“In the provincial world of Austen’s novels, small-mindedness is among the greatest of personal and social follies, for which an expansive library serves as a counterbalance. Darcy’s fetching library serves as metaphor for a variety of qualities in a marriage partner today which might counteract contemporary excesses and limitations: broad-mindedness in an age of identity politics and narrow partisanship, integrity in an era of brutal pragmatism, strong work ethic in a culture of shortcuts, steadiness in a swirl of passing fancies. While countless other qualities might substitute for those represented by Darcy’s library, these attracted me to my husband and have deepened my love for him more over the years. Not to mention the fact that he built me my own library, and its shelves are overflowing.”
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.
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.
Instead of buying the film rights to Mad About the Boy, Helen Fielding’s just-released final book in the Bridget Jones trilogy, production companies are instead apparently working on Bridget Jones’s Baby, a film based on an original screenplay by Fielding, which will include Colin Firth. Er….wise choice I suppose? RT
Castle head writer Andrew Marlowe and his co-writer wife are working on an hour-long drama for ABC featuring Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe character for ABC. COME TO ME PRECIOUS. RT
The lovely Charity has analyzed every personality type according to a famous fictional character (mostly from sci fi shows, to my great delight). I am Anne of Green Gables (naturally). Who are you? The Doctor? Sherlock? Caroline Forbes from Vampie Diaries? RT
From USA Today’s Happily Ever After, 3 little-known facts about Jane Eyre:
Royal lovebirds love Jane Eyre. No, not Kate and Will. We’re talking about Victoria and Albert, of course! The queen read the book to her prince over the course of many evenings, even staying up quite late because it was “most interesting.” She noted in her diary that Jane Eyre was “really a wonderful book … powerfully and admirably written.” Perhaps Victoria identified with the diminutive heroine. By all accounts, Victoria was plain like Jane, while Albert was not only as worldly as Edward Rochester, but also quite the heartthrob.
Not all of Jane Eyre was fiction. Lowood Institution, that horrible charity school that Jane attended, well, gulp, it really did exist. When The Rev. Patrick Brontë’s wife died, leaving him with five young children, he decided to send his four daughters to the Clergy Daughters School at Cowan Bridge. The students at Cowan Bridge were so cold and malnourished that many of them, including Charlotte’s two sisters, became ill and died. But did their headmaster despair? No, he did not! In fact, he rejoiced because he was sending his students “to heaven.” And what exactly did heaven look like to the girls of Cowan Bridge? Since 70 students were forced to share a one-seat outdoor toilet, the Pearly Gates are probably doors to private commodes.
Jane Eyre‘s Edward continues to inspire. When she wrote Twilight, Stephenie Meyer named Edward Cullen, a vampire, after Edward Rochester, also a slightly creepy hero. Both men are described as depressed and brooding when they arrive on the scene. These tortured heroes frighten the heroines — Bella and Jane, respectively — with their volatility. Both Edwards reject shallow and empty-headed socialites, choosing instead to love two young women who are insecure about their looks. RT
And finally, two exciting trailers. The first is for Lifetime’s high-budget, suave-looking adaptation of Bonnie & Clyde – can’ t be embedded but watch here. The second is for the upcoming and much-anticipated adaptation of John Banville’s The Sea, which stars Ciaran Hinds, Charlotte Rampling, and others in what looks like a story exactly halfway between broodingly literary and grippingly dramatic.
This almost brought tears to my eyes. Philip Graham at The Millions on reading with his son – “Maybe those days of curling up in bed with a story were long gone, but what if we read the same book together silently, side by side, in the living room? If I bought two copies of a novel, we could take on chapter-length chunks each evening and then discuss what we’d just read. Perhaps in this way I could gently lead my son to an appreciation of the deeper internal landscapes that literature offers…The pace of the plot kept us constantly engaged” RT
You go girl. Finally someone speaks the truth. Fit mom Maria Kang on the firestorm of criticism about her photo – “What I WILL say is this. What you interpret is not MY fault. It’s Yours. The first step in owning your life, your body and your destiny is to OWN the thoughts that come out of your own head. I didn’t create them. You created them. So if you want to continue ‘hating’ this image, get used to hating many other things for the rest of your life. You can either blame, complain or obtain a new level of thought by challenging the negative words that come out of your own brain.” RT
Benedict Cumberbatch, who wins ALL THE THINGS, does an amazing Chewbacca Impression. My favorite, though? Harrison Ford’s face. RT
Illuminating post on the clothes behind the fall’s best comedy. “Mindy’s personal style is a lot more edgy, and Mindy on the show is more of a urban hipster. So there are outfits that Mindy Lahiri wears on the show that Mindy Kaling wouldn’t, but I’ve definitely seen Mindy changing it up — she’ll find out where I bought something and get one for herself and add it to her wardrobe. I think that Mindy’s personal style has grown with access to the clothes she has on the show. Much like Sarah Jessica Parker, she was never the fashion plate before “Sex and the City” that she is now.” RT
According to Lifehacker, standing for 3 hours a day works miracles – the equivalent of running 10 marathons a year RT
The SF Chronicle has created a gorgeous Bay Area Literary Map RT
Nothing I love better than a blistering review. Jason Diamond of Flavorwire offers this one – “Franco’s book is exactly what you’d imagine, except maybe a little worse (think: concussed David Foster Wallace fanboy mixes booze and cough syrup before trying to write a novel about how difficult it is to be an actor).” RT
On the other hand, I also love positive, brilliantly written reviews, of which this, of the Joaquin Phoenix film Her -is one – “When Theo asks Amy if he’s a freak for falling into love with Samantha, her response is perfect: “I think anyone who falls in love is a freak. It’s a crazy thing to do. It’s like a socially acceptable form of insanity.” One half of the relationship at the center of Her may lack a physical form, but it is nonetheless a film about the universality of romance: its longing, its intensity, and its transformative power — for the best, and the worst. The outcome of this highly unconventional relationship is warm and funny and tragic, all at once. And so is this very lovely film.” RT
If you had a chance to proofread unreleased Tolstoy works – would you? You know that you would quit your day job. This story from the New Yorker is the stuff of literary daydreams. “That was when they hit on the idea of crowdsourcing, Tolstaya said. “It’s according to Leo Tolstoy’s ideas, to do it with the help of all people around the world—vsem mirom—even the world’s hardest task can be done with the help of everyone.” RT
…and, we’re back to Franco. As much as it pains me to put the man anywhere within rubbing distance of Tolstoy. “Franco offers up less material in that regard than you might think. Hard to make pseudo-intellectual jokes at the expense of a guy who cheerfully made Your Highness. Hard to make dumb-stoner jokes at the expense of a guy who spends so much time pursuing advanced degrees.” RT
Coffee and Irony 