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rushthatspeaksWorth another go. Not tracking rereads as that way lies madness and caused giving up last time.
Books 2009
January
1. The Making of The African Queen, or How I Went to Africa with Bogart, Bacall and Huston and Almost Lost My Mind, Katharine Hepburn. Quite good. Should read her later autobiography.
2. D'Aulaires' Book of Animals, Ingri and Edgar Parin D'Aulaire. Simple, ingenious and beautiful little book.
not-3. The Duchess, The Maid, The Groom & Their Lover by Victoria Janssen. Clearly well-written; also very clearly Not My Thing. *sigh* Sorry, Vicki.
3. Me: Stories of My Life, Katharine Hepburn. Not as good as the previous; still fairly worthy but with large patches that do not work.
4. Leif the Lucky, Ingri and Edgar Parin D'Aulaire. I have Serious Issues with the text of this picture book (oh god so colonialist and outright racist and just awful), but the art is spectacular. Must go through and see what the futhark says. I really want to read the D'Aulaire bio of Lincoln because I can't imagine them in that modern an idiom, and yet that's the one they won the Caldecott for.
not-5. The Atrocity Archives, Charles Stross. Wow, I find the way this uses Holocaust-related stuff for plot purposes really and genuinely offensive. Enough to not plow through the rest of it.
6. Collected Essays, Volume IV, Virginia Woolf. It is always so hard to say when one has finished a book of Woolf's essays, because they are so shuffled between books, and because one cannot read in order straight through but is always picking up and putting down again. However, either at this time or at an earlier date I have now read every essay in this book, and there were some I had not read beforehand.
7. Crystal Rain, Tobias Buckell.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
50books_poc #2. Free ebook edition from that Tor giveaway a while ago. Reads like a first novel. Very well plotted, brilliant worldbuilding, did not emotionally engage at all. I liked the dialogue but the descriptive prose felt choppy. I will probably read more Buckell to see where he is going.
8. The Discworld Almanak: The Year of the Prawn (2005), Terry Pratchett and Bernard Pearson. Eminently suitable for reading at work in small slightly amusing increments, which is exactly what I did with it.
9. living dead girl, Elizabeth Scott. via![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
coffeeandink. I found this book very helpful; it is truthful about types of emotion that many novels about abuse do not cover, and it helped me sort out some things. I will almost certainly never read it again.
10. Pearl's Secret: A Black Man's Search For His White Family, Neil Henry.50books_poc #4, via said comm. Very good memoir, verging on brilliant. A meditation on race and class in America with interesting things to say, and also a description of how when looking for symbols one tends to find people, some of them oneself.
11. The Last Samurai, Helen DeWitt.nineweaving suggested I read this novel, which is not about Japanese history, and handed me a lending copy lo this very long time since, and I have finally got to it. Maybe now the borrowed-books stack will not be taller than I am. The book is intelligent and witty, and I liked the first half better than the second-- it ended perfectly, but the portion of the plot that was episodic had one or two too many episodes. Recommended especially to ling geeks, classics geeks, and people who collect languages. Ultimately a good book rather than a great one, I think.
not-12. Street Gang: The Complete History of Sesame Street, Michael Davis. Book on a subject I find desperately interesting which nevertheless managed to lose me through an insistence on providing the life story of every single relevant person a la Victor Hugo, an interest in the early days of childrens' television which while laudable causes details to intrude such that I wonder if the writer hadn't ought to be writing a history of 'Captain Kangaroo' really, an overly intrusive narrative voice, and an inability to keep a large cast of characters and acronyms distinguishable. I read until the show got on the air, because I wanted to know how that actually happened; then I bailed.
February
12. The White Rose, Glen Cook. In tiny increments at work. Like, a paragraph at a time since December. I wanted to know how the plot came out, but really the latter two were so much less good than The Black Company that I think I am done with Glen Cook now.
not-13. My Miserable Lonely Lesbian Pregnancy, Andrea Askowitz. ... it's because she's making herself miserable. Seriously. Dude, the stereotype about lesbians is that we think about our emotions too much. Maybe consider that? Anyway, Anne Lamott this ain't. There is this specific kind of self-deprecating lesbian humor that causes me to wonder whether the person making it actually likes a) herself and b) women, and I have almost no tolerance for that in recent years. Query To Self: I didn't think I bounced off books this often. Apparently I do?
13. The Attack of the Two-Inch Teacher, Bruce Coville. When I am in a library, I have a habit of scanning the children's shelves to see what Coville they have in and then reading anything I haven't right there on the spot. They're so short I don't want to haul them home, and they generally take about fifteen minutes to read. Nothing beats Coville's warm, friendly, endlessly welcoming worlds for a relaxing break (unless the library has an uncommon book by Daniel Pinkwater). When I have children, I intend to buy his stuff in bulk. (ETA: I pretty much did buy his stuff in bulk at Boskone. There is something about buying stuff when you can hand money to the author...)
14. The Sinner, Madeline Hunter. Not the weakest of Hunter I've read, but by far the weakest of the only series of hers that had not previously made me want to throw anything at the wall. Readable, but so aggravating on gender and plot levels. Rrgh. I may be done with Hunter; time to find another writer to fill the same niche. (Nalini Singh?)
15. The Sun King: Louis XIV at Versailles, Nancy Mitford. My last unread Mitford bio. Better than the Voltaire, not as good as the Frederick, about on par with the Pompadour. Somewhat more structurally tangled than I might have liked and suffers from the usual Mitford-bio problem that if you do not know the genealogy/geography/sequence of battles/importance of family already this is not where you are going to get an explanation; but as always brings the people to life, collects truly impressive quantities of data and anecdote, and is brilliantly illustrated. I only wish there were more.
16. The Pride of Chanur, C.J. Cherryh. Delightful space opera romp like the classic first-contact novel turned inside out; I thought this was very clever because the alien POV gives one all the info necessary on the aliens, but one always knows what the human must be thinking, even though the aliens don't. Reminded me a lot of various Gundam series for some reason.
17. The Sharing Knife: Horizon, Lois McMaster Bujold. This feels to me like the last of these, which is good because I have essentially been reading them out of inertia. There is just not the emotional depth or the wit here of Bujold's best work, and Dag inches perilously close to Mary Sue-dom sometimes. Still, some fun things with the setting, and watching her do the logistics of large groups of people is an education in clarity of writing. If there are more, I would read one more, but that's really where my limit lies.
18. Ragamuffin, Tobias Buckell.50books_poc #6. Definitely better than the first, by a measurable margin: tighter plotting, wider scope, more shades of gray, fewer things in the plot that have been done before. Still not remotely emotionally involving, although I find the spaceship names splendid. Female protag but I have a couple few issues about women here. Will probably read the next-- I think I am doing Buckell on a one-book-arguing-for-the-next basis.
March
19. Vegan Lunchbox, Jennifer McCann. Book version of a very good food blog I follow. Unfortunately, the book lacks many of the virtues of the blog, including the clear easy page layout and the lovely color photography. This certainly helps one to think about menus, about balancing flavors, and about food prep as an indissoluble part of health, but honestly the book veers too far into being an advertisement for itself. Not a keeper cookbook. Go for the web version.
20. Exiles of the Stars, Andre Norton (in the reprint omnibus Moonsinger). I'd read Moon of Three Rings as a child, and I read Flight in Yiktor as an adolescent (our library copy had a really frustrating two pages missing and I have been trying to track down a different copy since), but somehow I had missed this middle book. I have to say, if I'd been imagining a book between the two others I would not have imagined Evil Ancient Egyptian Forerunner Treasure Hunt Express. I mean, this is a perfectly fine book, I just find aspects of it rather inexplicable. Does not go in my mental list of top-tier Norton but does have some pretty and some creepy moments.
21. The Court of the Stone Children, Eleanor Cameron. Oh my. The Mushroom Planet books did nothing to lead me to expect this lovely sunny time-slip domestic fantasy, which reminds me of nothing so much as Elizabeth Marie Pope's The Sherwood Ring, which is high praise indeed. Somewhat marred by the sexism of the period, which the author clearly does not agree with but which reads as a far uglier note now than I suspect it did originally; I got outright angry when I suspect I was intended to be annoyed. Highly recommended, especially if you have ever wanted to work in art history or preservation or at a museum.
22. Into the Land of the Unicorns, Bruce Coville. Wow,kate_nepveu was right when she called this one twee. Coville seems uneasy with a female protagonist and the worldbuilding is sadly conventional. Not remotely his best work. Still, not a total waste of fifteen minutes.
23. Labor of Love: The Story of One Man's Extraordinary Pregnancy, Thomas Beatie. I remember reading the initial article in the Advocate in which Beatie, a transman, disclosed his pregnancy, and thinking that I wished him and his family well. I am not the only person who did, but I seem to have been in a significant minority. In particular, I am ashamed and saddened at the behavior of the gay/lesbian and trans advocacy organizations surrounding this; the groups such as GLAAD seem to have decided that Beatie and his wife had turned into a straight couple and therefore were no longer in need of protection, and the trans groups saw Beatie's pregnancy as a forfeiture of his male gender identity, which-- have none of them read any fucking theory since the eighties? Then, of course, there were serious hoops to be jumped concerning medical care-- at one point a nurse ordered an ultrasound everyone involved already knew to be unnecessary because she had heard somewhere that maybe somebody years ago might have done a study that suggested that testosterone use caused fetal problems in rats (of course Beatie had stopped using testosterone well before the pregnancy)-- and all sorts of legal questions, and Fox fucking News... At any rate, in this memoir Beatie and a co-writer (Beatie is, um, quite evidently not a writer) detail a life of stubbornness, intelligence, and love in the face of abusive and horrific circumstances, leading to a clearly ridiculously good marriage, a stable business, an unshakable self-knowledge and what is clearly going to be besotted fatherhood of his new daughter. I continue to wish him and his family all the best.
24. The Fifth Elephant, Terry Pratchett. A Discworld book I was not in the mood for when it came out. Not Pratchett's best, but not as bad as I thought it was when I initially bounced off it. This is a Vimes/Watch/Ankh-Morpork politics book; I had some problems with the characterizations of both Carrot and Sergeant Colon in it, as both wound up behaving in ways that seem to me inconsistent with earlier and with later portrayals. It feels, as I also suspected at the time, like Pratchett making a run-up towards less comedy-centered novels, and he's gotten much better at those since.
25. Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement, Kathryn Joyce. This deserves its own entry. In the meantime, a brief summary: this not perfect but damn fine work is the first book to look at the particular flavor of right-wing Christian fundamentalism known as the Quiverfull movement, who are consciously waging opposition to feminism (on very basic levels) and liberalism in general through memetic war and attempting to outbreed the other side. I find these people very frightening; after all, they quite literally want me dead.
26. Westmark, Lloyd Alexander. Formrissa's book group. Ruritanian YA with some interesting aspects that unfortunately felt rather condensed and suffered the probably-me-specific problem of running very hard into my knowledge of eighteenth-century fiction in general and Voltaire in specific and being close enough to those to evoke them while not actually being quite that. I am looking forward to the second of the trilogy as the groundwork has been laid for a masterpiece if Alexander can do it, and everyone assures me he can.
27. A Homemade Life: Stories and Recipes from My Kitchen Table, Molly Wizenberg. Enjoyable food memoir reminds me rather of early Ruth Reichl, which is high praise. Wizenberg runs a very good food blog (Orangette) and her recipes tend to instantly jump to quite high on my want-to-try list. This book is structured oddly (I do not understand the ordering of chapters) and may be a bit dessert-heavy in terms of recipes, but is an enjoyable and touching read about her father's life and death, her blog and how it led to her marriage, and above all the love of food. Nothing terribly original, but I am a bit of a sucker for this genre.
28. The Yggyssey, Daniel Pinkwater. This sequel to The Neddiad is not as good as its predecessor, but then The Neddiad is far and away the best book Pinkwater has written; The Yggyssey lacks the delirious-love-song-to-Los-Angeles quality that I loved so much in the first. Which is not to say it's a bad book. It's not. It's just far more traditional Pinkwater, which people who like that kind of thing will like. I tend to recommend The Neddiad even to people who hate Pinkwater; not this one. Hopefully the third will stay in L.A., which it looks like it ought. Anyway, this has interdimensional travel, ghost-hunting, inner-city free-climbing, witches, cat people, and a total lack of resemblance to the Odyssey.
29. The First Part Last, Angela Johnson.50books_poc #9. Lyrical and sweet YA about Bobby, a sixteen-year-old struggling with new and single fatherhood. Many things about this book are beautiful and beautifully done: the language, the characters, the emotions. I loved that Bobby's mother is the tough-love one and his father is the softie; I loved that every character, no matter how minor, was complex and three-dimensional. I loved that the book in no way glosses over the work of having a baby. I did not love the plot, what there was of it. It felt to me as though several major events were a bit contrived, especially things involving Nia, the baby's mother. But this was strong and touching enough that I will be looking for more by this author.
30. The Folklore of Discworld, Terry Pratchett and Jacqueline Simpson. Why yes, it is yet another Discworld spinoff which I have read in two or three-page increments at work when there was nothing going on. This book had a piece of information I hadn't known involving possible explanations of the hunting of the wren, so I suppose it was worthwhile. All else is at an elementary level.
31. Forerunner Foray, Andre Norton. There is a remote possibility that I read this at some time as a child, but I think it far more likely that I read the other two Forerunner books and missed this one. It is a completely respectable one of these, though I would like to reread the second at some point as I have fond memories of it. This one was not best-tier Norton but enjoyable.
32. Stars in my Pocket like Grains of Sand, Samuel R. Delany,50books_poc #10. Oh. Well. My. The thing is, I read Empire Star, right, years ago, and I bounced off The Fall of the Towers and all the Neveryon stuff, and Babel-17 was fun except that at the time I was a linguistics major and, just, oh dear, and Nova was fun, and unlike ninety percent of everybody did actually try to read Hogg and made it almost a quarter through before sighing and concluding that this was not going to be interesting to persons whose kink it wasn't, and oh so Not My Kink. And I have a signed copy of The Motion of Light in Water and portions of that memorized, and I have seen multiple pictures of Mr. Delany naked (not just the famous one), and I have sat across a cafeteria lunch table with him and had him tell a whole group of students, gently, some things about his complicated relationship with science fiction. I know him as well as one knows a writer one knows by knowing the writer, not the person (well, there are exceptions; I mean as well as one knows a writer one is not internally on some kind of first-name basis with; I mean not as well as I know Jack Lewis, for example). I had somehow missed this novel. I think I got the title mixed up with 'Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones', which, I hold, is understandable. I had not known I had not read his greatest novel. This is one of the greatest novels I have ever read. This is the sort of book that renews my faith in both science fiction and the novel. This is a book during which I found myself almost continuously laughing, for no reason except pure and utter delight. This goes on that tiny mental shelf with Perelandra and Engine Summer and Always Coming Home and Burning Your Boats and Wuthering Heights and The Worm Ouroboros and Moonwise and The Female Man. I anticipate rereading it, over the years, with a great and desperate pleasure.
33. Turn Coat, Jim Butcher. The latest of the Dresden Files books is neither my favorite (White Knight remains that) nor my least favorite to date. If you like this sort of thing, you probably already know that this is the sort of thing you like.
34. The Iron Hunt, Marjorie Liu,50books_poc #11. I had pretty much given up on Marjorie Liu, because I loved Tiger Eye but her later stuff was moving farther and farther away from what I liked in that book and into a great deal of angst and complication and spy-stuff of a sort I do not find interesting. I mean for example I very much like Amiri but I could not finish the book about him. Just couldn't. But I saw this one, and was like, well, maybe something that is not Dirk and Steele continuity will not have the problems I have been having there. I am glad I did, because this was solid and really damn enjoyable. I am trying to think of another urban-fantasy-genre-type book where the protagonist has such a steady, interesting, equal, partner-y relationship. He knows all her paranormal stuff! He deals! He is her support system and she is his! I couldn't believe it. Traditionally in this genre most heterosexual relationships make me attempt to mentally block them out. Also fun worldbuilding, pretty demons, awesome line of descent of women of power. I will pick up the next of these.
April
35. The Illyria Adventure, Lloyd Alexander. First of the Vesper Holly books, of which I had heard. Swashbuckly pseudo-archaeology with bandits, revolutionary movement, and indomitable red-headed heroine. Quite clearly Not My Thing. I don't know what it is about Lloyd Alexander I dislike, but it seems to be pretty nearly constant.
36. Wintergirls, Laurie Halse Anderson. Viabuymeaclue. Beautifully written novel which manages to escape the teen-problem genre. I initially thought the ending was too pat and speeded up, but then concluded that the pacing one expects in the end is based on whether one believes this to be a realist or a magic-realist novel, a question on which I am undecided but leaning towards magical-realist. Really magnificently done.
37. Escape from Hell, Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. The twenty-five-years later sequel to Inferno is more of the same, instead of being a Purgatorio. I would have far preferred a Purgatorio. That would have been awesome. However, it is a perfectly reasonable more-of-the-same, only somewhat inferior to the original, and also, clearly, not as original. Nor as funny. Anyway, it was readable, though I wish they'd left out Aimee Semple McPherson.
38. Naamah's Kiss, Jacqueline Carey. ARC via job. First book of the third trilogy. Unlike other Jacqueline Carey, this one is not about S&M. Still a lot of sex, of course. Also, there's a time jump between trilogies, so this is more alt-1400s than alt-1200s. I think she should keep moving forward; her aesthetic would make for highly entertaining steampunk. As usual, I am vaguely uncomfortable with the ways that her non-protagonist-producing cultures are represented, and specifically in this case feel that the entire latter quarter of the book has What These People Need Is A White Girl syndrome and that the milieu is an abstraction of a set of classically annoying Western abstractions. Also as usual, her women have sexual agency, her men have sexual vulnerability, and her tracing of the specific kinds of trouble you can have in poly relationships in which power, property, and inheritance are factors is wonderful. So there we are. I mean, in some senses I would like to see Carey stretch herself a bit, but when she tried that it was such a catastrophic failure that I found the books absolutely unreadable. Apparently she has a book not set in the Kushiel universe coming out soon too. We'll see? Basically, if you like Jacqueline Carey you will like this. If not, not.
39. Beka Cooper: Bloodhound, Tamora Pierce. I can't tell if this is a notch less good than the previous, or if it is only that it is missing the element of surprise, as the previous was the book I have enjoyed the most out of Tamora Pierce since I was first picking up the Alanna books at twelve years old and I can tell you I wasn't expecting it. At any rate, this continues to be a somewhat-grittier-than-usual-Pierce police procedural written in an entertaining made-up street-cant and with a positive delight in skewering, ignoring, or simply running over cliches about how teenage girl protagonists are supposed to be in this sort of thing. (I am never going to get over how at the start of the first book Beka had already had sex, decided it was okay, and moved to concentrating on her job. In this one, she has sex with someone she knows perfectly well she is not going to stay with forever or even very long, and has a wonderful time.) Recommended.
40. Dark Angel, L.J. Smith. Picked up a Night World anthology in a bookstore, realized I hadn't read this one, sat down with it. Tangentially, it's kind of amazing how L.J. Smith now looks like a prescient of teen fiction, writing fifteen years before her particular zeitgeist. Except she's still better than ninety percent of the current stuff, which is saying something given that on occasion 'good' is not the word I would use to describe her work-- as opposed to 'always readable'. Anyway, this one is readable but totally not as cracktastically awesome as I would have liked. Girl falls in stream in winter, near-death experience, returns to life with accompanying guardian angel who teaches her to be socially awesome, except he also starts teaching her to be not very nice at all, and eventually to start putting curses on her enemies, enter hereditary witchcraft, etc. etc.. This being L.J. Smith, I think we all know there are going to be soulmates, witch princesses, and random cameo vampires; maybe I would like this better if I hadn't read as much of her other stuff. Recommended for completists. Which I am.
41. Fledgling, Octavia Butler,50books_poc #12. I put off reading this when it first came out because I was annoyed with aspects of Parable of the Talents, and also because most Butler is so acutely painful that one every couple of years is about right. And then she died, and I put it off longer, until I could cope with that. It's kind of odd after that to find that the book isn't painful at all. I wouldn't even call it depressing. It's a fascinating book because it feels on the surface as though it should be part of the current paranormal romance/fantasy zeitgeist (though it somewhat predated that), but is instead a genuinely insightful sfnal extrapolation using all the same tropes. Anyway, this has a lot of Butler's usual themes-- the difference between humans and nonhumans, biological interdependence between humans and nonhumans, biology as everybody's destiny, personal relationships as in some ways the window-dressing people put over said biological destinies, family as the only strength and legacy but also as a possibly inescapable trap, metaphors about racial situations literalized to the point of no longer being metaphors-- okay, when I put it like that, I can't figure out why she wasn't writing vampire novels for years, it seems an absolutely perfect encoding of her philosophical dialectic. People who have problems with sexual depictions of beings who look like children might have some issues with this book, but I personally was not bothered because what we see of the being involved makes it unquestionably obvious that she is of an age and capacity for consent. I liked a lot of the people in this a lot more than I like the people in most of Butler, but I also found it less emotionally compelling than a lot of her other things. Not that that is necessarily a problem. Highly recommended.
May
42. Fall of Light, Nina Kiriki Hoffmann. O holy good god no! Okay, so I quite liked A Fistful of Sky, and this is the direct sequel, and just-- just-- there is not one thing I liked about this book, except the image on the cover, which is only tangentially related. Even the title doesn't make much sense. It is badly proofread, the characters behave in ways that no people ever ever would including Romance Novel people, everyone seems to take the protagonist having magic with aplomb even though they are living in a world in which magic is supposed to be impossible, there are trailing plot threads every damn which way, and, and this is a major, major and, there are HUGE MAJOR HUGE AWFUL issues with sexual consent absolutely all over because of the main character's power to influence other people's minds and the text really does not seem to me to have thought this over on more than an extremely tangential level. (It is not acceptable moral behavior to date-rape a date-rapist, frex. And anything people do under magical hypnosis has not been consented to, how difficult is that to grasp? Sheesh.) It doesn't end, it stops; none of the major issues or problems resolve; the only character I liked in the entire thing is quite evidently meant to be taken as an insufferable bitch. This is a fucking train wreck of a book, and Hoffmann can do better. I cannot understand how this novel was released into the wild in this state. Go reread A Fistful of Sky instead.
43. Daughters of Darkness, L.J. Smith. Upon reading Mely's Night World roundup post, I realized I hadn't read this one either. In fact I think I missed most of the Night World books, which is the problem with an unnumbered series of stand-alones. Anyway, this is fun and awesome and includes non-supernatural people being just as asskicking as supernatural people, a heroine with a brain, and a hero who has actually read a couple of books at some point. Top-tier L.J. Smith.
44. Dead and Gone, Charlaine Harris. This book was doing okay until the plot started resolving, at which point I very strongly considered throwing it very hard at the wall, and would have if it hadn't been a store copy. *sigh* Nonononono. Don't know if I can read these anymore, because that? was Homophobic Bullshit, and I just don't want that in my beach reading. Also the end of the book disintegrated into a mass of things happening suddenly without setup or resolution, but by that point I didn't care.
45. Spellbinder. Yet Another L.J. Smith. Good fun, middle-tier.
46. The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks, E. Lockhart. Hmmm. I get what this book was trying to do, but I'm not sure it actually achieved it. Frankie Landau-Banks is at a prep school where a lot of people have more money than sense, and finds out that her boyfriend is in a secret society of the good-ol'-boy's-club sort. Her solution to being left out and disregarded is rather Machiavellian. My problem with this book was that it felt rather thin in some ways: it's true that Frankie sees things primarily in terms of power, systems, and gaming the systems, but I'm not sure the book acknowledges that there are other ways to see things. Nobody in this seems to have real friends. I went to a prep school where a lot of people had more money than sense, and there was a defined and inflexible power structure. The way to deal with it was to totally ignore it, and be yourself as hard as possible in the knowledge that the world changes after high school. It's fair given her family background that Frankie wouldn't know the world changes, but. Also there are no cross-gender interactions, let alone friendships, that are not taken as romantic; they can't just hang out with people. I went to a single-sex school, so I don't know, but is it really like that? And everyone seems to think the things Frankie does are a lot worse than I think they are, but I hang out with MIT people. So. Anyway, this is a fun and interesting little book, thought-provoking though flawed.
47-48. The Chosen and Soulmate, L.J. Smith. These keep on being these, all right. (I really do seem to have mostly stumbled across the good Smith when I was younger; these just aren't as good as, say, Forbidden Game.)
49. Brother, I'm Dying, Edwidge Danticat.50books_poc #13. This memoir of the deaths of Danticat's father and brother (and of her own pregnancy at about the same time) is very well-written on a sentence and scene level but failed to cohere around itself; she was very clearly trying to thematically link and contrast the lives of her family with each other and it didn't work for me at all. As a result, it left me emotionally uninvolved. However, I'm not sorry I read it, because it really does have some fine work in it. I may try some of her fiction, to see if not having to abide by the restraints of what actually happened assists her ability to create emotional effect.
50. Beloved, Toni Morrison.50books_poc #14. Actually this is a reread, technically, but I am not thinking of it as one because I read it for class in high school. This was a horrible idea which has prevented me from reading any other Morrison since. I do not think it is a book for high school students, or at any rate not with our teacher, which is saying something because he was brilliant and passionate and made me love Madame Bovary which took some doing, and everyone in my class hated and was confused by Beloved. None more than me. I literally, genuinely, and thoroughly could not parse the book as being written in English. People would talk about things that happened in the book, and I could not figure out where they got them, because I could not distinguish either characters or a plot. I could not track a sentence of it from one end to the other. I was reading Derrida and Eco that year on my own lookout; it was not the denseness of the prose was the problem. The problem was that in high school half the content of the book bounced off me for lack of my having any experiential context to make sense of it and the other half bounced off because it was so inextricably painful that my brain refused to allow it entry so thoroughly I couldn't even recognize it as painful. Or at any rate this is the conclusion I come to now, looking back on the first read from the end of the second read of this strange, wrenching, deeply and magnificently brilliant novel. This is about how the past never goes away, because it isn't even past. This is about haunting, and being haunted; and about work; and how impossible it can be to live and how hard it can be to die. And the frame of mind it takes to kill something to keep anyone else from killing it: a frame of mind that is I am sure intimately familiar to many, certainly to me, but usually extended only towards one's own works and one's own self, upon hitting bottom: not towards other people, but part of the horror of this book is that that is apparently not such a large step under some circumstances. And this is about Ohio, where the sky does indeed look like that. And, more than anything else, this is a book set where hell and earth are the same place. It is a spectacular achievement. Quite honestly, I still hate it; only now cordially, and with my love. It does what masterpieces are meant to do: it changes the reader.
51. Santa Olivia, Jacqueline Carey. ... in which Carey stretches herself, yay! This is a non-Kushiel-universe book, and it is one of the two best things she's ever written (it has some competition from portions of Kushiel's Avatar). In a legally nonexistent enclave between a warring U.S. and Mexico, an on-the-lam genetically-engineered super-soldier fathers a daughter, and this is the book about her growing up. I like the worldbuilding, the atmosphere, the people, the plotting; I like that ninety percent of the cast are people of color who have agency and kick ass. I thought the end was a little anticlimactic and rushed, but in general this made me very happy and I would like a sequel. It is always good to see a writer not sticking to what they already know they can do.
52. Salt and Silver, Anna Katherine. *waves attrifles* Above-average paranormal romance set in a remarkably grim world for one of these. Takes the unusual tack of having many of the characters not be nice people at all even a little bit, which works very well. Also the protagonist has seen and enjoyed Cemetery Man, which means I am morally obligated to love her. I would love to see this author try something in a less restrictive genre, as I did rather feel that I knew a good deal of what to expect from the book in advance solely because of its genre, but this is a fine first novel and a worthy read.
53. Time and Mr. Bass, Eleanor Cameron. I am now sincerely wondering why it is The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet that has been accorded classic status when the other things I have read by Cameron, including this direct Mushroom Planet sequel, are much, much better. This one reads kind of like a cross of the original with The Dark is Rising books. No, really. If you want to read about spore people mourning the death of King Arthur in a genuinely moving way, this is your novel.
54. A Spell is Cast, Eleanor Cameron. Perfectly reasonably YA I would have liked better if it had decided to really be either Gothic or fantasy instead of hovering nervously about the edges of both. Suffered for me due to cognitive dissonance caused by it being the only other thing I've ever read that was illustrated by the people who did Elizabeth Enright's Gone-Away Lake books, which meant I was always thinking about those and comparing them to this and that is not a fair thing to do to just about any book ever.
55. Savvy, Ingrid Law. Down-home-y YA about a girl in a family where they all get magical powers of exceedingly random sorts on their thirteenth birthdays. Kind of what would happen if you put A Fistful of Sky in a blender with Wilanne Schneider Belden's Frankie!, not that anyone but me seems ever to have read the latter. This-- I can see why it got a Norton nom and it deserved one, but it just never quite came alive for me. No sense of real darkness.
June
56. Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-63, Taylor Branch. This is the first book of Branch's trilogy about the Civil Rights Movement, the kind of books about which people always use the word 'monumental' because there is nothing else that can adequately express the sheer length and weight of it all. It is clearly popular history; it is clearly popular history written by a white man and with a white audience in mind. I would have liked more footnotes, but the endnotes are there. He did the research, and the facts seem solid. For fact, anecdote, tracking of general trends, and simple reminder of how different things were; for identification of factions, descriptions of people who may have been overlooked in other sources, and decided attempts not to canonize or demonize those history has passed verdicts on; in short, for historiography, this is a very fine book. If you are looking for biographies, for primary sources, for people involved in their own words, or for a writer who is not profoundly in love with Kennedy (though to be fair he knows and is trying to work against it), this is not your book. I will probably read the other two, as I have a far less clear grip on the sequence of events in those years than I would like.
57. The Element of Lavishness: Letters of Sylvia Townsend Warner and William Maxwell, 1938-1978. I think Sylvia Townsend Warner may write the most truly enjoyable letters I have ever met. It is the sort of thing where you want to quote a bit, to prove the point, or read a bit aloud to someone in the room, and you have to stop because you would read the whole book. She writes the only volumes of letters I would consider reading aloud for pleasure. Of course she claims she is not a patch on Mme. de Sevigny, and has told me strictly that after I am fifty I may read the journals of Goncourt. And William Maxwell is a fine conversational companion. It is a pleasure to read writers working together, the dip and swerve of things left unsaid, the undercurrent of desperate joy.
Graphic Works 2009
January
1. Aria v.4, Kozue Amano. Delightful as always.
2. Maka-Maka v.1, Kishi Torajiro. d'awwwww cutest hottest sweetest lesbian porn ever. ♥ kawcrow for the rec as I would never have found this on my own.
3. Maka-Maka v.2, Kishi Torajiro. This literally made me cry from happy. I keep thinking I must be hallucinating, because people don't put yuri like this out in English book editions with actual bindings and in color and things. Time to send Media Blasters cookies yet again.
4. Silver Diamond v.3, Shiho Sugiura. Continues fun.
5. Her Majesty's Dog v.11, Mick Takeuchi. Reasonable conclusion to a series I mostly like probably better than it deserves. I think I have gone off Takeuchi, though I may skim her next in the store to see if she is improving.
6. Je ne verrai pas Okinawa, Aurélia Aurita.50books_poc #1. I will now take thirty seconds to gloat about successfully reading this in French without either a dictionary or any trouble. ... Thank you. That said, my reaction to this is complex and tangled and I am not actually sure whether the book is any good and there could be a thirty-page deconstruction of the various forms of intersecting privilege in this work, which I do not feel qualified to write and am not sure Aurita thought about at all; but Aurita's art continues charming. (Why in hell do young female artists keep seeming to fall for Frédéric Boilet so?)
7. Wild Adaptor v.6, Kazuya Minekura. So much love.
8-9. Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle, v.18-19, CLAMP. I keep losing track of when new volumes of this come out, and I really prefer the things xxxholic has been doing over the past while. But still quite good and, as always, Fai.
10. Berserk v.1, Kentaro Miura. Has definitely gotten me to want to read the next volume. It's not that it does anything different, it's just that it does it so well, and has such obvious potential.
11. Saiyuki Reload v.8, Kazuya Minekura. Saiyuki: consistently one of the reasons I continue reading manga since c. 2002.
12. The Arrival, Shaun Tan.50books_poc #3. Just as good as everyone says it is, which is saying something. The inside cover! The paper bird! The woman with the book! Sunlight on the hilltop! I cried.
13. Oishinbo A La Carte: Japanese Cuisine v.1, Tetsu Kariya and Akira Hanasaki. Attempt by Viz to excerpt a hundred-volume-plus food manga that has been running since 1983 into a series of collections centered around aspects of Japanese food culture that may be intelligible/interesting to Westerners. I think they are probably doing about as well as anybody could at this endeavor, but I am not sure it's what I'd have tried to do; it has the effect of removing all plot and character development. If there was any. The focus on food here makes the cast of Tampopo look like dilettantes.
14. Tales of Outer Suburbia, Shaun Tan.50books_poc #5. Much more conventional childrens' book, brilliant on a technical level. A collection of small fables of the weird. Did not really catch me.
February
15-16. Samurai Deeper Kyo v.31-32, Akimine Kamijyo. HOTARU. Still my boy. Akira is being fairly awesome, too, but man, has Kamijyo never heard of pacing? Shounen fight into next fight into next fight GO all the time. Also, this entire series becomes somehow even more entertaining if one reflects that the Mibu are basically elves conceptually, and then one can sit there going wait that is a pimp-hat banjo-player everyone's-daddy crazy elf what.
17. 20th Century Boys v.1, Naoki Urasawa. Yay not reading in scanlation. Yay being able to hold the volume. Yay pro translation. Boo unnecessarily spoilery back cover and cast page. Boo translated sound effects-- they are too distracting when they cover as much of the page as they do here. Still the Best Manga Ever Written, and I mean that absolutely literally. I remain utterly in awe of Urasawa's pacing. Also, and as always, Kanna.
March
18-19. Aya and Aya of Yop City, Marguerite Abouet and Clement Oubrerie.50books_poc #7-8. Interesting little graphic novels about a group of teenage girls, and their relatives and larger circle of associates, in the capital of Cote d'Ivoire in the late 1970s. The organic storytelling is very impressive at introducing and making a large cast distinct and real as people in a very short amount of time. These are very much domestic books, rhythms-of-daily-life books, with the touch of drama that all teenage girls acquire along the way; humorous, expansive, lovingly rendered. I didn't feel like these did very much or delved very deep, but what they did they did well and enjoyably. Also contained what looks like an extremely good recipe for peanut sauce, which I am looking forward to attempting.
20. Disappearance Diary, Hideo Azuma. The author, a well-known and well-respected manga artist (most famous for inventing lolicon, which was a lot less terrifying and tasteless originally), chronicles the 'missing' periods of his life: two spells of homelessness, during which he simply wandered away from his house, work, and family and lived in various woods (during the second one he got employment as a gas fitter under an assumed name), and one stretch in an alcoholism ward. Azuma's cute and cartoony drawings are deliberately at war with his subject; the beginning of the book states outright that "This book has a positive outlook on life and absolutely no realism will be allowed." He focuses on the logistical and practical realities of survival in his situation, the various places to swipe food and find booze money, the social structure of the ward, the fear of freezing to death in the winter, the way everything becomes less frightening when it is familiar. He is not introspective, but flashback sequences to his life as a manga artist make it clear why he might need to escape. I would have liked to know more about his wife, whose reasons for staying with him are never discussed; I would certainly have liked to know more about things like how he managed to re-establish his career after dropping everything and running not once but twice. But that's not what this book is about, and for what it is about, it's very good.
21. Afterschool Nightmare v.10, Setona Mizushiro. This is one of those series where I was on eggshells the whole way through: will it make me hate it? No, it did not. I think the ending would have done better to have left more unexplained; to close in darkness, like a dream. But what this did it did very well, and I look forward to tearing it to little, little analytical shreds in the post-Utena chapter of watashtachi-no-Manga-Book.
22. Sayonara Zetsubou-sensei v.1, Kohji Kumeta. Wow, the anime is one of the most faithful adaptations of all time. It's pretty much panel-by-panel. Also, all the lovely freeze-frames that go by too fast for you to read the text turn out to be the chapter splash pages, so you can read the text. So I am happy. God only knows what one would think of this if one hadn't seen the anime.
23. Kaze Hikaru v.4, Taeko Watanabe. Borrowing series fromlignota. I have to be in a really odd mood to read these because of knowing the historical ouchiness that is Looming Just Ahead. But man, the Shinsengumi are so awesome. Also I really like contrasting this with Peacemaker Kurogane, as they are pretty much shounen and shoujo versions of the same story: kid who joins Shinsengumi for Personal Reasons, is There During History. Unsurprisingly, I like the shoujo better. This is my personal favorite Okita Souji, and (amazingly enough) is fighting with Rurouni Kenshin for my favorite Saito Hajime. I had thought Kenshin pretty definitive in that direction, but this one is brilliant. On the other hand, I liked the reveal of the haiku-authorship better in Peacemaker, and there are a whole bunch of the upper leadership I liked better in, of all things, Gintama, even though I have seen them in like two volumes of that. Also Sei herself is a tad weepy. But this is in many ways awesome; I love the dealing with the logistics of menstruation and the way that she blocks the issues of being a pretty girl in a group of men by hiding under the issues of being a pretty boy in a group of men.
24. Berserk v.2, Kentaro Miura. Man, Miura can draw demons. I vaguely wonder if he can draw anything else, but I am not actually convinced that existentially it is ever going to matter. The elf's body language actually being androgynous is a nice little feat. It is nice to have this as after all Hellsing is ending so there was going to be a lack of gratuitous testosterone in my reading life. Not that this is Hellsing, even though it shares the characteristic of that series that everyone evil is technically a liquid.
25-26. Pluto v.1-2, Naoki Urasawa. ZOMG awesome. I seriously want to cuddle this version of Astro Boy. Also I like the bit where you can extrapolate an entire issue of Black Jack from one panel showing only his feet. Also worldbuilding! I am very happy with this and looking forward to more.
27-30. Kaze Hikaru v.5-8, Taeko Watanabe. This is a very good series. I also really like the bits at the end where the mangaka is like, here is where I did my research, and here is how impossible some of it was, and here is where Imade my assistants redraw redrew things to make them more accurate, and here is where I threw my hands up in despair. It is one of the best series of extras I have seen.
31. Samurai Deeper Kyo v.33, Akimine Kamijyo. Either I was in totally the wrong mood for this and should have waited, or this was a volume in which there was a lot of milling about and nothing much happened. Or both.
April
32. Fairy Tail v.5, Hiro Mashima. I read this in bookstores when I'm tired, but I think it has outworn my patience.
33-35. Ge Ge Ge no Kitaro v.1-3, Shigeru Mizuki. Impossible-to-find Kodansha bilingual edition FTW! That said, I think I prefer the anime; the stories here don't have quite enough room to breathe. Also, I do not like the translation at all. But the art, as always, is spectacular.
36. Samurai Deeper Kyo v.34, Akimine Kamijyo. Better. There are too many characters in this series, and I will be the first to admit it has serious problemssuch as not enough Sanada Yukimura with pacing, plotting, etc., not to mention Not The World's Best Women, but there are things one buys into, y'know? Somewhere in all this there is something that resonates. Also, Hotaru.
37. A Drifting Life, Yoshihiro Tatsumi. This is the second realistic/cartoony slice-of-life memoir about the earlier days of the manga industry I've read this year, and it's really kind of amazing how much it is the inverse of Disappearance Diary. Both works are by and about men who founded genuinely new and important genres of manga (in Tatsumi's case, gekiga, which was one of the first terms used to distinguish manga genuinely intended for adult audiences for reasons other than sexual content), who overwork to a ludicrous degree, who feel artistically stifled by the constraints of the publishing industry, who have to navigate an inbred circle of artists and editors many of whom are outright crazy. But where Hideo Azuma turns to drinking and homelessness, Tatsumi discovers his anger and his love, realizes that this life makes him happy. Neither man would be able to stop being a mangaka, no matter how hard they tried, but for Tatsumi this is his saving grace as well as his curse. I don't know how this book would be if you don't know a fair bit about the early days of manga; it is swamped with names, dates, titles, publishing houses, and particularly the shadow of Osamu Tezuka (I mean this literally-- there is one panel that is ridiculously awesome if, as anyone who lives with Thrud can, you are able to identify Tezuka by the outline of his shadow alone). I don't get half of the references and I know it, but enough to get by. If you're at the level of manga geekiness to be confused at seeing Shotaro Ishimori wander by before he became Shotaro Ishinomori because you thought that happened earlier, you should be fine. I seriously do not know if people who don't have this sort of geekiness would like or even be able to follow this book, which means that it confuses me that it was put out by a non-manga publisher, adapted by Adrian Tomine, and is selling like the dickens.
May
38. 20th Century Boys v.2, Naoki Urasawa. Yay more 20th Century Boys! I want this all to come out, like, immediately. If not sooner. This one is really in some ways an intermediate volume of setup, but I still love it profoundly.
39-40. Berserk, v.3-4, Kentaro Miura. In which Berserk stops being 'that manga that does that one genre with the testosterone really well' and starts being ZOMG AWESOME. Seriously, this is making me INCOHERENTLY HAPPY GRIFFITH GRIFFITH GRIFFITH OMG. If I started trying to list the things this is doing really, really well, I would go on for hours. The way that Miura is using sexual violence is brilliant, and I can't believe I just wrote that sentence, but it is, because it supercharges and complicates the relationship between Griffith and Guts from the first: if they could simply be lovers, everything might be all right, but as it is they are going to be something far stranger, and destroy each other. And a SHONEN WRITER NOTICED AND DID THAT OMG. This manga seriously pushes my gore tolerance (and probably anybody's)(except of course Thrud's-- she is reading this too and does not think the demons have yet achieved vile, which is just as well as I like being able to find the volumes in the bookcase and not under her pillow), and is the one thing I read that is definitively gorier than Hellsing-- and it is gorier than Hellsing by a lot-- but I do not care, it is totally worth it. It is epic and darkly magnificent and clearly only going to get better, because it has latched on to some kind of high fantasy archetype and is just being the best of that that can be possible. I can also already tell that these characters will break my heart, and I don't care about that either. So good. So damn good.
41-42. Fullmetal Alchemist, v.1-2, Hiromu Arakawa. Yes, yes, I know. But the anime was triggery such that I couldn't finish it, and I saw it first, so I was rather reluctant about the manga. Which is a shame because it is better than the anime-- better pacing, better expression work, better plotting. It is for example even more obvious how ridiculously awesome Hawkeye is, and the way that the alchemists have an uneasy relationship with ethics and the military and the conflicts between those is much clearer right from the start. Also I like the art very much; the anime is more conventionally pretty but I find this better-looking. Oh, and I have spent however many years wondering why the slash fandom for this series fixated on Ed and Roy. Well, I still wouldn't go there myself, but I no longer think that this is one of those totally insane fandom things, as I can see it if I squint, which is a major change from the anime. Still trying to decide whether I want to watch Ye Anime Remake. Definitely keeping going with the manga.
43. Berserk v.5, Kentaro Miura. ♥. You know, it's really hard to write someone who is set up to have to be as awesome as Griffith is and actually have them be as awesome as Griffith is. I mean, everyone goes around talking about how awesome Griffith is, but he is still actually that awesome. Traditionally if the entire cast of something starts going on about how amazing somebody is, it is time to start looking around for Mary Sues. Not this time.
44-49. Fullmetal Alchemist v.3-7, Hiromu Arakawa. Yeah, I really like this much better than the anime in just about every way. Pacing! This has so much better pacing! And Greed's people come across better. And the art.
50. Flower of Life v.4, Fumi Yoshinaga. Extremely good conclusion to a ridiculously good series. This volume gently explains to the reader that yes, there has been a plot right there all along before wrapping it up in an emotionally and intellectually satisfying way, with a couple of surprisingly painful touches along the road. This is one of Yoshinaga's best and very high in my list of my favorite manga ever. Highly, highly recommended.
51-54. Fullmetal Alchemist v.8-11, Hiromu Arakawa. I am finding portions of the panel layout slightly visually confusing at times, but this is a very solid series. And I am really enjoying Hawkeye (the thing with Barry was hilarious), and watching Roy be ridiculously badass. Honestly I would like a little more Ed and Al than we are getting, and the Xing stuff feels slightly superfluous. But these are minor quibbles.
55-58. Berserk v.6-9, Kentaro Miura. ♥ ♥ ♥ Oh, evil evil epic high fantasy manga, where have you been all my life? Never leave me again. Please continue to shower me with layered plot structure (symbolism! which does not suck! in a relatively subtle way! in manga! whee!), developed characters, an interesting underlying philosophical argument, a surprisingly light sense of humor (you can't tell me the truly stupid names of the enemy platoons aren't that stupid on purpose), and the mere existence of Griffith. Seriously at this point I don't think Griffith even needs to do anything to continue being this awesome. You could have him stand there for like an entire volume and look inscrutable and the entire cast and Thrud and I would assume that he had taken over the world offscreen using only the power of his subconscious. Speaking of which, am anticipating beginning to have problems removing relevant volumes of manga from Thrud's person and/or pillow. I haven't seen her this happy about something not by Tezuka or Urasawa in years. A note to persons who may be considering reading this manga: still the goriest thing I read by a factor of seventy-leven, and significant sequences of (necessary, plot-justified) extreme sexual nastiness. Find a non-shrink-wrapped copy of the first volume and read the first three pages. If that squicks you, well, that's an adequate representation.
59-62. Fullmetal Alchemist v.12-15, Hiromu Arakawa. Okay, I take back what I said about the Xing stuff. Well, about everyone except the girl with the panda, who can GO AWAY NOW. Ed = awesome. Roy = awesome. Ishbal genocide = depressing as hell gaaaaaahhhh. Manga = fairly awesome.
Movies 2009
January
Lola Montès (dir. Max Ophuls, 1955). Harvard Film Archive. Reconstructed to the original form for the first time in fifty years. Visually spectacular, subtly bitchy deconstruction of the idea of the femme fatale, through the life of the mistress of Chopin, Liszt, Ludwig I etc. seen literally as a three-ring circus. This may be the best circus I have ever seen in a movie: like the Cirque de Soleil in a blender with Versailles. Honestly, I think this is the film Powell and Pressburger were in some ways inching toward in their expressionist period, and never made. With Anton Walbrook as Ludwig of Bavaria.
February
Vivre sa Vie (My Life to Live), dir. Jean-Luc Godard, Museum of Fine Arts, withsovay. My first Godard. I decided to see this mostly as an attempt to see whether I actually find French New Wave interesting, or whether it is all like unto My Night at Maud's (dir. Rohmer), an experience I still remember as the most genuinely boring film I have ever seen. Either the New Wave grows on one, or I have grown up some, or Godard is better than Rohmer or hits my personal tastes more closely, or some combination of all of those; I am not sure I could describe Vivre sa Vie as enjoyable, precisely, but it was indeed very interesting and I admire it more the more I think about it. Anna Karina stars as Nana, a young woman who drifts through clerking into prostitution. The narrative arc of the film seems conventional and isn't-- it's a mask for a meditation on the meaning of communication, the purposes of speech, the freedom or not of the soul. I am not sure I agree with its conclusions, but it does set up a remarkably complex philosophical dialectic with clarity, grace, and emotion. Also, the cinematography is gorgeous.
March
The Cat Returns. Home. Definitely the least of the Ghibli movies I have seen. The most interesting aspect of this girl-saves-a-cat-gets-carried-off-to-kingdom-of-cats-has-to-get-out-of-it story is that it is pretty clearly a novel written by Shizuku from Whispers of the Heart, drawing on elements of her experiences in that movie, although it never outright alludes to her at all. As such-- well, I hope it's a first novel; Shizuku has always struck me as having more potential than this. (This movie, oddly enough, also came out at about the time my internal fanon chronology places Shizuku as publishing her first book-- 2002, when she'd be twenty-two and have two years to go before marrying Seiji.) It's just-- I mean, it's not a bad movie, it has reasonable voicework and the art is perfectly workmanlike although not with the lambent beauty of a Miyazaki and it wasn't actively boring and, well, while looking at house pictures online recently the household would see some and say 'that's a great house', and some and say 'that's a dump', and some and say 'well, that's certainly a house'. This is certainly a movie. I am mostly writing about it to tell everyone that they really ought to see Whispers of the Heart, which is a film that brings light to the soul and encouragement to the mind.
April
Know1ng. Alewife Fresh Pond Cinema. With B., who wanted to go to a movie; it is the time of year when that is not very feasible, and the HFA and the MFA and the Brattle weren't showing anything I wanted to see. In this movie, Nicolas Cage makes his patented Code-Cracking Face several times. Also, the score is so overdone that I kept expecting 'Also Sprach Zarathustra'. But the film does have the courage of its convictions, such as they are; it is bad science fiction, bad theology, bad acting, bad storytelling, and bad cinema but it projects an air of desperate sincerity that makes one want to pat it on the head and tell it there's no shame in B-movie-dom before administering kindly euthanasia.
Orlando. Home. With B.; it is a List Movie. About two years ago we each made a list of ten films we wanted the other to see. He enjoyed this. Ha. I fell into it the way I always do; there is no one more luminously beautiful than Tilda Swinton, entire paintings in the way the light hits the side of her cheek. And the funeral in the snow, black on winter, through the woods; the Thames ice market; Constantinople; her panniered skirts in the room of white sheets; red braid down a brown flyer's jacket, year-battered. I will never get tired of this movie.
Coraline. Alewife Fresh Pond Cinema. With B. I initially did not want to see this because I didn't like the book. B. pointed out to me that he also does not like the book, so we went. This was much better than I had expected and I like it far better than the book in just about every direction, mostly because they seem to have performed some kind of plot-squish-together with The Thief of Always. Good music, great animation, some added details that were actually vaguely creepy, reasonable acting, no longer pretending to Say Something Profound About Childhood. Now if only someone would actually film The Thief of Always along these lines.
The Wicker Man. Home. The good British version. Rewatch with B. and household; Thrud was the only one who hadn't seen it. As always, a nicely thought-provoking movie about theological horror, with excellent music, a very young Christopher Lee, and That Scene With Britt Eklund (of Coupling fame). Watched now because B. wanted to watch the Nicolas Cage version and the video store didn't have it in. It is inevitable that they will at some point, I am afraid. These things happen around B.
Bounceoff: My List Movie for this time was Cube, which we got about halfway through before I decided that I was not going to stop watching the clock on the DVD player rather than the screen. There was just nothing about this I liked, except a young David Hewlett. It is however nice to have a source for a particular kind of visual sf-nal aesthetic I have seen around a lot since, most specifically in Portal, a game that plays like 'let's do portions of the premise of Cube in a non-stupid manner with cool things and genuine wit'.
May
The Thief of Bagdad, 1940, dir. by committee including Michael Powell, produced by Alexander Korda. Home. Oh hey Criterion just put this out on DVD, so you all know. I am ill and was feeling tired and bored and terrible and wanted to watch something new to me that was guaranteed not to depress me or shock me or make me feel worse. People had been telling me repeatedly that this was one of the greatest family movies of all time. Well, what do you know, it is. Things I liked about this, besides everything, include the colors (yay three-strip Technicolor!), Sabu, and that while the girl didn't get to do much she was clearly at least trying to have control of her own life. Also you can see the influence of the visuals clear down to things like Okami (hiii, statue-climbing-giant-spider-fight I had to play from behind the couch). Great music, too.lignota, teenybuffalo, have you seen this? If not, do so immediately.
Books 2009
January
1. The Making of The African Queen, or How I Went to Africa with Bogart, Bacall and Huston and Almost Lost My Mind, Katharine Hepburn. Quite good. Should read her later autobiography.
2. D'Aulaires' Book of Animals, Ingri and Edgar Parin D'Aulaire. Simple, ingenious and beautiful little book.
not-3. The Duchess, The Maid, The Groom & Their Lover by Victoria Janssen. Clearly well-written; also very clearly Not My Thing. *sigh* Sorry, Vicki.
3. Me: Stories of My Life, Katharine Hepburn. Not as good as the previous; still fairly worthy but with large patches that do not work.
4. Leif the Lucky, Ingri and Edgar Parin D'Aulaire. I have Serious Issues with the text of this picture book (oh god so colonialist and outright racist and just awful), but the art is spectacular. Must go through and see what the futhark says. I really want to read the D'Aulaire bio of Lincoln because I can't imagine them in that modern an idiom, and yet that's the one they won the Caldecott for.
not-5. The Atrocity Archives, Charles Stross. Wow, I find the way this uses Holocaust-related stuff for plot purposes really and genuinely offensive. Enough to not plow through the rest of it.
6. Collected Essays, Volume IV, Virginia Woolf. It is always so hard to say when one has finished a book of Woolf's essays, because they are so shuffled between books, and because one cannot read in order straight through but is always picking up and putting down again. However, either at this time or at an earlier date I have now read every essay in this book, and there were some I had not read beforehand.
7. Crystal Rain, Tobias Buckell.
50books_poc #2. Free ebook edition from that Tor giveaway a while ago. Reads like a first novel. Very well plotted, brilliant worldbuilding, did not emotionally engage at all. I liked the dialogue but the descriptive prose felt choppy. I will probably read more Buckell to see where he is going.8. The Discworld Almanak: The Year of the Prawn (2005), Terry Pratchett and Bernard Pearson. Eminently suitable for reading at work in small slightly amusing increments, which is exactly what I did with it.
9. living dead girl, Elizabeth Scott. via
coffeeandink. I found this book very helpful; it is truthful about types of emotion that many novels about abuse do not cover, and it helped me sort out some things. I will almost certainly never read it again.10. Pearl's Secret: A Black Man's Search For His White Family, Neil Henry.
50books_poc #4, via said comm. Very good memoir, verging on brilliant. A meditation on race and class in America with interesting things to say, and also a description of how when looking for symbols one tends to find people, some of them oneself.11. The Last Samurai, Helen DeWitt.
nineweaving suggested I read this novel, which is not about Japanese history, and handed me a lending copy lo this very long time since, and I have finally got to it. Maybe now the borrowed-books stack will not be taller than I am. The book is intelligent and witty, and I liked the first half better than the second-- it ended perfectly, but the portion of the plot that was episodic had one or two too many episodes. Recommended especially to ling geeks, classics geeks, and people who collect languages. Ultimately a good book rather than a great one, I think. not-12. Street Gang: The Complete History of Sesame Street, Michael Davis. Book on a subject I find desperately interesting which nevertheless managed to lose me through an insistence on providing the life story of every single relevant person a la Victor Hugo, an interest in the early days of childrens' television which while laudable causes details to intrude such that I wonder if the writer hadn't ought to be writing a history of 'Captain Kangaroo' really, an overly intrusive narrative voice, and an inability to keep a large cast of characters and acronyms distinguishable. I read until the show got on the air, because I wanted to know how that actually happened; then I bailed.
February
12. The White Rose, Glen Cook. In tiny increments at work. Like, a paragraph at a time since December. I wanted to know how the plot came out, but really the latter two were so much less good than The Black Company that I think I am done with Glen Cook now.
not-13. My Miserable Lonely Lesbian Pregnancy, Andrea Askowitz. ... it's because she's making herself miserable. Seriously. Dude, the stereotype about lesbians is that we think about our emotions too much. Maybe consider that? Anyway, Anne Lamott this ain't. There is this specific kind of self-deprecating lesbian humor that causes me to wonder whether the person making it actually likes a) herself and b) women, and I have almost no tolerance for that in recent years. Query To Self: I didn't think I bounced off books this often. Apparently I do?
13. The Attack of the Two-Inch Teacher, Bruce Coville. When I am in a library, I have a habit of scanning the children's shelves to see what Coville they have in and then reading anything I haven't right there on the spot. They're so short I don't want to haul them home, and they generally take about fifteen minutes to read. Nothing beats Coville's warm, friendly, endlessly welcoming worlds for a relaxing break (unless the library has an uncommon book by Daniel Pinkwater). When I have children, I intend to buy his stuff in bulk. (ETA: I pretty much did buy his stuff in bulk at Boskone. There is something about buying stuff when you can hand money to the author...)
14. The Sinner, Madeline Hunter. Not the weakest of Hunter I've read, but by far the weakest of the only series of hers that had not previously made me want to throw anything at the wall. Readable, but so aggravating on gender and plot levels. Rrgh. I may be done with Hunter; time to find another writer to fill the same niche. (Nalini Singh?)
15. The Sun King: Louis XIV at Versailles, Nancy Mitford. My last unread Mitford bio. Better than the Voltaire, not as good as the Frederick, about on par with the Pompadour. Somewhat more structurally tangled than I might have liked and suffers from the usual Mitford-bio problem that if you do not know the genealogy/geography/sequence of battles/importance of family already this is not where you are going to get an explanation; but as always brings the people to life, collects truly impressive quantities of data and anecdote, and is brilliantly illustrated. I only wish there were more.
16. The Pride of Chanur, C.J. Cherryh. Delightful space opera romp like the classic first-contact novel turned inside out; I thought this was very clever because the alien POV gives one all the info necessary on the aliens, but one always knows what the human must be thinking, even though the aliens don't. Reminded me a lot of various Gundam series for some reason.
17. The Sharing Knife: Horizon, Lois McMaster Bujold. This feels to me like the last of these, which is good because I have essentially been reading them out of inertia. There is just not the emotional depth or the wit here of Bujold's best work, and Dag inches perilously close to Mary Sue-dom sometimes. Still, some fun things with the setting, and watching her do the logistics of large groups of people is an education in clarity of writing. If there are more, I would read one more, but that's really where my limit lies.
18. Ragamuffin, Tobias Buckell.
50books_poc #6. Definitely better than the first, by a measurable margin: tighter plotting, wider scope, more shades of gray, fewer things in the plot that have been done before. Still not remotely emotionally involving, although I find the spaceship names splendid. Female protag but I have a couple few issues about women here. Will probably read the next-- I think I am doing Buckell on a one-book-arguing-for-the-next basis. March
19. Vegan Lunchbox, Jennifer McCann. Book version of a very good food blog I follow. Unfortunately, the book lacks many of the virtues of the blog, including the clear easy page layout and the lovely color photography. This certainly helps one to think about menus, about balancing flavors, and about food prep as an indissoluble part of health, but honestly the book veers too far into being an advertisement for itself. Not a keeper cookbook. Go for the web version.
20. Exiles of the Stars, Andre Norton (in the reprint omnibus Moonsinger). I'd read Moon of Three Rings as a child, and I read Flight in Yiktor as an adolescent (our library copy had a really frustrating two pages missing and I have been trying to track down a different copy since), but somehow I had missed this middle book. I have to say, if I'd been imagining a book between the two others I would not have imagined Evil Ancient Egyptian Forerunner Treasure Hunt Express. I mean, this is a perfectly fine book, I just find aspects of it rather inexplicable. Does not go in my mental list of top-tier Norton but does have some pretty and some creepy moments.
21. The Court of the Stone Children, Eleanor Cameron. Oh my. The Mushroom Planet books did nothing to lead me to expect this lovely sunny time-slip domestic fantasy, which reminds me of nothing so much as Elizabeth Marie Pope's The Sherwood Ring, which is high praise indeed. Somewhat marred by the sexism of the period, which the author clearly does not agree with but which reads as a far uglier note now than I suspect it did originally; I got outright angry when I suspect I was intended to be annoyed. Highly recommended, especially if you have ever wanted to work in art history or preservation or at a museum.
22. Into the Land of the Unicorns, Bruce Coville. Wow,
kate_nepveu was right when she called this one twee. Coville seems uneasy with a female protagonist and the worldbuilding is sadly conventional. Not remotely his best work. Still, not a total waste of fifteen minutes.23. Labor of Love: The Story of One Man's Extraordinary Pregnancy, Thomas Beatie. I remember reading the initial article in the Advocate in which Beatie, a transman, disclosed his pregnancy, and thinking that I wished him and his family well. I am not the only person who did, but I seem to have been in a significant minority. In particular, I am ashamed and saddened at the behavior of the gay/lesbian and trans advocacy organizations surrounding this; the groups such as GLAAD seem to have decided that Beatie and his wife had turned into a straight couple and therefore were no longer in need of protection, and the trans groups saw Beatie's pregnancy as a forfeiture of his male gender identity, which-- have none of them read any fucking theory since the eighties? Then, of course, there were serious hoops to be jumped concerning medical care-- at one point a nurse ordered an ultrasound everyone involved already knew to be unnecessary because she had heard somewhere that maybe somebody years ago might have done a study that suggested that testosterone use caused fetal problems in rats (of course Beatie had stopped using testosterone well before the pregnancy)-- and all sorts of legal questions, and Fox fucking News... At any rate, in this memoir Beatie and a co-writer (Beatie is, um, quite evidently not a writer) detail a life of stubbornness, intelligence, and love in the face of abusive and horrific circumstances, leading to a clearly ridiculously good marriage, a stable business, an unshakable self-knowledge and what is clearly going to be besotted fatherhood of his new daughter. I continue to wish him and his family all the best.
24. The Fifth Elephant, Terry Pratchett. A Discworld book I was not in the mood for when it came out. Not Pratchett's best, but not as bad as I thought it was when I initially bounced off it. This is a Vimes/Watch/Ankh-Morpork politics book; I had some problems with the characterizations of both Carrot and Sergeant Colon in it, as both wound up behaving in ways that seem to me inconsistent with earlier and with later portrayals. It feels, as I also suspected at the time, like Pratchett making a run-up towards less comedy-centered novels, and he's gotten much better at those since.
25. Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement, Kathryn Joyce. This deserves its own entry. In the meantime, a brief summary: this not perfect but damn fine work is the first book to look at the particular flavor of right-wing Christian fundamentalism known as the Quiverfull movement, who are consciously waging opposition to feminism (on very basic levels) and liberalism in general through memetic war and attempting to outbreed the other side. I find these people very frightening; after all, they quite literally want me dead.
26. Westmark, Lloyd Alexander. For
mrissa's book group. Ruritanian YA with some interesting aspects that unfortunately felt rather condensed and suffered the probably-me-specific problem of running very hard into my knowledge of eighteenth-century fiction in general and Voltaire in specific and being close enough to those to evoke them while not actually being quite that. I am looking forward to the second of the trilogy as the groundwork has been laid for a masterpiece if Alexander can do it, and everyone assures me he can.27. A Homemade Life: Stories and Recipes from My Kitchen Table, Molly Wizenberg. Enjoyable food memoir reminds me rather of early Ruth Reichl, which is high praise. Wizenberg runs a very good food blog (Orangette) and her recipes tend to instantly jump to quite high on my want-to-try list. This book is structured oddly (I do not understand the ordering of chapters) and may be a bit dessert-heavy in terms of recipes, but is an enjoyable and touching read about her father's life and death, her blog and how it led to her marriage, and above all the love of food. Nothing terribly original, but I am a bit of a sucker for this genre.
28. The Yggyssey, Daniel Pinkwater. This sequel to The Neddiad is not as good as its predecessor, but then The Neddiad is far and away the best book Pinkwater has written; The Yggyssey lacks the delirious-love-song-to-Los-Angeles quality that I loved so much in the first. Which is not to say it's a bad book. It's not. It's just far more traditional Pinkwater, which people who like that kind of thing will like. I tend to recommend The Neddiad even to people who hate Pinkwater; not this one. Hopefully the third will stay in L.A., which it looks like it ought. Anyway, this has interdimensional travel, ghost-hunting, inner-city free-climbing, witches, cat people, and a total lack of resemblance to the Odyssey.
29. The First Part Last, Angela Johnson.
50books_poc #9. Lyrical and sweet YA about Bobby, a sixteen-year-old struggling with new and single fatherhood. Many things about this book are beautiful and beautifully done: the language, the characters, the emotions. I loved that Bobby's mother is the tough-love one and his father is the softie; I loved that every character, no matter how minor, was complex and three-dimensional. I loved that the book in no way glosses over the work of having a baby. I did not love the plot, what there was of it. It felt to me as though several major events were a bit contrived, especially things involving Nia, the baby's mother. But this was strong and touching enough that I will be looking for more by this author.30. The Folklore of Discworld, Terry Pratchett and Jacqueline Simpson. Why yes, it is yet another Discworld spinoff which I have read in two or three-page increments at work when there was nothing going on. This book had a piece of information I hadn't known involving possible explanations of the hunting of the wren, so I suppose it was worthwhile. All else is at an elementary level.
31. Forerunner Foray, Andre Norton. There is a remote possibility that I read this at some time as a child, but I think it far more likely that I read the other two Forerunner books and missed this one. It is a completely respectable one of these, though I would like to reread the second at some point as I have fond memories of it. This one was not best-tier Norton but enjoyable.
32. Stars in my Pocket like Grains of Sand, Samuel R. Delany,
50books_poc #10. Oh. Well. My. The thing is, I read Empire Star, right, years ago, and I bounced off The Fall of the Towers and all the Neveryon stuff, and Babel-17 was fun except that at the time I was a linguistics major and, just, oh dear, and Nova was fun, and unlike ninety percent of everybody did actually try to read Hogg and made it almost a quarter through before sighing and concluding that this was not going to be interesting to persons whose kink it wasn't, and oh so Not My Kink. And I have a signed copy of The Motion of Light in Water and portions of that memorized, and I have seen multiple pictures of Mr. Delany naked (not just the famous one), and I have sat across a cafeteria lunch table with him and had him tell a whole group of students, gently, some things about his complicated relationship with science fiction. I know him as well as one knows a writer one knows by knowing the writer, not the person (well, there are exceptions; I mean as well as one knows a writer one is not internally on some kind of first-name basis with; I mean not as well as I know Jack Lewis, for example). I had somehow missed this novel. I think I got the title mixed up with 'Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones', which, I hold, is understandable. I had not known I had not read his greatest novel. This is one of the greatest novels I have ever read. This is the sort of book that renews my faith in both science fiction and the novel. This is a book during which I found myself almost continuously laughing, for no reason except pure and utter delight. This goes on that tiny mental shelf with Perelandra and Engine Summer and Always Coming Home and Burning Your Boats and Wuthering Heights and The Worm Ouroboros and Moonwise and The Female Man. I anticipate rereading it, over the years, with a great and desperate pleasure.33. Turn Coat, Jim Butcher. The latest of the Dresden Files books is neither my favorite (White Knight remains that) nor my least favorite to date. If you like this sort of thing, you probably already know that this is the sort of thing you like.
34. The Iron Hunt, Marjorie Liu,
50books_poc #11. I had pretty much given up on Marjorie Liu, because I loved Tiger Eye but her later stuff was moving farther and farther away from what I liked in that book and into a great deal of angst and complication and spy-stuff of a sort I do not find interesting. I mean for example I very much like Amiri but I could not finish the book about him. Just couldn't. But I saw this one, and was like, well, maybe something that is not Dirk and Steele continuity will not have the problems I have been having there. I am glad I did, because this was solid and really damn enjoyable. I am trying to think of another urban-fantasy-genre-type book where the protagonist has such a steady, interesting, equal, partner-y relationship. He knows all her paranormal stuff! He deals! He is her support system and she is his! I couldn't believe it. Traditionally in this genre most heterosexual relationships make me attempt to mentally block them out. Also fun worldbuilding, pretty demons, awesome line of descent of women of power. I will pick up the next of these. April
35. The Illyria Adventure, Lloyd Alexander. First of the Vesper Holly books, of which I had heard. Swashbuckly pseudo-archaeology with bandits, revolutionary movement, and indomitable red-headed heroine. Quite clearly Not My Thing. I don't know what it is about Lloyd Alexander I dislike, but it seems to be pretty nearly constant.
36. Wintergirls, Laurie Halse Anderson. Via
buymeaclue. Beautifully written novel which manages to escape the teen-problem genre. I initially thought the ending was too pat and speeded up, but then concluded that the pacing one expects in the end is based on whether one believes this to be a realist or a magic-realist novel, a question on which I am undecided but leaning towards magical-realist. Really magnificently done.37. Escape from Hell, Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. The twenty-five-years later sequel to Inferno is more of the same, instead of being a Purgatorio. I would have far preferred a Purgatorio. That would have been awesome. However, it is a perfectly reasonable more-of-the-same, only somewhat inferior to the original, and also, clearly, not as original. Nor as funny. Anyway, it was readable, though I wish they'd left out Aimee Semple McPherson.
38. Naamah's Kiss, Jacqueline Carey. ARC via job. First book of the third trilogy. Unlike other Jacqueline Carey, this one is not about S&M. Still a lot of sex, of course. Also, there's a time jump between trilogies, so this is more alt-1400s than alt-1200s. I think she should keep moving forward; her aesthetic would make for highly entertaining steampunk. As usual, I am vaguely uncomfortable with the ways that her non-protagonist-producing cultures are represented, and specifically in this case feel that the entire latter quarter of the book has What These People Need Is A White Girl syndrome and that the milieu is an abstraction of a set of classically annoying Western abstractions. Also as usual, her women have sexual agency, her men have sexual vulnerability, and her tracing of the specific kinds of trouble you can have in poly relationships in which power, property, and inheritance are factors is wonderful. So there we are. I mean, in some senses I would like to see Carey stretch herself a bit, but when she tried that it was such a catastrophic failure that I found the books absolutely unreadable. Apparently she has a book not set in the Kushiel universe coming out soon too. We'll see? Basically, if you like Jacqueline Carey you will like this. If not, not.
39. Beka Cooper: Bloodhound, Tamora Pierce. I can't tell if this is a notch less good than the previous, or if it is only that it is missing the element of surprise, as the previous was the book I have enjoyed the most out of Tamora Pierce since I was first picking up the Alanna books at twelve years old and I can tell you I wasn't expecting it. At any rate, this continues to be a somewhat-grittier-than-usual-Pierce police procedural written in an entertaining made-up street-cant and with a positive delight in skewering, ignoring, or simply running over cliches about how teenage girl protagonists are supposed to be in this sort of thing. (I am never going to get over how at the start of the first book Beka had already had sex, decided it was okay, and moved to concentrating on her job. In this one, she has sex with someone she knows perfectly well she is not going to stay with forever or even very long, and has a wonderful time.) Recommended.
40. Dark Angel, L.J. Smith. Picked up a Night World anthology in a bookstore, realized I hadn't read this one, sat down with it. Tangentially, it's kind of amazing how L.J. Smith now looks like a prescient of teen fiction, writing fifteen years before her particular zeitgeist. Except she's still better than ninety percent of the current stuff, which is saying something given that on occasion 'good' is not the word I would use to describe her work-- as opposed to 'always readable'. Anyway, this one is readable but totally not as cracktastically awesome as I would have liked. Girl falls in stream in winter, near-death experience, returns to life with accompanying guardian angel who teaches her to be socially awesome, except he also starts teaching her to be not very nice at all, and eventually to start putting curses on her enemies, enter hereditary witchcraft, etc. etc.. This being L.J. Smith, I think we all know there are going to be soulmates, witch princesses, and random cameo vampires; maybe I would like this better if I hadn't read as much of her other stuff. Recommended for completists. Which I am.
41. Fledgling, Octavia Butler,
50books_poc #12. I put off reading this when it first came out because I was annoyed with aspects of Parable of the Talents, and also because most Butler is so acutely painful that one every couple of years is about right. And then she died, and I put it off longer, until I could cope with that. It's kind of odd after that to find that the book isn't painful at all. I wouldn't even call it depressing. It's a fascinating book because it feels on the surface as though it should be part of the current paranormal romance/fantasy zeitgeist (though it somewhat predated that), but is instead a genuinely insightful sfnal extrapolation using all the same tropes. Anyway, this has a lot of Butler's usual themes-- the difference between humans and nonhumans, biological interdependence between humans and nonhumans, biology as everybody's destiny, personal relationships as in some ways the window-dressing people put over said biological destinies, family as the only strength and legacy but also as a possibly inescapable trap, metaphors about racial situations literalized to the point of no longer being metaphors-- okay, when I put it like that, I can't figure out why she wasn't writing vampire novels for years, it seems an absolutely perfect encoding of her philosophical dialectic. People who have problems with sexual depictions of beings who look like children might have some issues with this book, but I personally was not bothered because what we see of the being involved makes it unquestionably obvious that she is of an age and capacity for consent. I liked a lot of the people in this a lot more than I like the people in most of Butler, but I also found it less emotionally compelling than a lot of her other things. Not that that is necessarily a problem. Highly recommended. May
42. Fall of Light, Nina Kiriki Hoffmann. O holy good god no! Okay, so I quite liked A Fistful of Sky, and this is the direct sequel, and just-- just-- there is not one thing I liked about this book, except the image on the cover, which is only tangentially related. Even the title doesn't make much sense. It is badly proofread, the characters behave in ways that no people ever ever would including Romance Novel people, everyone seems to take the protagonist having magic with aplomb even though they are living in a world in which magic is supposed to be impossible, there are trailing plot threads every damn which way, and, and this is a major, major and, there are HUGE MAJOR HUGE AWFUL issues with sexual consent absolutely all over because of the main character's power to influence other people's minds and the text really does not seem to me to have thought this over on more than an extremely tangential level. (It is not acceptable moral behavior to date-rape a date-rapist, frex. And anything people do under magical hypnosis has not been consented to, how difficult is that to grasp? Sheesh.) It doesn't end, it stops; none of the major issues or problems resolve; the only character I liked in the entire thing is quite evidently meant to be taken as an insufferable bitch. This is a fucking train wreck of a book, and Hoffmann can do better. I cannot understand how this novel was released into the wild in this state. Go reread A Fistful of Sky instead.
43. Daughters of Darkness, L.J. Smith. Upon reading Mely's Night World roundup post, I realized I hadn't read this one either. In fact I think I missed most of the Night World books, which is the problem with an unnumbered series of stand-alones. Anyway, this is fun and awesome and includes non-supernatural people being just as asskicking as supernatural people, a heroine with a brain, and a hero who has actually read a couple of books at some point. Top-tier L.J. Smith.
44. Dead and Gone, Charlaine Harris. This book was doing okay until the plot started resolving, at which point I very strongly considered throwing it very hard at the wall, and would have if it hadn't been a store copy. *sigh* Nonononono. Don't know if I can read these anymore, because that? was Homophobic Bullshit, and I just don't want that in my beach reading. Also the end of the book disintegrated into a mass of things happening suddenly without setup or resolution, but by that point I didn't care.
45. Spellbinder. Yet Another L.J. Smith. Good fun, middle-tier.
46. The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks, E. Lockhart. Hmmm. I get what this book was trying to do, but I'm not sure it actually achieved it. Frankie Landau-Banks is at a prep school where a lot of people have more money than sense, and finds out that her boyfriend is in a secret society of the good-ol'-boy's-club sort. Her solution to being left out and disregarded is rather Machiavellian. My problem with this book was that it felt rather thin in some ways: it's true that Frankie sees things primarily in terms of power, systems, and gaming the systems, but I'm not sure the book acknowledges that there are other ways to see things. Nobody in this seems to have real friends. I went to a prep school where a lot of people had more money than sense, and there was a defined and inflexible power structure. The way to deal with it was to totally ignore it, and be yourself as hard as possible in the knowledge that the world changes after high school. It's fair given her family background that Frankie wouldn't know the world changes, but. Also there are no cross-gender interactions, let alone friendships, that are not taken as romantic; they can't just hang out with people. I went to a single-sex school, so I don't know, but is it really like that? And everyone seems to think the things Frankie does are a lot worse than I think they are, but I hang out with MIT people. So. Anyway, this is a fun and interesting little book, thought-provoking though flawed.
47-48. The Chosen and Soulmate, L.J. Smith. These keep on being these, all right. (I really do seem to have mostly stumbled across the good Smith when I was younger; these just aren't as good as, say, Forbidden Game.)
49. Brother, I'm Dying, Edwidge Danticat.
50books_poc #13. This memoir of the deaths of Danticat's father and brother (and of her own pregnancy at about the same time) is very well-written on a sentence and scene level but failed to cohere around itself; she was very clearly trying to thematically link and contrast the lives of her family with each other and it didn't work for me at all. As a result, it left me emotionally uninvolved. However, I'm not sorry I read it, because it really does have some fine work in it. I may try some of her fiction, to see if not having to abide by the restraints of what actually happened assists her ability to create emotional effect.50. Beloved, Toni Morrison.
50books_poc #14. Actually this is a reread, technically, but I am not thinking of it as one because I read it for class in high school. This was a horrible idea which has prevented me from reading any other Morrison since. I do not think it is a book for high school students, or at any rate not with our teacher, which is saying something because he was brilliant and passionate and made me love Madame Bovary which took some doing, and everyone in my class hated and was confused by Beloved. None more than me. I literally, genuinely, and thoroughly could not parse the book as being written in English. People would talk about things that happened in the book, and I could not figure out where they got them, because I could not distinguish either characters or a plot. I could not track a sentence of it from one end to the other. I was reading Derrida and Eco that year on my own lookout; it was not the denseness of the prose was the problem. The problem was that in high school half the content of the book bounced off me for lack of my having any experiential context to make sense of it and the other half bounced off because it was so inextricably painful that my brain refused to allow it entry so thoroughly I couldn't even recognize it as painful. Or at any rate this is the conclusion I come to now, looking back on the first read from the end of the second read of this strange, wrenching, deeply and magnificently brilliant novel. This is about how the past never goes away, because it isn't even past. This is about haunting, and being haunted; and about work; and how impossible it can be to live and how hard it can be to die. And the frame of mind it takes to kill something to keep anyone else from killing it: a frame of mind that is I am sure intimately familiar to many, certainly to me, but usually extended only towards one's own works and one's own self, upon hitting bottom: not towards other people, but part of the horror of this book is that that is apparently not such a large step under some circumstances. And this is about Ohio, where the sky does indeed look like that. And, more than anything else, this is a book set where hell and earth are the same place. It is a spectacular achievement. Quite honestly, I still hate it; only now cordially, and with my love. It does what masterpieces are meant to do: it changes the reader.51. Santa Olivia, Jacqueline Carey. ... in which Carey stretches herself, yay! This is a non-Kushiel-universe book, and it is one of the two best things she's ever written (it has some competition from portions of Kushiel's Avatar). In a legally nonexistent enclave between a warring U.S. and Mexico, an on-the-lam genetically-engineered super-soldier fathers a daughter, and this is the book about her growing up. I like the worldbuilding, the atmosphere, the people, the plotting; I like that ninety percent of the cast are people of color who have agency and kick ass. I thought the end was a little anticlimactic and rushed, but in general this made me very happy and I would like a sequel. It is always good to see a writer not sticking to what they already know they can do.
52. Salt and Silver, Anna Katherine. *waves at
trifles* Above-average paranormal romance set in a remarkably grim world for one of these. Takes the unusual tack of having many of the characters not be nice people at all even a little bit, which works very well. Also the protagonist has seen and enjoyed Cemetery Man, which means I am morally obligated to love her. I would love to see this author try something in a less restrictive genre, as I did rather feel that I knew a good deal of what to expect from the book in advance solely because of its genre, but this is a fine first novel and a worthy read. 53. Time and Mr. Bass, Eleanor Cameron. I am now sincerely wondering why it is The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet that has been accorded classic status when the other things I have read by Cameron, including this direct Mushroom Planet sequel, are much, much better. This one reads kind of like a cross of the original with The Dark is Rising books. No, really. If you want to read about spore people mourning the death of King Arthur in a genuinely moving way, this is your novel.
54. A Spell is Cast, Eleanor Cameron. Perfectly reasonably YA I would have liked better if it had decided to really be either Gothic or fantasy instead of hovering nervously about the edges of both. Suffered for me due to cognitive dissonance caused by it being the only other thing I've ever read that was illustrated by the people who did Elizabeth Enright's Gone-Away Lake books, which meant I was always thinking about those and comparing them to this and that is not a fair thing to do to just about any book ever.
55. Savvy, Ingrid Law. Down-home-y YA about a girl in a family where they all get magical powers of exceedingly random sorts on their thirteenth birthdays. Kind of what would happen if you put A Fistful of Sky in a blender with Wilanne Schneider Belden's Frankie!, not that anyone but me seems ever to have read the latter. This-- I can see why it got a Norton nom and it deserved one, but it just never quite came alive for me. No sense of real darkness.
June
56. Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-63, Taylor Branch. This is the first book of Branch's trilogy about the Civil Rights Movement, the kind of books about which people always use the word 'monumental' because there is nothing else that can adequately express the sheer length and weight of it all. It is clearly popular history; it is clearly popular history written by a white man and with a white audience in mind. I would have liked more footnotes, but the endnotes are there. He did the research, and the facts seem solid. For fact, anecdote, tracking of general trends, and simple reminder of how different things were; for identification of factions, descriptions of people who may have been overlooked in other sources, and decided attempts not to canonize or demonize those history has passed verdicts on; in short, for historiography, this is a very fine book. If you are looking for biographies, for primary sources, for people involved in their own words, or for a writer who is not profoundly in love with Kennedy (though to be fair he knows and is trying to work against it), this is not your book. I will probably read the other two, as I have a far less clear grip on the sequence of events in those years than I would like.
57. The Element of Lavishness: Letters of Sylvia Townsend Warner and William Maxwell, 1938-1978. I think Sylvia Townsend Warner may write the most truly enjoyable letters I have ever met. It is the sort of thing where you want to quote a bit, to prove the point, or read a bit aloud to someone in the room, and you have to stop because you would read the whole book. She writes the only volumes of letters I would consider reading aloud for pleasure. Of course she claims she is not a patch on Mme. de Sevigny, and has told me strictly that after I am fifty I may read the journals of Goncourt. And William Maxwell is a fine conversational companion. It is a pleasure to read writers working together, the dip and swerve of things left unsaid, the undercurrent of desperate joy.
Graphic Works 2009
January
1. Aria v.4, Kozue Amano. Delightful as always.
2. Maka-Maka v.1, Kishi Torajiro. d'awwwww cutest hottest sweetest lesbian porn ever. ♥ kawcrow for the rec as I would never have found this on my own.
3. Maka-Maka v.2, Kishi Torajiro. This literally made me cry from happy. I keep thinking I must be hallucinating, because people don't put yuri like this out in English book editions with actual bindings and in color and things. Time to send Media Blasters cookies yet again.
4. Silver Diamond v.3, Shiho Sugiura. Continues fun.
5. Her Majesty's Dog v.11, Mick Takeuchi. Reasonable conclusion to a series I mostly like probably better than it deserves. I think I have gone off Takeuchi, though I may skim her next in the store to see if she is improving.
6. Je ne verrai pas Okinawa, Aurélia Aurita.
50books_poc #1. I will now take thirty seconds to gloat about successfully reading this in French without either a dictionary or any trouble. ... Thank you. That said, my reaction to this is complex and tangled and I am not actually sure whether the book is any good and there could be a thirty-page deconstruction of the various forms of intersecting privilege in this work, which I do not feel qualified to write and am not sure Aurita thought about at all; but Aurita's art continues charming. (Why in hell do young female artists keep seeming to fall for Frédéric Boilet so?)7. Wild Adaptor v.6, Kazuya Minekura. So much love.
8-9. Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle, v.18-19, CLAMP. I keep losing track of when new volumes of this come out, and I really prefer the things xxxholic has been doing over the past while. But still quite good and, as always, Fai.
10. Berserk v.1, Kentaro Miura. Has definitely gotten me to want to read the next volume. It's not that it does anything different, it's just that it does it so well, and has such obvious potential.
11. Saiyuki Reload v.8, Kazuya Minekura. Saiyuki: consistently one of the reasons I continue reading manga since c. 2002.
12. The Arrival, Shaun Tan.
50books_poc #3. Just as good as everyone says it is, which is saying something. The inside cover! The paper bird! The woman with the book! Sunlight on the hilltop! I cried.13. Oishinbo A La Carte: Japanese Cuisine v.1, Tetsu Kariya and Akira Hanasaki. Attempt by Viz to excerpt a hundred-volume-plus food manga that has been running since 1983 into a series of collections centered around aspects of Japanese food culture that may be intelligible/interesting to Westerners. I think they are probably doing about as well as anybody could at this endeavor, but I am not sure it's what I'd have tried to do; it has the effect of removing all plot and character development. If there was any. The focus on food here makes the cast of Tampopo look like dilettantes.
14. Tales of Outer Suburbia, Shaun Tan.
50books_poc #5. Much more conventional childrens' book, brilliant on a technical level. A collection of small fables of the weird. Did not really catch me. February
15-16. Samurai Deeper Kyo v.31-32, Akimine Kamijyo. HOTARU. Still my boy. Akira is being fairly awesome, too, but man, has Kamijyo never heard of pacing? Shounen fight into next fight into next fight GO all the time. Also, this entire series becomes somehow even more entertaining if one reflects that the Mibu are basically elves conceptually, and then one can sit there going wait that is a pimp-hat banjo-player everyone's-daddy crazy elf what.
17. 20th Century Boys v.1, Naoki Urasawa. Yay not reading in scanlation. Yay being able to hold the volume. Yay pro translation. Boo unnecessarily spoilery back cover and cast page. Boo translated sound effects-- they are too distracting when they cover as much of the page as they do here. Still the Best Manga Ever Written, and I mean that absolutely literally. I remain utterly in awe of Urasawa's pacing. Also, and as always, Kanna.
March
18-19. Aya and Aya of Yop City, Marguerite Abouet and Clement Oubrerie.
50books_poc #7-8. Interesting little graphic novels about a group of teenage girls, and their relatives and larger circle of associates, in the capital of Cote d'Ivoire in the late 1970s. The organic storytelling is very impressive at introducing and making a large cast distinct and real as people in a very short amount of time. These are very much domestic books, rhythms-of-daily-life books, with the touch of drama that all teenage girls acquire along the way; humorous, expansive, lovingly rendered. I didn't feel like these did very much or delved very deep, but what they did they did well and enjoyably. Also contained what looks like an extremely good recipe for peanut sauce, which I am looking forward to attempting.20. Disappearance Diary, Hideo Azuma. The author, a well-known and well-respected manga artist (most famous for inventing lolicon, which was a lot less terrifying and tasteless originally), chronicles the 'missing' periods of his life: two spells of homelessness, during which he simply wandered away from his house, work, and family and lived in various woods (during the second one he got employment as a gas fitter under an assumed name), and one stretch in an alcoholism ward. Azuma's cute and cartoony drawings are deliberately at war with his subject; the beginning of the book states outright that "This book has a positive outlook on life and absolutely no realism will be allowed." He focuses on the logistical and practical realities of survival in his situation, the various places to swipe food and find booze money, the social structure of the ward, the fear of freezing to death in the winter, the way everything becomes less frightening when it is familiar. He is not introspective, but flashback sequences to his life as a manga artist make it clear why he might need to escape. I would have liked to know more about his wife, whose reasons for staying with him are never discussed; I would certainly have liked to know more about things like how he managed to re-establish his career after dropping everything and running not once but twice. But that's not what this book is about, and for what it is about, it's very good.
21. Afterschool Nightmare v.10, Setona Mizushiro. This is one of those series where I was on eggshells the whole way through: will it make me hate it? No, it did not. I think the ending would have done better to have left more unexplained; to close in darkness, like a dream. But what this did it did very well, and I look forward to tearing it to little, little analytical shreds in the post-Utena chapter of watashtachi-no-Manga-Book.
22. Sayonara Zetsubou-sensei v.1, Kohji Kumeta. Wow, the anime is one of the most faithful adaptations of all time. It's pretty much panel-by-panel. Also, all the lovely freeze-frames that go by too fast for you to read the text turn out to be the chapter splash pages, so you can read the text. So I am happy. God only knows what one would think of this if one hadn't seen the anime.
23. Kaze Hikaru v.4, Taeko Watanabe. Borrowing series from
lignota. I have to be in a really odd mood to read these because of knowing the historical ouchiness that is Looming Just Ahead. But man, the Shinsengumi are so awesome. Also I really like contrasting this with Peacemaker Kurogane, as they are pretty much shounen and shoujo versions of the same story: kid who joins Shinsengumi for Personal Reasons, is There During History. Unsurprisingly, I like the shoujo better. This is my personal favorite Okita Souji, and (amazingly enough) is fighting with Rurouni Kenshin for my favorite Saito Hajime. I had thought Kenshin pretty definitive in that direction, but this one is brilliant. On the other hand, I liked the reveal of the haiku-authorship better in Peacemaker, and there are a whole bunch of the upper leadership I liked better in, of all things, Gintama, even though I have seen them in like two volumes of that. Also Sei herself is a tad weepy. But this is in many ways awesome; I love the dealing with the logistics of menstruation and the way that she blocks the issues of being a pretty girl in a group of men by hiding under the issues of being a pretty boy in a group of men. 24. Berserk v.2, Kentaro Miura. Man, Miura can draw demons. I vaguely wonder if he can draw anything else, but I am not actually convinced that existentially it is ever going to matter. The elf's body language actually being androgynous is a nice little feat. It is nice to have this as after all Hellsing is ending so there was going to be a lack of gratuitous testosterone in my reading life. Not that this is Hellsing, even though it shares the characteristic of that series that everyone evil is technically a liquid.
25-26. Pluto v.1-2, Naoki Urasawa. ZOMG awesome. I seriously want to cuddle this version of Astro Boy. Also I like the bit where you can extrapolate an entire issue of Black Jack from one panel showing only his feet. Also worldbuilding! I am very happy with this and looking forward to more.
27-30. Kaze Hikaru v.5-8, Taeko Watanabe. This is a very good series. I also really like the bits at the end where the mangaka is like, here is where I did my research, and here is how impossible some of it was, and here is where I
31. Samurai Deeper Kyo v.33, Akimine Kamijyo. Either I was in totally the wrong mood for this and should have waited, or this was a volume in which there was a lot of milling about and nothing much happened. Or both.
April
32. Fairy Tail v.5, Hiro Mashima. I read this in bookstores when I'm tired, but I think it has outworn my patience.
33-35. Ge Ge Ge no Kitaro v.1-3, Shigeru Mizuki. Impossible-to-find Kodansha bilingual edition FTW! That said, I think I prefer the anime; the stories here don't have quite enough room to breathe. Also, I do not like the translation at all. But the art, as always, is spectacular.
36. Samurai Deeper Kyo v.34, Akimine Kamijyo. Better. There are too many characters in this series, and I will be the first to admit it has serious problems
37. A Drifting Life, Yoshihiro Tatsumi. This is the second realistic/cartoony slice-of-life memoir about the earlier days of the manga industry I've read this year, and it's really kind of amazing how much it is the inverse of Disappearance Diary. Both works are by and about men who founded genuinely new and important genres of manga (in Tatsumi's case, gekiga, which was one of the first terms used to distinguish manga genuinely intended for adult audiences for reasons other than sexual content), who overwork to a ludicrous degree, who feel artistically stifled by the constraints of the publishing industry, who have to navigate an inbred circle of artists and editors many of whom are outright crazy. But where Hideo Azuma turns to drinking and homelessness, Tatsumi discovers his anger and his love, realizes that this life makes him happy. Neither man would be able to stop being a mangaka, no matter how hard they tried, but for Tatsumi this is his saving grace as well as his curse. I don't know how this book would be if you don't know a fair bit about the early days of manga; it is swamped with names, dates, titles, publishing houses, and particularly the shadow of Osamu Tezuka (I mean this literally-- there is one panel that is ridiculously awesome if, as anyone who lives with Thrud can, you are able to identify Tezuka by the outline of his shadow alone). I don't get half of the references and I know it, but enough to get by. If you're at the level of manga geekiness to be confused at seeing Shotaro Ishimori wander by before he became Shotaro Ishinomori because you thought that happened earlier, you should be fine. I seriously do not know if people who don't have this sort of geekiness would like or even be able to follow this book, which means that it confuses me that it was put out by a non-manga publisher, adapted by Adrian Tomine, and is selling like the dickens.
May
38. 20th Century Boys v.2, Naoki Urasawa. Yay more 20th Century Boys! I want this all to come out, like, immediately. If not sooner. This one is really in some ways an intermediate volume of setup, but I still love it profoundly.
39-40. Berserk, v.3-4, Kentaro Miura. In which Berserk stops being 'that manga that does that one genre with the testosterone really well' and starts being ZOMG AWESOME. Seriously, this is making me INCOHERENTLY HAPPY GRIFFITH GRIFFITH GRIFFITH OMG. If I started trying to list the things this is doing really, really well, I would go on for hours. The way that Miura is using sexual violence is brilliant, and I can't believe I just wrote that sentence, but it is, because it supercharges and complicates the relationship between Griffith and Guts from the first: if they could simply be lovers, everything might be all right, but as it is they are going to be something far stranger, and destroy each other. And a SHONEN WRITER NOTICED AND DID THAT OMG. This manga seriously pushes my gore tolerance (and probably anybody's)(except of course Thrud's-- she is reading this too and does not think the demons have yet achieved vile, which is just as well as I like being able to find the volumes in the bookcase and not under her pillow), and is the one thing I read that is definitively gorier than Hellsing-- and it is gorier than Hellsing by a lot-- but I do not care, it is totally worth it. It is epic and darkly magnificent and clearly only going to get better, because it has latched on to some kind of high fantasy archetype and is just being the best of that that can be possible. I can also already tell that these characters will break my heart, and I don't care about that either. So good. So damn good.
41-42. Fullmetal Alchemist, v.1-2, Hiromu Arakawa. Yes, yes, I know. But the anime was triggery such that I couldn't finish it, and I saw it first, so I was rather reluctant about the manga. Which is a shame because it is better than the anime-- better pacing, better expression work, better plotting. It is for example even more obvious how ridiculously awesome Hawkeye is, and the way that the alchemists have an uneasy relationship with ethics and the military and the conflicts between those is much clearer right from the start. Also I like the art very much; the anime is more conventionally pretty but I find this better-looking. Oh, and I have spent however many years wondering why the slash fandom for this series fixated on Ed and Roy. Well, I still wouldn't go there myself, but I no longer think that this is one of those totally insane fandom things, as I can see it if I squint, which is a major change from the anime. Still trying to decide whether I want to watch Ye Anime Remake. Definitely keeping going with the manga.
43. Berserk v.5, Kentaro Miura. ♥. You know, it's really hard to write someone who is set up to have to be as awesome as Griffith is and actually have them be as awesome as Griffith is. I mean, everyone goes around talking about how awesome Griffith is, but he is still actually that awesome. Traditionally if the entire cast of something starts going on about how amazing somebody is, it is time to start looking around for Mary Sues. Not this time.
44-49. Fullmetal Alchemist v.3-7, Hiromu Arakawa. Yeah, I really like this much better than the anime in just about every way. Pacing! This has so much better pacing! And Greed's people come across better. And the art.
50. Flower of Life v.4, Fumi Yoshinaga. Extremely good conclusion to a ridiculously good series. This volume gently explains to the reader that yes, there has been a plot right there all along before wrapping it up in an emotionally and intellectually satisfying way, with a couple of surprisingly painful touches along the road. This is one of Yoshinaga's best and very high in my list of my favorite manga ever. Highly, highly recommended.
51-54. Fullmetal Alchemist v.8-11, Hiromu Arakawa. I am finding portions of the panel layout slightly visually confusing at times, but this is a very solid series. And I am really enjoying Hawkeye (the thing with Barry was hilarious), and watching Roy be ridiculously badass. Honestly I would like a little more Ed and Al than we are getting, and the Xing stuff feels slightly superfluous. But these are minor quibbles.
55-58. Berserk v.6-9, Kentaro Miura. ♥ ♥ ♥ Oh, evil evil epic high fantasy manga, where have you been all my life? Never leave me again. Please continue to shower me with layered plot structure (symbolism! which does not suck! in a relatively subtle way! in manga! whee!), developed characters, an interesting underlying philosophical argument, a surprisingly light sense of humor (you can't tell me the truly stupid names of the enemy platoons aren't that stupid on purpose), and the mere existence of Griffith. Seriously at this point I don't think Griffith even needs to do anything to continue being this awesome. You could have him stand there for like an entire volume and look inscrutable and the entire cast and Thrud and I would assume that he had taken over the world offscreen using only the power of his subconscious. Speaking of which, am anticipating beginning to have problems removing relevant volumes of manga from Thrud's person and/or pillow. I haven't seen her this happy about something not by Tezuka or Urasawa in years. A note to persons who may be considering reading this manga: still the goriest thing I read by a factor of seventy-leven, and significant sequences of (necessary, plot-justified) extreme sexual nastiness. Find a non-shrink-wrapped copy of the first volume and read the first three pages. If that squicks you, well, that's an adequate representation.
59-62. Fullmetal Alchemist v.12-15, Hiromu Arakawa. Okay, I take back what I said about the Xing stuff. Well, about everyone except the girl with the panda, who can GO AWAY NOW. Ed = awesome. Roy = awesome. Ishbal genocide = depressing as hell gaaaaaahhhh. Manga = fairly awesome.
Movies 2009
January
Lola Montès (dir. Max Ophuls, 1955). Harvard Film Archive. Reconstructed to the original form for the first time in fifty years. Visually spectacular, subtly bitchy deconstruction of the idea of the femme fatale, through the life of the mistress of Chopin, Liszt, Ludwig I etc. seen literally as a three-ring circus. This may be the best circus I have ever seen in a movie: like the Cirque de Soleil in a blender with Versailles. Honestly, I think this is the film Powell and Pressburger were in some ways inching toward in their expressionist period, and never made. With Anton Walbrook as Ludwig of Bavaria.
February
Vivre sa Vie (My Life to Live), dir. Jean-Luc Godard, Museum of Fine Arts, with
sovay. My first Godard. I decided to see this mostly as an attempt to see whether I actually find French New Wave interesting, or whether it is all like unto My Night at Maud's (dir. Rohmer), an experience I still remember as the most genuinely boring film I have ever seen. Either the New Wave grows on one, or I have grown up some, or Godard is better than Rohmer or hits my personal tastes more closely, or some combination of all of those; I am not sure I could describe Vivre sa Vie as enjoyable, precisely, but it was indeed very interesting and I admire it more the more I think about it. Anna Karina stars as Nana, a young woman who drifts through clerking into prostitution. The narrative arc of the film seems conventional and isn't-- it's a mask for a meditation on the meaning of communication, the purposes of speech, the freedom or not of the soul. I am not sure I agree with its conclusions, but it does set up a remarkably complex philosophical dialectic with clarity, grace, and emotion. Also, the cinematography is gorgeous.March
The Cat Returns. Home. Definitely the least of the Ghibli movies I have seen. The most interesting aspect of this girl-saves-a-cat-gets-carried-off-to-kingdom-of-cats-has-to-get-out-of-it story is that it is pretty clearly a novel written by Shizuku from Whispers of the Heart, drawing on elements of her experiences in that movie, although it never outright alludes to her at all. As such-- well, I hope it's a first novel; Shizuku has always struck me as having more potential than this. (This movie, oddly enough, also came out at about the time my internal fanon chronology places Shizuku as publishing her first book-- 2002, when she'd be twenty-two and have two years to go before marrying Seiji.) It's just-- I mean, it's not a bad movie, it has reasonable voicework and the art is perfectly workmanlike although not with the lambent beauty of a Miyazaki and it wasn't actively boring and, well, while looking at house pictures online recently the household would see some and say 'that's a great house', and some and say 'that's a dump', and some and say 'well, that's certainly a house'. This is certainly a movie. I am mostly writing about it to tell everyone that they really ought to see Whispers of the Heart, which is a film that brings light to the soul and encouragement to the mind.
April
Know1ng. Alewife Fresh Pond Cinema. With B., who wanted to go to a movie; it is the time of year when that is not very feasible, and the HFA and the MFA and the Brattle weren't showing anything I wanted to see. In this movie, Nicolas Cage makes his patented Code-Cracking Face several times. Also, the score is so overdone that I kept expecting 'Also Sprach Zarathustra'. But the film does have the courage of its convictions, such as they are; it is bad science fiction, bad theology, bad acting, bad storytelling, and bad cinema but it projects an air of desperate sincerity that makes one want to pat it on the head and tell it there's no shame in B-movie-dom before administering kindly euthanasia.
Orlando. Home. With B.; it is a List Movie. About two years ago we each made a list of ten films we wanted the other to see. He enjoyed this. Ha. I fell into it the way I always do; there is no one more luminously beautiful than Tilda Swinton, entire paintings in the way the light hits the side of her cheek. And the funeral in the snow, black on winter, through the woods; the Thames ice market; Constantinople; her panniered skirts in the room of white sheets; red braid down a brown flyer's jacket, year-battered. I will never get tired of this movie.
Coraline. Alewife Fresh Pond Cinema. With B. I initially did not want to see this because I didn't like the book. B. pointed out to me that he also does not like the book, so we went. This was much better than I had expected and I like it far better than the book in just about every direction, mostly because they seem to have performed some kind of plot-squish-together with The Thief of Always. Good music, great animation, some added details that were actually vaguely creepy, reasonable acting, no longer pretending to Say Something Profound About Childhood. Now if only someone would actually film The Thief of Always along these lines.
The Wicker Man. Home. The good British version. Rewatch with B. and household; Thrud was the only one who hadn't seen it. As always, a nicely thought-provoking movie about theological horror, with excellent music, a very young Christopher Lee, and That Scene With Britt Eklund (of Coupling fame). Watched now because B. wanted to watch the Nicolas Cage version and the video store didn't have it in. It is inevitable that they will at some point, I am afraid. These things happen around B.
Bounceoff: My List Movie for this time was Cube, which we got about halfway through before I decided that I was not going to stop watching the clock on the DVD player rather than the screen. There was just nothing about this I liked, except a young David Hewlett. It is however nice to have a source for a particular kind of visual sf-nal aesthetic I have seen around a lot since, most specifically in Portal, a game that plays like 'let's do portions of the premise of Cube in a non-stupid manner with cool things and genuine wit'.
May
The Thief of Bagdad, 1940, dir. by committee including Michael Powell, produced by Alexander Korda. Home. Oh hey Criterion just put this out on DVD, so you all know. I am ill and was feeling tired and bored and terrible and wanted to watch something new to me that was guaranteed not to depress me or shock me or make me feel worse. People had been telling me repeatedly that this was one of the greatest family movies of all time. Well, what do you know, it is. Things I liked about this, besides everything, include the colors (yay three-strip Technicolor!), Sabu, and that while the girl didn't get to do much she was clearly at least trying to have control of her own life. Also you can see the influence of the visuals clear down to things like Okami (hiii, statue-climbing-giant-spider-fight I had to play from behind the couch). Great music, too.
lignota, teenybuffalo, have you seen this? If not, do so immediately.
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Date: 2009-01-05 09:13 pm (UTC)*nod* I am still trying to log rereads, but yeah, I am trying to stick to a minimalist format so that I keep up with it.
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Date: 2009-01-05 09:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-01-06 03:57 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-01-06 05:18 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-01-06 01:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-05-14 02:30 pm (UTC)So hi! Anassa kata and all that! :)
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Date: 2009-05-14 06:07 pm (UTC)At any rate, hi, and friended-back. ^_^
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Date: 2010-02-18 09:54 am (UTC)