Showing posts with label list. Show all posts
Showing posts with label list. Show all posts

Thursday, September 3, 2015

What I'm Reading/Watching

David Simon (creator of The Wire) had a six-episode miniseries that finished last Sunday.  Show Me  a Hero is about the city of Yonkers' response to the court mandated low income housing and the underlying racial tensions this brings to the surface.  It stars Oscar Isaac as councilman/mayor Nick Wasicsko, and has a great cast including Catherine Keener and Alfred Molina.

I also picked up a copy of Harlan Ellison's screenplay for I, Robot.  Those of you only familiar with the 2004 SF/Action/Converse Commercial may not know that Harlan Ellison wrote the original screenplay, which is itself highly regarded as a SF work.  Ellison got into a fight with a studio exec who was giving him notes despite not having read the script and Ellison claims to have "laid hands on" the exec.  Anyway, Ellison was kicked of the project. Later, Irvin Kershner (director of The Empire Strikes Back) was tapped to direct it, and agreed on the condition that Ellison be brought back to the project.  Anyway, the original script is pretty darn great.  It's a bit dated, but only in the sense that it reflects being written in the late 1970s.  


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Thursday, May 14, 2015

What I'm Reading/Watching

Gabriel García Márquez's News of a Kidnapping (1996).  It's a non-fiction account of the abduction of ten journalists and/or their relatives by Pablo Escobar in the early 1990's, tied in with the legal/political framework of the Colombian governments attempts to curb narcoterrorism.  I didn't know much about the subject before reading this book, and Márquez is writing to a Colombian audience, so there are some aspects of the social/political background that aren't immediately apparent to an American audience.  But overall it's a fascinating account of the captivity and political maneuvering surrounding these abductions.


I also read Charles Lee's The Hidden Public (1958) for research.  It's a history of the book-of-the-month club from its inception in 1926 up through 1958.  Lee is clearly a fan of the club, and at times the book reads like an internally produced 'history of our company', but it provides a lot of information clearly and Lee was given access to BOMC's records.

I've just begun Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson's The Illuminatus! Trilogy (1975).  It's pretty hilarious so-far, and seems like a mix of Thomas Pynchon and Douglas Adams (think The Crying of Lot 49 meets The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul).  One of the main characters names happens to be Saul Goodman, which can be a bit distracting, kind of like Homer Simpson in Nathanael West's The Day of the Locust.  Shea and Wilson have Pynchon and Adams's taste for bizarre character names, like Hagbard Celine, Harry Coin, and, no shit, Sasparilla Godzilla (but honestly, is that really much weirder than names like Sauncho Smilax or Dirk Gently).  Even Saul Goodman is a silly name (S'all good, man).


I've also been watching some of the original Twilight Zone series on Netflix.  While there are a handful that get replayed frequently, the rest of the series holds up surprisingly well.  The tenth episode, Judgment Night, is worthy of being a classic.  The twist is expected, but the execution is superb.


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Saturday, January 11, 2014

List of Non-Bestseller Reviews

Book Reviews:

Old Twentieth by Joe Haldeman

Timequake by Kurt Vonnegut

Reasons to Never Return edited by Sara Khayat

Sudden Fiction International edited by Robert Shapard and James Thomas

S. by J. J. Abrams and Doug Dorst

The Bladerunner by Alan E. Nourse and Blade Runner (a movie) by William S. Burroughs

A Political Fable by Robert Coover

1Q84 by Haruki Murakami

A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter Miller Jr.

Wampters, Foma & Granfalloons by Kurt Vonnegut

 Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson

Lucky Alan and Other Stories by Jonathan Lethem

The Fifth Heart by Dan Simmons

Going All the Way by Dan Wakefield

Closing Time by Joseph Heller

Krakatoa by Simon Winchester

 Suttree by Cormac McCarthy

 Mythago Wood by Robert Holdstock

Illusions by Richard Bach

The Cunning Man by Ray Davies

 The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie



Film Reviews:

Dogtooth (2009)

Slaughterhouse-five (1972)

 Destiny Turns on the Radio (1995)

The Truth About Cats & Dogs (1996)

The Cable Guy (1996)

Waiting for Guffman (1996)

Men in Black (1997)

Small Soldiers (1998)

Who's the Caboose (1999)

Chain of Fools (2000)

 Ghost World (2001)

Dr. Dolittle 2 (2001)

Pootie Tang (2001)

 Scary Movie 2 (2001)

Run, Ronnie, Run (2002)

 Martin & Orloff (2002)

 Mr. Holmes (2015)
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Saturday, February 9, 2013

100 years, 94 books

     For this blog I plan, among other things, to read and review every novel to reach the number one spot on Publishers Weekly annual bestsellers list, starting in 1913.  Beyond just a book review, I'm going to provide some information on the authors and the time at which these books were written in an attempt to figure out just what made these particular books popular at that particular time.

    I decided to undertake this endeavor as a mission to read books I never would have otherwise read, discover authors who have been lost to obscurity, and to see how what's popular has changed over the last one hundred years.  I plan to post a new review every Monday, with links, short essays, and the like between review posts.

Here is the list of books I plan to review:

* Books that appear multiple times will be condensed into one post. The review of The Robe, the only book to reach number one on two inconsecutive years (1943 and 1953) will be published under the earlier date.

** Publishers Weekly did not include the Harry Potter books in its listings.  Harry Potter and the Order of the Pheonix was the bestselling book for 2003, and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows was the bestselling book of 2007.  I have decided to go with the official PW list.  This is not due to any bias against Harry Potter (I have fond memories of waiting in line for the midnight release of the final book).  By not counting Harry, I add The Da Vinci Code and A Thousand Splendid Suns to the list.  The Da Vinci Code already appears for 2004.  A Thousand Splendid Suns has a lot less notoriety than Harry Potter, so is more in tune with the mission.


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