You ever have a day where you’re just…tired? You haven’t had a crazy week. People haven’t burnt you out. Maybe no reason at all. You’re just…tired. And all you want to do is go home and curl up someplace warm and safe.
I love these bedrooms for that reason. Bedrooms are almost always my favorite part of any house – it’s the one place where personality can come out the most, and it’s the place of refuge and individualism, peace, hideaway. These bedrooms have elements of boho chic, minimalist, and rustic.
Celeste Ng at The Millions highlights 5 Series You Probably Missed as a Kid (But Should Read as an Adult). I’ve read half of these and HIGHLY recommend them, especially Half Magic, and am adding the other half to my to-read list. RT
Gorgeous, heartbreaking. David Mitchell on translating an autistic Japanese teen’s memoir, and his own son’s autism. “The conclusion is that both emotional poverty and an aversion to company are not symptoms of autism but consequences of autism – its harsh lockdown on self-expression and society’s near-pristine ignorance about what’s happening inside autistic heads.” RT
The ‘verse has been ablaze with the ending of Veronica Roth’s Divergent series (which is a great series, by the way. Veronica Roth speaks out. I think she made a brave choice. But I would have hated her for it had I found out only upon reading the book. RT
More The Millions’ goodness, making me want to re-read Colm Toibin’s The Master, which I read prior to reading Henry James. “He feels love profoundly, for women and men alike, but he can’t act on it in any way that might compromise his freedom as an artist, and instead he pours out his love for them in his novels after they’re dead. That, in this case, his love for Minny Temple gave us The Portrait of a Lady may be enough for some. It isn’t for me. As much as I care about books, I think people matter more in the end.” RT
Surprisingly, according to this roundup of reviews for it via Entertainment Weekly, it appears that the star-laden The Counselor was a very bad film. RT
1. Heirs. I haven’t watched a Korean drama in a straight two years, but when I heard that my favorites Lee Min Ho, of the charisma and the bushels of talent, and Park Shin Hye, of the adorableness and expressive face, were being paired together, I knew I had to get on that. Heirs has made me fall madly for it; the romance is wistful and delicate and achingly addicting – it’s the small moments that get me, like him watching her sleep, or the two sitting on opposite sides of a winecellar wall, both lost in thought, the wall a visual symbol of how two people can be physically close yet find each other so hard to reach. You can watch all aired episodes so far on Dramafever.
2. The Thin Man. I picked up a vintage copy of Dashiell Hammett’s famous hardboiler (yes I just coined this, why should “potboiler” exist and not “hardboiler”?) at a book sale this weekend, and a fourth of the way in am highly enjoying it. Nick and Nora Charles are a wealthy socialite couple in New York for Christmas. Nick, a former ace detective, left that life behind when he married Nora and devoted himself to running the various businesses she was left heir to by her family. The couple are blithely in love and live in a breezy flurry of cocktail parties and social events, but are left ever so slightly bored by it. So when a murder turns up practically on their doorstep Nora pushes Nick to get involved, and in between throwing back a drink every other page, he manages to do some able detecting. Some people find this book hilarious, but I find it more endearing than anything. Also, best opening line of all time surely – “I was leaning against the bar in a speakeasy on Fifty-second Street, waiting for Nora to finish her Christmas shopping, when a girl got up from a table where she had been sitting with three other people, and came over to me.”
3.Seattle Chocolates. This stuff is delicious, y’all, particularly the Rainier cherry – I generally don’t like either cherries or pecans but somehow the blend in this chocolate bar is just perfect, rich and fruity and chocolatey and wildly addicting.
This will be a quick review as I don’t have much time today, but – COMPLETELY riveting. It’s a superbly well-done thriller that manages to surprise every time you think the twists have already happened. What really stands out however is the strength of the character development – Blomkvist and Salander are fascinating, charismatic, fully-sketched figures who leap off the page and feel readily identifiable despite the uniqueness (on Salander’s part anyway) of their upbringing and profession. It is at times also a very dark novel – a thread of fury at violent crimes against women runs through the novel and finds a voice occasionally in graphic depictions of said violence – but this is a thoroughly impressive and completely gripping novel with a strong sense of worldbuilding and the dialectics between good and evil. Well worth the read.
So much goodness on Pajiba today summarizing 2015 films –
Avengers: Age of Ultron — The sequel to the third highest grossing film of all time, built inside one of the most successful cinematic universes of all time is obviously a slam dunk. The fact that James Spader — one of the most wry, deadpan actors in Hollywood — is playing the villain, and will voice Whedon’s ultra-wry dialogue only makes it that much more compelling. The addition of Elisabeth Olson (as the Scarlet Witch) and Aaron Taylor-Johnson (as Quicksilver) doesn’t hurt, nor does our expectation that Whedon will likely kill off a character. For maximum devastation, it should be Tony Stark, but I suspect cooler heads (and Marvel’s money bags) will prevail, meaning it’ll be someone like Pepper Potts. Bah!
Star Wars VII — Here’s what we know about Star Wars VII: It will be a continuation of the series that will pick up 20 to 40 years after Return of the Jedi. J.J. Abrams will direct. Simon Kinberg and Lawrence Kasdan are tasked with screenplay duties. Carrie Fisher, Harrison Ford and Mark Hamill will almost certainly return. Chewbacca is probably in it. Saoirse Ronan has auditioned for a role, but according to her, “so has everyone.” John Williams will compose the score. It will be filmed in the UK.
That’s essentially all we know, and the less we know, the more we will anticipate the return of the most successful sci-fi series of all time under the leadership of a director who is bound to improve upon George Lucas’ last trilogy. RT
Film School Rejects covers the new Star Wars writers more in depth – “Kasdan, by contrast, has moved from mere consultant to lead writer, and that should instill great confidence in anyone interested in a return to form for the Star Wars universe. Sure he co-wrote Dreamcatcher, but in addition to it being a fairly shitty source novel do you know who the other co-writer on the screenplay is? William Fucking Goldman. That’s right. The man behind The Princess Bride, Misery, All the President’s Men, Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid, Marathon Man, and more co-wrote the script for Dreamcatcher.” RT
Really really gorgeous Hook/Emma video starring the couple that has the TV-watching interwebs ablaze.
Brilliant article from Daniel Carlson on modern TV-watching. “I fight every day my desire to have everything be awesome and interesting and delivered on time and flawless and surprising and perfect. (I’m a Willenial.) Everything is go go go, now now now, this must be great and witty and dark or dark-lite or winking and self-reflexive and ready to be chopped into gifs. It has to be totes the best, or I just can’t even. It has to make you feel feels. It has to make you do all sorts of things that look like emotion but are in fact disguised methods of dissection. And God help me, sometimes I fall for it.” RT
And finally, quite a decent introduction to the history and style of Bollywood films from my friends over at LAAF. RT
The library didn’t have #1 in the Graceling series, but as I heard they’re only very loosely linked, I went ahead with #2.
I enjoyed this immensely. The world-building is fairly similar to George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones and many other fantasy novels of the like, in that it’s built mostly on a medieval world of lords, ladies, courts, and stone castles, (and winter. is there some kind of rule that 70% of fantasy novels take place in winter?). Fire is the only human monster left in the world populated by humans and animal monsters. Unlike the animal monsters, she is intelligent, and she has essentially a human form, but she’s also gifted (or cursed) with two un-human qualities: an otherworldly, spellbinding beauty, and the ability to read, and influence, the minds of other living creatures (both animal and human).
This has the same emotional intensity, romantic center, and driving pace of plot as Cecilia Dart Thornton’s Bitterbynde novels, and for those I liked it very much indeed. Said plot is a little threadbare – one of the reviewers I read was completely right in saying that this oddly skirts around both young adult and adult camps without really falling into either. As far as emotional complexity and the unabashed, frequent references to very dark topics such as rape, this definitely falls in the adult camp. But the simplicity of the plot and world-building pull it back into YA, where overall it fits more comfortably I think. This is not at all an experimental or unique book, but it is BEAUTIFULLY realized and vivid and its characters leap off the page. Gripping enough that I finished it in one night. Definitely recommend for any fans of Thornton, McKinley, or Suzanne Collins.
Gorgeous. Thomas Beller writes about watching his daughter discover (and undiscover) books in The New Yorker – “A moment later, I tossed her Rilke’s “Letters to a Young Poet.” I walked out of the room to make breakfast, and glanced back to see her examining the cover. When I returned, she was outside, looking for worms, wearing a shirt of mine to keep warm. I watched as she bent down to inspect the earth. She stood up to remove the shirt and, with the impeccable logic of childhood, gently spread it over the moist, muddy ground and stood on it to keep her feet dry.” – RT
Jhumpa Lahiri in the NYT on perfect sentences – “I remember reading a sentence by Joyce, in the short story “Araby.” It appears toward the beginning. “The cold air stung us and we played till our bodies glowed.” I have never forgotten it. This seems to me as perfect as a sentence can be. It is measured, unguarded, direct and transcendent, all at once. It is full of movement, of imagery. It distills a precise mood. It radiates with meaning and yet its sensibility is discreet.” RT
Hilarious. Dalia Lithwick of Slate decides to wear Axe for an entire week. “Sunshine. Harps. It was the most sublimely powerful fragrance experience of my adult life. Truly. After decades of smelling like a flower or a fruit, for the first time ever, I smelled like teen boy spirit. I smelled the way an adolescent male smells when he feels that everything good in the universe is about to be delivered to him, possibly by girls in angel wings.” RT
Sherlock returns!! “Sherlock, Season 3″ — Sundays, January 19-February 2, 2014, 10:00 p.m. ET — Benedict Cumberbatch (The Fifth Estate, Star Trek Into Darkness) and Martin Freeman (The Hobbit, The Office UK) return as Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson in three new 90-minute episodes – “The Empty Hearse” (January 19), “The Sign of Three” (January 26) and “His Last Vow” (February 2) – of the contemporary reinvention of the Arthur Conan Doyle classic, written and created by Steven Moffat (Dr. Who) and Mark Gatiss (Game of Thrones). – via PBS
And finally, Captain America: The Winter Soldier Teaser!
I read this YA novel in an hour flat sitting at the library. And –
Ugh. The appeal of this fantastically titled book with a quirky cover design pretty much begins and ends with said title and cover design. This is boring and frankly surprisingly ordinary given the dramatic nature of the premise, all rife with possibility and comedy. Ruby Oliver is at the end of her rope and in denial about it after a series of unfortunate (though not particularly unusual) events happen to her causing her to lose her boyfriend and her social life and become temporarily a social outcast. So her overprotective parents – volatile comedian mother and abstracted plant-obsessed father – send her off to therapy. Where her therapist instructs her to make a list of all the boys she’s ever liked and thus Ruby’s story (such as it is) unfolds over the course of 11 therapy sessions.
Couple problems: Ruby’s problems are not at unusual – her ex dumps her for another girl, she attempts to get him back, has lots of drama with her girlfriends, etc – and therefore not innately interesting, though really good writing could have covered that – and two, her “boyfriend” stories are mostly rather dull. Half the boys on the list she had a brief and pointless crush on; there’s only a handful in which the history is genuinely interesting. Her childhood friend, her high school boyfriend, and the boy she encounters toward the very end of the novel are the only three interesting ones, and none of these three is fully developed. Her relationship with her current/high school boyfriend is compelling and achingly real at times, but it’s given neither full development nor a resolution, it just sort of peters out. And while this is reflective of real life sometimes, it wasn’t replaced with any other element. She has a few brief exchanges with the interesting, sarcastic, and refreshingly grown-up Noel toward the end, but he simply fades from her life.
E Lockhart in the final act reaches toward a growing-up story of catharsis and independence with a teen girl leaving the drama of high school behind and embracing her own identity – but tells this rather than shows it, and it simply falls flat. Give this a miss – John Green writes a thousand times more tenderly and eloquently and comically about the obsessive, circular, magical period of discovery that is adolescence.
Coffee and Irony 