Park makes his American debut with this loopy thriller, which sounds a lot like a remake of the great Hitchcock film Shadow of a Doubt.  Young India (Mia Wasikowska), emotionally unstable, loses her father, an event that leads to her smiling, handsome uncle (Matthew Goode) coming to live with India and her nervous, distant mother (Nicole Kidman).  India becomes infatuated with him, but he has ulterior motives.  Critics say it's wild and weird, overheated and fascinating.  Jacki Weaver and Dermot Mulroney co-star.  (Yes)

21 & Over    A wild, go-for-broke comedy about the 21st birthday of a young, straight-laced kid.  A night of epic debauchery ensues.  "From the producer of The Hangover."

*

Not a history lesson - nor much reading - but here's an interesting article about art, birds, and the Edo Period in Japan:

http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/aroundthemall/2013/02/birds-and-bards-the-arts-of-edo-japan/

*

I finally saw The Master, Paul Thomas Anderson's love it-or-hate it, thinly-veiled look at the early years of Scientology.  In my opinion, it was less about the cult religion than it was about the relationship between an aimless ex-soldier composed of too much id (Joaquin Phoenix) and the hearty, seductive man of all trades (Philip Seymour Hoffman) who mentors him.  Strikingly shot by Mihai Malaimare and acted to perfection by the two leads (granted, Phoenix's divisive work is an unsettling, Method-y form of perfection), the film ambles along without ever really being about anything other than post-war dissatisfaction and restlessness and a rubbing, insistent search for truth and meaning.  There are some lulls but a few truly captivating scenes too.  Plenty of dreaminess (lots of shots of churning water) and an evocative score by Jonny Greenwood.  I wish Laura Dern's part was bigger, though.  (The film inspired me to listen to more Jo Stafford, however.)

*

Some time during the next nine days, we will get the news that Julia has a new job.  Fingers crossed!         

Call me!

Well, 15 out of 24 Oscar picks is just okay.  Good ceremony, as far as those things go and I for one thought Seth MacFarlane was pretty funny. 

Doctor's appointment today!  Yikes!  Plus side: septic tank has been cleaned. 

For a Good Time Call (2012), directed by Jamie Travis, is a movie I expected almost nothing from.  So it was to my surprise that I ended up getting a sweet, funny comedy bolstered considerably by the unabashed portrayal of enthusiastic female friendship.  It helps having Ari Graynor around too, with her inspired, anything-goes gaiety (she's like Elizabeth Banks meets Bette Midler).  She plays a phone sex operator who, to her chagrin, finds herself sharing her NYC apartment with a more uptight, walking-the-straight-path girl (played by Lauren Miller, who also co-wrote the script).  Soon enough... you guessed it: eventually Miller's character is running the call business and even taking some of the calls herself.  Frank and amusing (when all this sex talk flies out of the mouths of females it's just funnier) and with a supporting part for the always watchable Justin Long as the girls' gay friend, the movie isn't anything great, but it's worth a chance. 

*

Ian McEwan's newest novel, Sweet Tooth (2012), is easy to like, impossible to love.  If you read the book, you'll understand what I mean when I say that I like it more when it's about literature than I do when it's about the intricacies and concerns of MI5. 




Serena Frome is a recent Cambridge grad who majored in mathematics despite her love of books.  She has an affair with a professor who ends up recruiting her for MI5.  After her lover's mysterious death (we found out about his fate about 2/3 of the way through the book), she joins the intelligent service, where, like most women there, she finds herself on the lowest end of the totem pole.  Eventually, however, her inscrutable male higher-ups task her with a mission: Operation Sweet Tooth.  She must befriend - and financially back - a promising young writer, Tom Haley.  You see, the government wants to give its subtle but determined support to writers whose ideas and and politics align with its own. 

Naturally, Serena and Tom fall in love.   



The sections of the book given over to the plot summaries of Tom's novels are the most entertaining in the novel.  Sweet Tooth, somewhat autobiographical and full of cultural history, winding its way along in McEwan's supple, intelligent (but not off-putting) prose, never really build to anything.  There's no suspense in the novel's looming dilemma: will Tom eventually find out Serena's true identity and motivation?  I wasn't that concerned.  Some of the sections of the novel drag, but I did like all the discussion about the writers and artists populating the time period.   






















Image courtesy of: 

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh3h9X-iNeUrE13wv91CZBABHToMmL1DUF-DftgSJ2w6-1r_zmGFP_ljq_TDBL1efYTW0Gf8DUVKvkR1TSzSY2igf7FiKNjB9NRKoc27qMJ6WAmZRSJYz-j5o9AdpPjfnCZadylRsGmbuU/s1600/goodtime1+%281%29.jpg

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I wanna thank...

Well, it's Oscar Sunday.  I'm actually not that interested in the telecast.  In the DVR era, it's so much easier just to record the show and fast-forward through the good parts Monday morning.  Don't really care that Seth MacFarlane is hosting - I have never watched a single episode of Family Guy.  Doesn't look like they'll be too many surprises.  I have no desire to see Babs or the cast of Les Mis sing, though of course Adele's performance inspires curiosity.

The Razzies and Independent Spirit Awards were both held yesterday.  At the Spirit awards, Silver Linings and The Sessions (possessing Helen Hunt's Oscar-nominated turn) scored the jackpot, while at the increasingly pointless Razzies, Twilight's Breaking Dawn Part II  damn near swept everything.  The Razzies are so dumb.  Why hold this meaningless ceremony celebrating movies everyone knows are bad?  If the Razzies had any guts, they would stick to it to overhyped, overrated movies needing to be cut down to size... Les Mis, perhaps? 

My latest list of who I think are the top 8 college basketball teams (a.k.a. my pre-tourney elite 8):

- Indiana
- Gonzaga
- Florida
- Miami
- Kansas
- Georgetown
- Louisville
- Michigan St. 

* 

Brewer's Blackbird. 

Beautiful, huh?  This guy was seen in Bulloch County, Georgia this week. 

* 

Happy birthday, Charles LeBrun (1619-1690).  I just learned about him yesterday.  Called the greatest painter who ever lived by the long-reigning King Louis XIV, he was responsible for many of the decorations and statues at Versailles: 

*

Finally, in celebration of Oscar day, let's honor one of my 500 Greatest Performances of All Time (which just happened to win an Oscar 19 years ago). 

Martin Landau
as Bela Lugosi in Ed Wood (1994)  

Landau's tragic, grandiloquent, sympathetic, funny portrayal of Bela Lugosi won nearly every award imaginable in 1994.  A longtime reliable character actor who had been nominated twice previously (for 1988's Tucker: The Man and His Dream and 1989's Crimes and Misdemeanors), Landau put his heart and soul into the part of a past-his-prime cinematic icon who is reduced to a Z-grade movie with a cast of spirited but utterly clueless filmmakers.  Burton's best film, it has a lot of tongue-in-cheek fun, spot-on set design, and a cheerfully underdog quality.  And Landau is just masterful.  





Images courtesy of:

http://files.myopera.com/RobinL/albums/718714/2009-06-09%20007%20Brewers%20Blackbird.jpg

http://aasid.parsons.edu/decorationascomposition/sites/default/files/peaceroom.jpg

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjkygptANca64I_EZaPRGE3Kh1tUGvQW3-tOWVBijvYMydWUARh2wFgRl9A3jyPoZ2BnA2Kf7Wev_iNbROaeZS_JLzvCdTcJeLqVd33vaufuvZpRJzMAp0sjDwyfVgbVe63-AaTTSX4htEz/s1600/Martin+Landau+Ed+Wood.PNG

Predix

End of the week day for Gabriel and Julia.   Gabriel sure didn't want to go to school this morning, and who can blame him?  On slate for today: a little work (hopefully), an attempt to finish the book I'm reading, relaxation, 70-degree weather, The Americans, half of the Downton Abbey finale (cisnce it's two hours...), and... oh, who knows?  We just roll with it!

New Movies opening this weekend:

Dark Skies    They're not screening this one for critics, which is an ominous sign indeed.  It looks good.  Keri Russell and Josh Hamilton are the parents in a family that suddenly and bafflingly finds itself pitted against a malevolent force.  J.K. Simmons is the supernatural expert they call in for help.  Good be spooky good or unintentionally bad.  (Yes)

Snitch    Somehow Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson's film career keeps on ticking, though I'm not sure he's ever been in a well-received movie.  The Rock is a father who goes undercover for the DEA in order to try get his son - a first-time drug offender - out of his 10-year prison stint.  Susan Sarandon (huh?), Barry Pepper, and Benjamin Bratt co-star.

*

Well, it's Oscar weekend, and here are my picks:

Best Picture

Argo.  It's winning every major award in the run-up to Oscar, and it's a critical and commercial hit.  And, yes, the consensus is that Ben Affleck was robbed, and this will be a way to pay the Academy back. 

Best Actor
Daniel Day-Lewis, Lincoln

It's really hard to conceive anyone else winning this award.  Hugh Jackman might have once had a shot, but a lot of people hate Les Mis.  I suppose Bradley Cooper is the wild-card here, but the fact that Lewis has won every award leading up to this might spell doom for the Coop.

Best Actress

Jennifer Lawrence, Silver Linings Playbook

It seems like her year; anchoring the hugely successful The Hunger Games franchise doesn't hurt.  Jessica Chastain's character in Zero Dark Thirty is said to be a little too flat.  Naomi Watts could pull off the upset.  Some like Emmanuelle Riva's chances for Amour.  Just not me.

Best Supporting Actor

Tommy Lee Jones, Lincoln

The toughest of the acting races to call.  Christoph Waltz and Alan Arkin might have won too recently, and it's thought that Philip Seymour Hoffman has had much better roles.  So it's between DeNiro - who has really been campaigning hard for what is said to be his best role in a long time - and Jones, who many feel walks away with Lincoln.  DeNiro hasn't won since 1980, Jones since 1993.  Hmmm.  I'll go with Jones, but barely. 

Best Supporting Actress

Anne Hathaway, Les Miserables

Next. 

Best Director

Steven Spielberg, Lincoln

Minus the competition of Affleck, this really does seem like a consolation prize.  Ang Lee is probably the frontrunner here, for bringing the unfilmable Life to Pi to, um, life, but he is going against an industry titan, earning some of his best reviews for a very different outing this time, a more intimate, actors' piece.  David Russell, Silver Linings Playbook's helmer, could add some spice to the mix.

Original Screenplay: Django Unchained, Quentin Tarantino (runner up: Amour)
Adapted Screenplay: Argo, Chris Terrio (runner-up: Lincoln, Tony Kushner)
Visual Effects: Life of Pi
Foreign Language Film: AmourAnimated Film: Wreck-it Ralph
Cinematography: Life of Pi, Claudio Miranda
Costume Design: Les Miserables
Documentary: How to Survive a PlagueEditing: Argo
Documentary short: Open Heart
Original Score: Life of Pi, Mychael Danna
Makeup and Hairstyling: Les Miserables
Original Song: "Skyfall," Adele, Skyfall
Production Design: Life of Pi
Animated Short Film: Fresh Guacomole
Live Action Short Film: Curfew
Sound Editing: Django Unchained
Sound Mixing: Skyfall



 

Movie Reviews

Repetitious and overlong, Sinister (2012) finds an increasingly low-voiced Ethan Hawke pitted against Mr. Boogie (no, that's not the name of a 1975 T. Rex album) in a horror film that has its share of jolts but is never really as scary as you want it to be.  Which is a shame because there is a kernel of a great idea here, with Hawke (as compelling as ever) as a devoted true crime writer who puts his family in jeopardy when he moves them into the house where an entire family, save a little girl, was murdered.  The best scenes in Scott Derrickson's film are the ones in which Hawke and his wife (stage actress Juliet Rylance) combatively argue about his obsession with his work at the expense of his family.  The rest of the underpopulated film largely consists of Hawke watching eerie Super-8 home footage and wandering around his always-dark home, following strange noises.  Store this one away as a letdown. 

*

Arbitrage (2012), writer-director Nicholas Jarecki's feature-film debut, has Richard Gere as a Bernie Madoff-like hedge fund magnate whose financial scams are the least of his problems after the car he is driving with his mistress crashes, killing her.  The life he has so carefully built up and manicured begins to crumble and the only person he can turn to is a young African-American (nicely played by Nate Parker) who is on his payroll and can help him out of tight jams.  Gere really knocks it out of the park here - who else can make you love such clean-cut, crisp phoniness like he can?  Susan Sarandon is his socialite wife, Brit Marling is excellent as his daughter (groomed to take over the business, but unaware of her dad's double-dealings), and Tim Roth, with New York accent, is the dogged, slouching detective honing in on Gere.  Talky at times - full of business argot - but generally absorbing. 

*

Images courtesy of:

http://www.cinematoria.com/images/films/sinister_2012/screenshots/sinister_2012-3-1920x1080.jpg


http://www.apnatimepass.com/richard-gere-in-arbitrage-movie-1.jpg

Oh, High School

 
The Perks of Being a Wallflower (2012) is a movie I liked but didn't love - and damned if I didn't want to love it!  Intelligent, well-acted, appealing, the movie somehow never really wedged into my my hall of Great Adolescent Movies.

The movie is a rare thing: an adaptation of a novelist's work (a much-liked, trim 1999 epistolary novel) byt the novelist himself - Stephen Chbosky - who also directed it!  The time period is never specified, but we're in Pittsburgh, sometime around 1991 or 1992.

Logan Lerman (Percy Jackson) is Charlie, a shy kid who starts high school without any friends and with some sort of unspecified back story - time in a psychiatric hospital, perhaps?  Unable to communicate with his parents (Dylan McDermott and Kate Walsh, both wasted), he recedes into the background until he comes across come other decide misfits - "uncool" kids who welcome him into their tight-knit, cozy, free-thinking kids: lovely Sam (Emma Watson, with a spot-on American accent), her gay stepbrother Patrick (Ezra Miller, who steals the show) chief among them.  It's here, in this warm, offbeat delineation of the collective, familial spirit of the outsiders that the film really shines.  Chbosky obviously has great affection for the afterthought kids, and he does fine job etching out three-dimensional characters that fell fresh - extending his touch to Mae Whitman's Mary Elizabeth. 

Paul Rudd gives a likable, recognizable supporting performance as Charlie's benevolent English teacher (who assigns Charlie various books to read, from A Separate Peace to The Catcher in the Rye).  The film is flawed, though.  Like too many "period" pieces, the film OD's on its obtrusive, never-ending use of music.  And there just isn't enough story; the film, though it is structured over the course of a school year, sort of meanders along with various details omitted or unclear (where exactly are Sam and Patrick's parents?).  Charlie isn't the most compelling character to anchor a movie, but I think it was strange - and perhaps in bad taste - to saddle him with that out-of-nowhere, unnecessary final-act revelation.

Munch, Munch

"Monday morning you sure look fine, Friday I've got traveling on my mind..."
     - Mac, Fleetwood

A new week - wonky downstairs plumbing, a reputed big twist on Downton Abbey (pretty sure I know what it is), Gabriel home sick from school, cold weather outside, and a new Ian McEwan book to read (Sweet Tooth).  We can make this work! 

What else?  Mindy McCready is dead (another Celebrity Rehab-er bites the dust) and the new Die Hard barely won the box office weekend, barely besting Identity Thief.  Safe Haven opened in third place, followed by Escape From Planet Earth (whatever that is), and Warm Bodies. 

Can I recommend an early candidate for the best book of the year? 

Richard Lloyd Parry's People Who Eat Darkness (2012) is a stunning, transfixing true-life account of the disappearance of a young British woman, Lucie Blackman, from the streets of Tokyo in July of 2000.  Parry, a journalist and Times' Tokyo bureau chief who lived in Tokyo during the ensuing hoopla and decade-long court proceedings, gives us everything we want here:
- a probing look into Lucie's life and the reasons she went to Japan
- a rounded, even-handed picture of the fractured Blackman family and the growing controversy regarding patriarch Tim's mysteriously non-grieving behavior
- insight into the life of a "hostess," the controversial, oft-misunderstood employment Lucie took
- the red-tape and insufficiency of the Japanese police
- the historical relationship between Koreans and the Japanese
- a searing, complicated portrait of the man eventually charged with Lucie's disappearance - Joji Obara, a long-overlooked, friendless, wealthy rapist.    


Fast-paced, intense, accessible, the book reads like a great thriller with a great villain.  Parry's involvement in the investigation ups the ante.  He presents the material cogently and clearly, never letting personal opinions or bias really get in the way.  He limns a delicate, exotic society very well.  What I admired most about the sad, haunting book is that, even long after we are told of the outcome of the court proceedings (and Obara's fate), we're still left unclear on motive.  Why did any of this happen?  What is evil?  What is justice, really?  The author freely admits that he doesn't know - and neither do we.

   

Books

Loved hearing, meeting (and timidly talking to) T.C. Boyle at the book festival yesterday.  It was invigorating to hear an author read one of his stories aloud - one that I had read before; I don't know, you just see it in a new light.

Which brings me to my annual list of reading and author goals for the year (and life):

25 Living Authors I Would Love to Meet1. Richard Russo
2. Jhumpa Lahiri
3. Dennis Lehane
4. Ken Follett
5. Jonathan Franzen
6. Jeffrey Eugenides
7. George Pelecanos
8. Ian McEwan
9. Oscar Hijuelos
10. Michael Connelly
11. Jeffery Deaver
12. Stewart O'Nan
13. Alice Munro   (not likely, considering she's 81 and Canadian)
14. Tom Perrotta
15. Jennifer Egan
16. Donna Tartt
17. Benjamin Black (aka John Banville)
18. Larry McMurtry
19. William Boyd
20. Kate Morton
21. Lionel Shriver
22. Claire Messud
23. Scott Smith
24. Philip Roth

25. Scott Spencer

25 Dead Authors I Would Have Loved to Meet1. Richard Yates
2. John Updike
3. Ross Macdonald
4. Agatha Christie
5. Evan Connell
6. William Faulkner
7. Jack London
8. Mark Twain
9. Pearl S.Buck
10. Truman Capote
11. Edith Wharton
12. James Joyce
13. F. Scott Fitzgerald
14. Cornell Woolrich
15. Dashiell Hammett
16. Graham Greene
17. Patricia Highsmith
18. Carson McCullers
19. Willa Cather
20. Fyodor Dostoevsky
21. Evelyn Waugh
22. Joseph Conrad
23. William Styron
24. Daphne du Maurier
25. James T. Farrell

25 Authors I Want to Read This Year (Whom I've Never Read Before)

Scott Turow

1. Ben Fountain (Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk)
2. Anna Sewell (Black Beauty)
3. Irving Stone
4. Scott Turow
5. Herman Wouk (Pulitzer winner for The Caine Mutiny)
6. Jospehine Tey
7. Edwin O'Connor (Pulitzer winner for The Edge of Sadness)
8. John Fante
9. John Jakes
10. Leon Uris
11. Karin Fossum (Scandanavian crime fiction)
12. Jane Smiley
13. David Quammen (nonfiction nature/science writer)
14. Isak Dinesen
15. John Buchan  (The Thirty-Nine Steps)
16. Wilkie Collins
17. Stephen Dobyns
18. Margaret Millar  (mystery writer, wife of Ross Macdonald)
19. Christopher Isherwood
20. John Galsworthy (The Forsyte Saga)
21. Gunter Grass
22. Natsuo Kirino (modern Japanese mystery writer)
23. Sara Blaedel  (Norwegian crime)
24. Daniel Freeman
25. Ross King


25 Books I Want to Read This Year

1. Stories, T.C. Boyle
2. The Executioner's Song, Norman Mailer
3. The Child's Child, Barbara Vine
4. Islands Under Fire, Kevin McCarey (a friend of T.C. Boyle and a teacher at SCAD, McCarey's first book is an account of the attempt to save Puerto Rico's coral reefs)
5. The Monuments Men, Robert Edsel
6. The Absent One, Jussi Adler-Olsen
7. The Boys From Brazil, Ira Levin
8. The Homesman, Glendon Swarthout  (a 1988 western that is being made into a Tommy Lee Jones-directed movie with Jones, Meryl Streep, and Hilary Swank)
9. The Secret Keeper, Kate Morton
10. Dear Alice, Alice Munro
11. The Hook, Donald Westlake
12. The Gods of Gotham, Lyndsay Faye
13. Back to Blood, Tom Wolfe
14. Where'd You Go, Bernadette?, Maria Semple
15. The Hypnostist, Lars Kepler
16. The Stonecutter, Camilla Lackberg
17. Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
18. Dare Me, Megan Abbott   (Lord of the Flies meets Bring it On)
19. The White Devil, Justin Evans
20. Quiet, Susan Cain   (a non-fiction book about introverts)
21. Howards End, E.M. Forster
22. A Thousand Parsons, Jonathan Dee
23. And the Mountains Echoed, Khaled Hosseini
24. A Town Like Alice, Nevil Shute
25. Frenchman's Creek, Daphne du Maurier







Images courtesy of:

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh7dNYkg7Sb0oPbM4ueKQSP8jzJnCd1-sZ27Z2qtKl-lho5woD4fsqSgB0NSTxlwYgh1oM2NFBQpGDiqwCg8-RCiVoLal0ymkLo8S-heMbHcKM2Th9rDF-Kj9AOm69LfmgJcBlbkXJK5c1W/s320/tc+boyle+stories.jpg

http://flcenterlitarts.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/scottturow.jpg

Book Festival

(This post will cover today and Saturday.  Saturday will find the Fischer family at the Savannah Book Festival.)

There is one author I want to see there and it's...

T. C. Boyle! 

I have loved everything I've read by Boyle:

- 1993's Road to Wellville (the only Boyle novel adapted into a film), that zany, colorful, amazingly-researched look at Dr. John Kellogg and the loopy wellness movement of the early 20th century
- 1995's The Tortilla Curtain, arguably his most recognized book, a great sociological, empathetic, blackly funny tale about the relationship between whites and illegal Mexican immigrants in a tony L.A. hillside community
- 2005's The Human Fly and Other Stories, a sterling collection of previously published short stories (except for one), including the great "The Love of My Life" 
- 2010's amazingly diverse, creative Wild Child, one of the best collections of stories I've ever read
- 2011's  When the Killing's Done, a stirring, thought-provoking, riveting story about the environmental disputes over California's Channel Islands.

Boyle has written 14 novels (the most recent of which is 2012's San Miguel, his first novel that is solely, straight-up historical) and published countless stories - by my count, there have been nine collections of stories to date, although according to his website, another volume is due out later this year. 

Characteristics of Boyle's work:

- inventive use of language (have a thesaurus handy, too!)
- environmental concerns
- the dynamics of interaction between steely, brilliant outsiders (Alfred Kinsey, John Kellogg, Frank Lloyd Wright, etc.) and society 
- black humor
- tons of details and research

He has been teaching English at the University of Southern California since 1978.  He lives near Santa Barbara with his wife of 39 years; the couple has three children.  He often goes up into the Southern Sierra mountains to write.  A prolific, consistently critically-adored novelist, he might not have that one definitive work (though maybe it's The Tortilla Curtain or possibly 1987's highly-praised World's End, which portrays three centuries worth of familial life in New York's Hudson River Valley) but I don't think he's ever written a disappointing work.

Apparently he gives very entertaining talks, with a lot of audience involvement, so I'm looking forward to hearing him.  (Note: His literary idol is Savannah native Flannery O'Connor.)

The link to his website: 

http://www.tcboyle.com/

Article in the Savannah Morning News:

http://savannahnow.com/do/2013-02-14/savannah-book-festival-tc-boyle-ventures-wild#.UR4uSei7CM8








Image courtesy of:

http://media.independent.com/img/croppedphotos/2011/03/30/03222011-TC-Boyle-007_t479.jpg?6626f76dcd72edc2e28f46812c7026450162bdb2

Cupid

It's Valentine's Day...

So what?

My wife is my year-round valentine - and she knows it! 

New Movies Opening This Weekend:

A Good Day to Die Hard    Obnoxious.  Dull.  Pointless.  Tapped out.  Such are the adjectives flying from the pens of severely underwhelmed critics for this fifth entry in the series.  But you know it looked bad, so there's no surprise there.  Bruce is back - and 55! - in Moscow, where he meets up with his son... Oh, who cares?  This one looks DOA.  Supposedly the story ends up in Chernobyl, though.  Which provides a good opportunity to recommend last year's The Chernobyl Diaries.

Safe Haven    Will we ever be rid of Nicholas Sparks?  Julianne Hough steps up to the plate as a troubled young woman who arrives in - where else? - North Carolina.  Because it's a Sparks movie (he co-scripted), you know she has a PG-13 tumultuous past.  Because it's a Sparks movie, you know she'll find romance in a hunky widower (Josh Duhamel).  Lasse Halstrom, who did a nice job with the author's Dear John, directs; Cobie Smulders co-stars.  Critics don't like it, but that's par for this author's oeuvre. 

Beautiful Creatures    Someone wants in on the Twilight/YA-fantasy market.  Adapted from the successful series by Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl, (both of whom will be at the Savannah Book Festival), the film takes place in a small South Carolina town and concerns a bookish boy and the mysterious new girl in town (played by director Jane Campion's daughter, Alice Englert).  Cue a lot of supernatural stuff.  Academy favorites Jeremy Irons, Emma Thompson, and Viola Davis all have meaty (read: hammy) supporting parts.  Could be fun.  Directed and scripted by long-time screenwriter Richard LaGravenese (The Bridges of Madison County, The Mirror Has Two Faces).
(Yes)

*

So why is today known as Valentine's Day?  Well, here's the legend:

http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history

Said to be the first image of St. Valentine - a woodblock print from the Nuremberg Chronicles, a world history/paraphrase of the Bible which follows human history as it is unfolds in the Bible

 


Images courtesy of:

http://www.filmofilia.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/Beautiful-Creatures_2.jpg

http://www.greenteadesign.com/thedesigntree/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/02-valentinus-woodblock-print.jpg

Take On Me

A quick round of housework this morning before the owner of the property comes by today to see what needs to be done before it is put on the market. 

- Julia and I watched Taken 2 last night.  I wasn't as, uh, taken with it as I was the first one, a thriller that was so bluntly effective and focused, giving the viewer exactly what he or she wanted.  This one just isn't as exciting, though wants the action gets going, there's no let up.  

Liam Neeson is back, of course, as Bryan Mills, everyone's favorite CIA operative dad.  This time, Bryan and his wife (Famke Janssen) are abducted while vacationing in Istanbul, and it's up to their teenage daughter (29-year old Maggie Grace) to try and get them back; don't fret if you think Neeson won;t eventually get free and start kicking butt too.

The fight scenes are more jerkily edited than they were the first time around (if memory serves right), and a good drinking game can be be started: every time you see an establishing shot of Hagia Sophia (you know, to remind us we're in Istanbul), drink up; by our count, you would imbibe a good thirty to forty swigs. 

Neeson has such presence, though, such rugged, hard-driving charisma, that it's impossible not to be riveted by him.  None of the other actors really register or have much to do.  The great thing about the Taken movies is that there is so little flab to them - no wasted scenes - that they're over before you know it.  This isn't the smartest of movies, but I was guiltily entertained.  The PG-13 rating is an indication that the violence won't be too excessive or explicit.     

* 

Top 10 Liam Neeson films:

10. Suspect (1987)
9. Rob Roy (1995)
8. Kinsey (2004)
7. Husbands and Wives (1992)
6. The Next Three Days (2010)
5. Unknown (2011)
4. The Grey (2012)
3. Love Actually (2003)
2. Taken (2009)
1. Schindler's List (1993)

* 

On a different note... What if, say, you had both a penis and a vagina?  And, let's say, that when having sex, you stuck your penis in your mate's vagina and vice versa, and then finished ten minutes later.  What next?  Why not just get rid of your penis at that point and grown another? 

http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/science/2013/02/this-sea-slug-discards-its-penis-after-sex-and-grows-another/

Ah, yes, the wonderful non-human world! 




Image courtesy of:  http://thecrat.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/taken2-bryan-mills.jpg

Yawn

Monday morning.  The Grammys are over - do you care?  You know you're getting old and out of touch when you haven't even of the artist or song that won Record of the Year.  What is Gotye?  Featuring Kimbra.  Who's Kimbra? I guess I'll have to YouTube it. 

Gabriel is on spring break this week.  It'll be him and I by ourselves all week, a scenario that should allow for all sorts of hand-grabbing, swinging, snacking, Oso-viewing shenanigans.  The house needs to be cleaned, that's for sure.

Julia has a job interview again today.  Fingers crossed for her!   

Identity Thief ruled the box office this weekend, despite mediocre reviews.  Audiences love them some Melissa McCarthy!  Warm Bodies, doing well, was in #2, edging out Side Effects, Steven Soderbergh's final film.  Silver Linings Playbook, nearing the $100 million mark, was fourth, beating out the surprising success that is Hansel &Gretel: Witch Hunters. 

Argo won the BAFTA (the British version of the Oscar) for Best Film and Best Director.  I think it's going to win Best Picture on Feb. 24 too, on this side of the pond. 

I'll have to amend my earlier predictions of the L.A. Lakers in the NBA Finals in the June.  Exchange them for the OKC Thunder and downgrade the Lakers (who have too many problems to mention) out of the playoffs. 

Today I want to continue the book I started yesterday, the insanely addictive true-life crime story People Who Eat Darkness, writer Richard Lloyd Parry's chilling, sad, culturally informative account of the disappearance of English girl Lucie Blackman from Tokyo in 2000.  100 pages in, I'll agree with author Chris Cleave (Little Bee), who calls this the In Cold Blood of out times."

Until tomorrow...

Back

Northern Lapwing

After a two-day hiatus, I'm back.  The fam had a nice day in Milledgeville yesterday, and, boy, talk about some college basketball games yesterday!  A half-court buzzer beater!  Five overtimes!  11 straight for the...Miami Hurricanes? 

My new top five teams in this ever tenuous landscape...
(no order)
- Indiana
- Gonzaga
- Miami
- Michigan
- Florida

*

A performance today for my list of the 500 Greatest Performances of All Time:

Meryl Streep
as Julia Child in Julie & Julia (2009) 

Streep is at her best here, as the flowery, larger-than-life Child; the actress' mannerisms and emulations of Child's physical behavior are, of course, spot-on.  Streep is having a great time here and she's a ball to watch; the chemistry between her and Stanley Tucci (gloriously understated as her husband) is pitch-perfect.  It's fun too when Jane Lynch shows up as Streep's sister.  Of course, the problem with Nora Ephron's film is that the Streep's Child isn't the sole focus of the film but rather shares the screen with the annoyingly whiny, rather uninteresting present-day character of Julie Powell (Amy Adams, in a thankless part). 

*

Well, it's February 10th and I can honestly say - and pray - that I have read the worst book of the year.  Matthew Quirk's ludicrously-hyped debut novel The 500 is so bad, it's comical.  I won't bother to recount the ludicrous plot for you - I'd only do that if I wanted to entice you to read it, and if you did that at this point, I'd be incredibly disappointed.  I will say that it wants to be a Firm-Baldacci sorta thing, but, honestly, this book makes a typical James Patterson novel look like high art.  Not one original plot point, characterization, line of dialogue, or description to be found anywhere in it.   

*

A rare bird has been spotted in Bulloch County by a number of bird-watchers, some of whom have hurried in from other counties to see it:

A northern lapwing:

This bird is rarely seen in the States.  It usually abides in Eurasia, although it is a migratory that sometimes wonders over to Canada after storms.  A wader bird that noisily defends its territory, the northern lapwing tends to feed late, late at night, guided by the moonlight.  













Images courtesy of:

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjF7HfY0e5LHSZstCFDw0Y-srK8DOKkGmOplkDnnulGEaJ90ZwcgMlAlfFcnCkMbiaO_gqmAip0nM6pfXqj2V7JPT49_MDnt6a8KVAk11lmaqbPkrpeOm6bhdR-l6CDXg_2yec2EnxkCkNA/s320/Meryl+Streep+in+Julie+%26+Julia.jpg

http://ibc.lynxeds.com/files/pictures/Lapwing.jpg

2/7/13

Can't wait to watch the DVR'd second episode of The Americans tonight.  The FX show had a snazzy, crackling pilot last week, with Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys both excellent as the KGB agents posing as Beltway suburbanites in 1980.  Kudos too for the casting of the reliable excellent, deceptively chummy character actor Noah Emmerich (The Truman Show, Little Children, Super 8, Frequency) as the government agent who becomes their new - and understandably suspiscious - neighbor.  There is a lot of fertile material here for a good show.  Creator Joseph Weisberg's show also made the best TV or cinematic use - at least, in memory - of any song off the critically divisive, bloated Fleetwood Mac double-disc album Tusk from 1979.   

New Movies Opening This Weekend: 

Identity Thief    This should be a slam-dunk: Director Seth Gordon - who made the great doc The King of Kong before segueing into comedies like Four Christmases and Horrible Bosses - re-teams with Jason Bateman (playing a straight man who has his identity nabbed), but this is a showcase for Melissa McCarthy, as the big, loud thief who goes on a cross-country odyssey with Bateman.  It doesn't seem like anyone actually likes this film, though.  Too bad! 

Side Effects    If this does prove to be Steven Soderbergh's last film - and the whirlwind, genre-hopping director said that it is - it seems like it's going to be a good swan song.  Critics are wild about it.  It's an expose of the medical industry and antidepressants, a thriller with plenty of twists, and a moving drama about a woman (played by Rooney Mara) lost in the world.  Mara is a wealthy NYC wife whose husband (Channing Tatum) has just gotten out of prison for insider trading.  Soon enough, the ever-depressed Mara starts seeing a shrink (Jude Law) and... well, I guess, we have to see the film.  Co-starring Catherine-Zeta Jones, Mamie Gummer (yay!), and Vinessa Shaw.  Written by Scott Z. Burns, who also penned the script for Soderbergh's just-okay Contagion.
(Yes)

Books

Middle of the week blues...

Gabriel has his spring break next week.  Julia has a job interview on Friday, and the whole family is headed up to Milledgeville on Saturday.  Monday, Julia has another interview...

Bye, bye, Emily Owens M.D.  Julia and I really liked this show.  I thought Mamie Gummer was really appealing - as was the rest of the cast.  I suppose it was like a CW-Grey's Anatomy.  The various love-triangle subplots were catching, and I thought the writers came up with some interesting medical dilemmas each week.
Too bad the ratings weren't better.  Maybe Mamie will get another show soon! 

Looking ahead at the year in book releases, here is what on the horizon between here and the end of the year:

- Khaled Hosseini's And the Mountains Echoed (May)   
- Meg Wolitzer's The Interestings (April)     (follows the lives of six girls who attended a summer arts camp)
- Elizabeth Haynes' Dark Tide         (said to be for fans of Gone Girl)
- Jonathan Dee's A Thousand Pardons     (another look at post 9/11 privileged NYC)
- Harlan Coben's Six Years    ( a stand-alone thriller)
- Stephen King's Dr. Sleep   (a sequel to The Shining)
- Jhumpa Lahiri's The Lowland     (set in the 60s and 70s in Calcutta)
- Elizabeth Strout's The Burgess Boys   (follow-up to her Pulitzer-winning Oliver Kitteridge)
- Maeve Binchy's A Week in Winter   (the late author's last novel about small-time Ireland)
- Claire Messud's The Woman Upstairs    (her first novel since The Emperor's Children, it's a tale about a teacher with dreams of becoming an artist)
- Lionel Shriver's Big Brother    (set in Iowa, it's about siblings and obesity)
- Michael Pollan's Cooked
- Edward Rutherford's Paris    (another historical novel, this time about the City of Light)

These are but a sampling...

* 

A selection for my list of the 500 Greatest Performances of All Time:

Nicole Kidman
as Suzanne Stone Maretto in To Die For (1995)

Kidman's Golden Globe-winning performance was the first indication that she was going to be a great actress.  As a cheery, ambitious weathergirl who wants to be famous above anything else, Kidman is blackly funny and lethal, blissfully false and sexy.  Nothing stands in this woman's way: not her likably dumb husband (Matt Dillon), not her mumbly, snarly teenage lover (Joaquin Phoenix), not her suspicious sister (Illeana Douglas, spot-on). 

Books

Monday, Monday, as the Ma's and Pa's used to harmonize.  Seemed like it was an exciting Super Bowl - literally lights-out - but now the week sits before us.  The big question this week is whether or not Julia will hear from any prospective employers.  Fingers crossed!

Warm Bodies ruled the box office this weekend, following the footsteps of surprise success of Zombieland.  Zombies never die!  The rest of the top five were similar to last week - the abominable Hansel and Gretel stayed strong at #2, and Silver Linings..., Mama, and Zero Dark Thirty rounded out the five.  The Stallone vehicle, Bullet to the Head, was DOA, finishing sixth.  Oscar nominations helped other films stay on course and hang around in the top ten - Les Mis, Lincoln, Django...

Book Reviews for today:

J.R. Moehringer's Sutton (2012) is sure to be one of the most enjoyable novels I'll encounter this year.  I knew nothing about real-life bank robber Willie Sutton;  by the time the novel's 334 pages came to a close, I felt that I knew him fully.  On Christmas Eve 1969, after a decade-plus stint at Attica Prison in New York, Sutton was released and followed by a reporter, whose paper had exclusive rights to Sutton's story, across New York City.  Moehringer imagines what might have happened that day.

Sutton leads the reporter (and a photographer) on a chronological journey across the city, narrating his story: his birth in the Irish slums, early friendships, the love of his life, early crimes, prison stints, the daring escapes, the fame.  What emerges is a loving, straightforward, jovial, scrappy portrait of an individual who when asked why he stole from banks, answered famously, "because that's where the money is."

It's almost impossible not to like this book.  The narrative flows really well, the characters are interesting, there's romance and it's informative.  It's an accurate, colorful re-creation of a time and place too - Depression-era New York most of the time.  Moehringer researched the book well (I had no idea that the marble lions outside the New York Metropolitan Library were named Patience and Fortitude were named by Mayor LaGuardia as symbols of the traits New Yorkers would need to get through the Depression) but he shows a lot of creative prowess in his limning of a character like.  Willie emerges as a grand storyteller, though you can't always trust him.  Plucky, pithy, courageous, and plotting, Willie Sutton is presented here as more colorful than he might actually have been, but that's fiction for you.  I would recommend this book to anyone.

Grade: A- 

*  

Donald Westlake's 2003 novel Money For Nothing has a great premise: an ordinary Joe mysteriously starts receiving checks from an untraceable government agency for $1000 once a month.  The checks continue to come, month after month, for seven years.  One day, on the ferry out to Fire Island, he is approached by a lumpy, olive-skinned foreigner and informed that he is now "active."

I liked the book - Westlake can write a drum-tight, bleakly funny plot - but I guess I didn't quite find the second-half of the novel - long after the storyline (which ends up involving an assassination attempt on a hated despot at Yankee Stadium) - as enjoyable, as worthy of the great premise.  Overall, not bad, though the main character was the least interesting one in the book.

Grade: B-
 
  
















Images courtesy of:

http://literaryhoarders.files.wordpress.com/2012/10/13624683.jpg?w=714 

http://s3.amazonaws.com/production.mediajoint.prx.org/public/piece_images/67275/DWest5_medium.jpg


   

Dybbuk... Dybbuk...

Well, it's Super Bowl Sunday, and I could care less who wins.  For the immediate future, I am football-ed out.

What I am excited about, truly, is Gabriel's recently re-discovered enthusiasm for Mickey Mouse, Honeycomb, and his desire to try new things - like bacon!

Don't mess with a dybbuk, is what seems to be the moral of The Possession, an effective little PG-13 horror film.  The dybbuk (the malevolent spirit from Jewish folklore) resides in the dark wooden box picked up by young Em (Natasha Calis) at a yard sale.  It doesn't take long for the creepy spirit in the box - displaced soul looking to inhabit an innocent host - to take over Em, and she starts doing odd things, including stabbing her father with a fork (in a creepy scene that is oddly never again mentioned or referred to).

The movie shares a lot in common with co-producer Sam Raimi's 2009 film Drag Me to Hell (also PG-13): a well-maintained mood of unease, effective low-budget effects, tension garnered from what is not seen as opposed to what is, tongue-in-cheek humor.  Director Ole Bornedal ropes in a good performance from Jeffrey Dean Morgan (looking more than ever like Javier Bardem) as the single, recently-separated father (ex-wife Kyra Sedgwick has sorta moved on) at a loss as to what has taken over his father.  The Hebrew reggae/rock musician Matisyahu has a crucial role as the rabbi called upon to guide the spirit back into the box.

There are a lot of questions arising from the story that you would be best to set aside and never return to.  Julia and I?  We had a good time with it.  It's a lot of fun and there are some choice moments, including what is one of the eeriest images of an occupied uvola that you'll ever see.    

And, yes, there is room for a sequel.  

And, yes, 'dybbuk' would be a great Scrabble word. 

*

Consider it high praise or not, but Orlando Bloom does his best work ever in the little-seen The Good Doctor (2012) as a new resident at a Southern California hospital who becomes infatuated with a patient (Riley Keogh, daughter of Lisa Marie Presley) and starts tinkering and fiddling with her medications so that she will have to stay in the hospital.  Leaning towards the dull, the movie works in fits and starts - though it feels longer than its 90-minute runtime - and is populated by actors with not enough to do: J.K. Simmons (as a detective), Troy Garity, Taraji P.Henson, Rob Morrow (dryly ragged and amusing), Michael Pena.  Not so much a thriller as an understated - too understated to be much fun - piece about a lonely man who isn't getting the respect he long-thought a doctor would and should deserve, it nevertheless provides evidence that Bloom should be cast more often as creepy guys. 


Book reviews tomorrow!   























Images courtesy of: 

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEinnrZpitiEH22U_dMyKd8ZbKEVF_48lf7O3aMo-kMFUclgLYdGm5MLZ68M6ESF8hG8LQWrxZP6uHLYrlQ0KpX_AXTi_M0qrTU6lim4JZ18bJ430nFALRiJvBmHXQMTYFbR8A4CGXLrWN4/s1600/the-possession-movie.jpg

http://2012.riverrunfilm.com/sites/default/files/films/Good_Doctor_The.JPG

Part Two

Yesterday, I published a list of my fifty favorite novels of all time.  Minutes after posting, I started thinking... why did I stop at fifty?

So... you guessed it!  I came up with my next fifty favorite novels.  100 is just so much better than 50, right?

I don't have short-story collections on this list.  Hence, no works by Alice Munro or acclaimed collections by T.C. Boyle, Jhumpa Lahiri, etc.
 
Here it is - the second half of my 100 Favorite Novels of All Time.  Novels I would recommend to anyone, anywhere, at any time.  (Once again, in no order...)

- The Hunter, Richard Stark (1962)

- Mystic River, Dennis Lehane (2001)

- The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain (1884)

- The Privileges, Jonathan Dee (2010)

- Straight Man, Richard Russo (1997)

- Bridge of Sighs, Richard Russo (2007)

- Jurassic Park, Michael Crichton (1990)

- The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, Sherman Alexie (2007)

- Winesburg, Ohio, Sherwood Anderson (1919)

- A Lost Lady, Willa Cather (1923)

 - The Studs Lonigan Trilogy, James T. Farrell (1932-5)


- Tigerlily's Orchids, Ruth Rendell (2010)

- A Light in August, William Faulkner (1932)

- Dracula, Bram Stoker (1897)

- The Good Earth, Pearl S. Buck (1931)

- The Firm, John Grisham (1991)

- Emily, Alone, Stewart O'Nan (2011)

- The Emperor's Children, Claire Messud (2006)

- Anything For Billy, Larry McMurtry (1988)

- Lady Chatterley's Lover, D.H. Lawrence (1928)

- To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee (1960)

- And Then There Were None, Agatha Christie (1939)

- Light Years, James Salter (1975)

- Pick-Up, Charles Willeford (1955)

- Rabbit at Rest, John Updike (1990)

- The Human Stain, Philip Roth (2000)

- Nemesis, Philip Roth (2010)

- The Chemistry of Death, Simon Beckett (2006)

- Ripley's Game, Patricia Highsmith (1974)

- This Sweet Sickness, Patricia Highsmith (1960)

- Bel Canto, Ann Patchett (2001)

- Little Children, Tom Perrotta (2005)   

- The Stranger, Albert Camus (1942)

- The Lincoln Lawyer, Michael Connelly (2005)

- The Tortilla Curtain, T.C. Boyle (1995)

- When the Killing's Done, T.C. Boyle (2011)  

- The Time Traveler's Wife, Audrey Niffenegger (2003)  

- Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, Anne Tyler (1982)

- Ulysses, James Joyce (1922)

- Back When We Were Grownups, Anne Tyler (2001)

A

- Darkness at Noon, Arthur Koestler (1940)

- The Relic, Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child (1995)

- Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky (1866)

- Molokai'i, Alan Brennert (2003)

- A Handful of Dust, Evelyn Waugh (1934)

- Freedom, Jonathan Franzen (2010)

- The End of the Affair, Graham Greene (1951)

- The Call of the Wild, Jack London (1900)

- Snow Falling on Cedars, David Guterson (1994)

- The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini (2004) 



















Images courtesy of:

http://bloodymurder.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/stark_hunter1.jpg

http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/studlonigan.gif 

http://stkarnick.com/culture/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/mockingbird.jpg

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiTr8eeGObC2q3Py8KA07EcZ9GWPXi6w4TUNGzkk_-hUjFphb4M4Uss40jcildBP3J9s_VpDBImgehoae5e4JYDvSl9oyWXro2OiQ5F4DIqAtZxkQIiOs35HKabL1imdFwhfScx7V3KsO4/s1600/Book_BelCanto.gif

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41S8QJPJ7NL.jpg

Faves

As promised in yesterday's post...

My 50 Favorite Novels of All Time: 
(in no order) 

- The Shadow of the Wind, Carlos Ruiz Zafon (2001) 

- Rosemary's Baby, Ira Levin (1967) 

- Christine Falls, Benjamin Black (2006) 

- Pillars of the Earth, Ken Follett (1989)

- Eye of the Needle, Ken Follett (1979) 

- The Devotion of Suspect X, Keigo Higashino (2005) 

- Empire Falls, Richard Russo (2001)

- Any Human Heart, William Boyd (2002)

- The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner (1929) 

- The Talented Mr. Ripley, Patricia Highsmith (1955) 

- A Dog's Ransom, Patricia Highsmith (1972) 

- The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald 

- The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, Stieg Larsson (2005) 

- The Chill, Ross Macdonald (1963) 

- The Keeper of Lost Causes, Jussi Adler-Olsen (2007) 

- Appointment in Samarra, John O'Hara (1934) 

- The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, Oscar Hijuelos (1989) 

- The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Agatha Christie (1926) 

- The Easter Parade, Richard Yates (1976) 

- Revolutionary Road, Richard Yates (1961) 

- A Visit From the Goon Squad, Jennifer Egan (2010) 

- The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Carson McCullers (1940) 

- Ragtime, E.L. Doctorow (1975) 

- Mr. Bridge, Evan Connell (1959) 

- True Grit, Charles Portis (1968) 

- Everyman, Philip Roth (2006) 

- Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison (1952) 

- Rabbit, Run. John Updike (1960) 

- Rabbit is Rich, John Updike (1981) 

- The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck (1939) 

- Middlesex, Jeffrey Eugenides (2002) 

- Shutter Island, Dennis Lehane (2003) 

- Little Tiny Teeth, Aaron Elkins (2007) 

- My Antonia, Willa Cather (1918) 

- The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint, Brady Udall (2000) 

- Summer, Edith Wharton (1917) 

- The Ruins, Scott Smith (2006) 

- Crazy in Alabama, Mark Childress (1993) 

- Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy (1985) 

- Loilita, Vladimir Nabokov (1955) 

- Last Night at the Lobster, Stewart O'Nan (2007) 

- The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro (1989) 

- 1984, George Orwell (1949) 

- Animal Farm, George Orwell (1945) 

- Lonesome Dove, Larry McMurtry (1985) 

- 13 Steps Down, Ruth Rendell (2004) 

- The Namesake, Jhumpa Lahiri (2003) 

- One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1967) 

- The Post-Birthday World, Lionel Shriver (2007) 

- Sophie's Choice, William Styron (1979) 















Images courtesy of: 

http://alitareads.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/shadow-of-the-wind.jpg

http://covers.feedbooks.net/item/312445.jpg?size=large&t=1346914959

http://ohshoot.typepad.com/.a/6a0133f1fdf2a0970b014e8a97b704970d-800wi

http://holisticladybookclub.files.wordpress.com/2012/04/middlesex.jpg

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjz6u8LNGyJPLKxFvr5zuJcYLoEOdCzq6GdpL8ve9dgDtdjmJI23zV9ncJfCM5vHmaaP8NQwxfZtVphg0oNJjEleN-YEQCgnKZDQalgpSOTbiR6bFWXhx5dF7mIpT3hVouy4_9Ecq6p6-8/s1600/lobster.jpg