Reviews - Two Books, Two Movies
No time for personal computer use means I'll be updated very infrequently. Thanks to Google Docs, I can write a few words a day and come up with a viable journal entry in a week or two (the body of this current entry was last edited 5 days ago, says the Google).
House of Leaves, Mark Z. Danielewski (novel): Reads like an homage to Jorges Luis Borges, the Blair Witch Project and poor, poor James Frey. While others have told me it terrified them, I honestly didn't get a scare until a few hundred pages in. And by then I was reading it just to see if anything good would happen. Nothing did, really. I wouldn't recommend it. But then, I know people who absolutely loved the thing, so there's that.
Blindsight, Peter Watts (novel): Quite possibly the best science fiction I've ever read. It's filled with science while retaining its humanity. Which is odd, considering that none of the characters are in the least bit baseline human. A first contact story, both riveting and depressing, packed thick with ideas. Highly recommended.
An Inconvenient Truth (documentary): Al Gore seems to be warmer than in his awful presidential bid, though the off-stage biography bits were unnecessary. Of course, this movie for me is like preaching to the choir. All science points to global warming, and when you graph global temperature versus time, either we're the most unluckiest species to ever live on Earth during an unprecedented outlier, or we're doing something wrong.
Ice Age (film): Awful. The only drawback about my mother-in-laws wonderful visits is picking movies that she'll enjoy. Some of the animation was
nice, but celebrities do not equal voice actors, and action slapstick one-two punches do not equal story.
I'm currently working through Del Rey's new Kull collection and a collection of pre-Tolkien-fantasy-that-influenced-Tolkien-in-some-way. I love Howard's very American approach to heroes. I'm also discovering that old fantasy is pretty awful: Victorian English writers applying the Disney treatment to German fairy tales. I've also seen a few more movies that I should post about. Next month!
House of Leaves, Mark Z. Danielewski (novel): Reads like an homage to Jorges Luis Borges, the Blair Witch Project and poor, poor James Frey. While others have told me it terrified them, I honestly didn't get a scare until a few hundred pages in. And by then I was reading it just to see if anything good would happen. Nothing did, really. I wouldn't recommend it. But then, I know people who absolutely loved the thing, so there's that.
Blindsight, Peter Watts (novel): Quite possibly the best science fiction I've ever read. It's filled with science while retaining its humanity. Which is odd, considering that none of the characters are in the least bit baseline human. A first contact story, both riveting and depressing, packed thick with ideas. Highly recommended.
An Inconvenient Truth (documentary): Al Gore seems to be warmer than in his awful presidential bid, though the off-stage biography bits were unnecessary. Of course, this movie for me is like preaching to the choir. All science points to global warming, and when you graph global temperature versus time, either we're the most unluckiest species to ever live on Earth during an unprecedented outlier, or we're doing something wrong.
Ice Age (film): Awful. The only drawback about my mother-in-laws wonderful visits is picking movies that she'll enjoy. Some of the animation was
nice, but celebrities do not equal voice actors, and action slapstick one-two punches do not equal story.
I'm currently working through Del Rey's new Kull collection and a collection of pre-Tolkien-fantasy-that-influenced-Tolkien-in-some-way. I love Howard's very American approach to heroes. I'm also discovering that old fantasy is pretty awful: Victorian English writers applying the Disney treatment to German fairy tales. I've also seen a few more movies that I should post about. Next month!