I am at work on a list of good X-Files episodes.  It’s mostly done, but I’m thinking of waiting until Eric and I have made it through Season 7.  We’re only watching about half the episodes, so it shouldn’t take us too long.  I just want to make sure I get all the decent ones on there.  I’ll probably post next week and then update if there are any others I decide on.

I was surprised that I didn’t get much reading done on vacation.  I got a huge stack of books from the library when several I’d reserved all came in at once.  But I only read two books the whole trip, and only one was a library book.

Palace Council is Stephen L. Carter’s third book.  Hopefully you remember him from a few years ago when he put out a popular thriller, The Emperor of Ocean Park.  Carter is a law professor but has managed to squeeze out his next two novels surprisingly quickly.  His books all tend to involve overlapping characters, though they don’t fit together as a series.  But they all have very strong ties, since all are about the upper-class African-American society, especially in academia.  The characters are mostly black and very well-educated.  There are murders and conspiracies and in those way Palace Council is no different.  It doesn’t involve a university setting, but it does have many of the same characters and plenty of intrigue.  The big change is that Carter has moved to Harlem in the 50’s and 60’s.  Many of his characters are just children, and it’s the previous generation that we follow.

There are plenty of reasons for me to dislike this book.  I tend to dislike novels where real-life characters like Richard Nixon and Langston Hughes make regular appearances.  I don’t like it when the main character is in love with a woman and can never get over her.  I don’t like novels where the main character is a fabulously successful novelist.  I don’t like books that try to tell me something new about 60’s radicalism and counterculture.  (Only two books have been successful there, American Pastoral, by Philip Roth and American Woman by Susan Choi.  And I’ve read a LOT of 60’s radical books.)  All these things are true of Palace Council, and yet they didn’t bother me the way these things usually do.  Carter is a nimble storyteller and he manages to avoid many of the pitfalls that go with the territory. His books just make you keep turning and turning pages.

Still, the novel has many of the flaws of the previous ones.  The conspiracy manages to get less clear as you go on, when it should be making more sense.  You never really get all the characters straight.  It leaves you feeling rather unsatisfied when all is over and done with.  But I’d put it as his second best.  New England White, from last year, is probably still my favorite.  It just felt more solid, more grounded in his characters and in touch with who they were.  He also didn’t seem to be trying as hard to cover so much ground.   Still, they’re all good reads, much better than most of the thrillers out there.  Carter never talks down to you.  And you can pick up any one of the three books without knowing anything about the others and get through it just fine.  In fact, I got through all of Palace Council without realizing I’d been introduced to the major characters from the two other books along the way.

I also read Tipping the Velvet by Sarah Waters.  I worked my way backwards through her books, starting with The Night Watch, her most recent, and ending with this one, which is her debut novel.  I really enjoy her books, though you could argue that she suffers from the same kind of repetition that Carter does.  In some ways, her books are more predictable.  I knew, while reading Tipping the Velvet, that Nancy, the heroine, would go through plenty of ups and downs, her story would make several unexpected twists and turns, but that she would eventually find the girl of her dreams.  These were all correct predictions.  Still, much of the joy of reading Waters comes from the journey.

Tipping, just like Waters’ other novels, is a period piece.  It’s set around the 1890’s and takes Nancy, a girl who works in her family’s oyster house, and throws her into contact with Kitty Butler, who’s on the stage.  But Kitty is a “masher,” a woman who dresses up as a man and sings men’s songs.  Kitty and Nancy, as you’d expect, fall in love.  And it’s to Waters’ credit that you feel Nancy’s complete and utter investment in the relationship.  You know early on that it won’t end well, she tips her hand there, but you go through all of Nancy’s emotions even as you can see her naivete.  From there, it’s impossible to predict Nancy’s adventures, it certainly didn’t go where I thought it would, but certainly by the end she’s seen nearly all there is to see of lesbian London at the turn of the century.

To some extent, I felt like I was reading Fingersmith, her third novel, over again.  Most of her heroines undergo the realization that they love women instead of men, and this always goes against society’s expectations or even their own comprehension.  There does seem to be a good amount of overlap there.  Still, I have to admit that Waters draws you into her characters so thoroughly and makes her story so innovative that you can’t help but go along for the ride.

If I have to pick a winner, though, it has to be The Night Watch.  Instead of the world of 1860’s (Fingersmith) or 1870’s (Affinity), TNW takes place in and around World War II.  Waters can do pretty much any period, it seems, though the grimy London of her first three books was about as real as it gets.  Her portrait of London during the bombings is completely enthralling.  It also seems to be an effort to move out of lesbian fiction and into a more traditional setting, though there are certainly plenty of gay elements and characters involved.  She also challenges herself by changing the structure of her narrative, moving you backwards in time instead of forwards, which is surprisingly effective.  She manages to have the same kind of amazing reveals as she does in her other narratives.  I think she may have alienated some of her fans, but I’m anxious to reread it to take another look at it now that I’ve seen where she’s come from.

I’m also anxious to see the BBC adaptations of Fingersmith and Tipping the Velvet, which I hear are excellent, if a bit racy.  (Then again, I think that’s the best way to describe Sarah Waters in general.  Though I don’t think her books are nearly as sexual as they seem.  There’s not much that’s graphic in most of them, it’s not that there are actual sex scenes, as there are references to lust and the fact that sex exists.  Certainly there are a few exceptions, though.)

Meanwhile, I am frantically trying to finish Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ‘72 by Hunter S. Thompson, since it’s overdue from the library.

I’m happy that there are a few tv shows back on the air.  Early in the week there’s Mad Men and Weeds, then mid-way there’s a Project Runway boost.  (Although so far, this season of PR seems pretty lackluster.)  I am, of course, thrilled that Mad Men is back on.  I am rewatching season 1 to get my fix.

Movie-wise, I’m a little out of the loop.  Although I was delighted when I found The History Boys on HBO while flipping channels at our hotel.  I do love that movie.  There’s plenty sitting waiting for me to watch here, though, it’s just a matter of getting to it.

I don’t think you get it.  Yes, The X-Files was your show.  You created it.  But I don’t think you ever understood what made your show good.

All the best episodes were written by people who were not you.  Vince Gilligan and Darin Morgan are probably the two best.  Granted, you wrote a few episodes I liked a lot, but all the ones written by you had this lack of finality which seemed to be your trademark.  Twists and turns with no resolutions.  Oh, and let’s not forget the long monologues and the speechifying about truth and belief and blah blah blah.  But you kept the show going for a long time, you were its driving force and all.  But you guys couldn’t let a good thing go.  Instead you turned it into a bad thing. (Do you remember just how bad a thing it was?  It was so bad that even I didn’t see it through to the end.)

Also, you weren’t very good at directing episodes either.  The best ones usually went to Kim Manners or Rob Bowman.  Then again, the show was never really one to take advantage of awesome visuals, but I guess that wasn’t really the style then anyway.

And yet, you both wrote and directed this movie.  Why?  Why did you do it?  Is it because all your buddies turned you down?  Because anybody with brains would have.  Now that I’ve seen the movie, I completely understand why the studio dumped it the week after Batman when no one would notice it.

The first time you made a movie, you let someone else direct it, which was a good idea.  But you still had a hand in writing it, and it shows.  But you also had to work the movie into the series, so I’m sure it wasn’t just you coming up with it yourself.  You had a rhythm, you had context.  And the first movie was good, it had a lot of crossover appeal.  And it was good for many of the reasons the series was good.  It had a light touch to make up for the overly heavy stuff every now and then.  That was also one of the defining traits of the series.

Here’s the thing.  I think you think the show was all about those so-called mythology episodes.  And yes, those were the ones we got really excited about back in the day.  Probably because we were stupid and naive and thought we’d be able to figure something out.  We never did.  And they don’t hold up now.

I have converted many a roommate to your show.  I got my whole family into it.  (It was a challenge, believe me, the first episode we watched at my house was The Host, you know, the one with the fluke-man.  Still perhaps the grossest one ever.  I’m amazed it even got turned on a second time.)  I have even turned on my current roommate, who also happens to be my husband.  He never saw the show and we’ve worked our way through it.  Most of your episodes now feel flat and uninteresting, but there are plenty of other people’s episodes that spark with life.  I’ve watched plenty of them over the last few months.  That may be why I’m uniquely qualified to tell you just how terrible the second movie was.

It was really terrible.  I came in expecting something along the lines of an average episode.  But it was like one of the bad episodes.  There were a handful every season.  And this was so one of them.  It wasn’t the kind of thing that only a fan would appreciate.  I don’t see how anyone could appreciate it, and I think fans will hate it even more.  Because we deserve better.

You destroyed a once-awesome show, and this is how you try to win us back?  I am going to have to go home and watch Bad Blood over and over again just to wash the terrible-ness out of my brain.  (We can all agree Bad Blood was the best episode, right?  Luke Wilson, Mulder’s slide show, the magic fingers bed, Scully’s endless autopsies.  “It wasn’t even real cream cheese, it was light cream cheese.”)

You had so much potential.  You could have made a post-series franchise!  You could have just made us a monster-of-the-week episode every couple years and get a decent box office take!  We would’ve loved you for it!  Instead you give us drivel?  Worse, drivel where Mulder and Scully have a relationship that makes no sense and is never explained?

There was little of the paranormal.  (One psychic doth not an X-Files episode make.  In fact, psychics rarely played a significant role.  The ones that did were often unusual.  Like Clyde Bruckman, the most well known, or the photographer in Tithonus.  And we won’t even get in to the stuff at the end.)  There was no significant banter between the characters.  There was only a glimpse of Skinner.  No good villain and no real motivation.  No monsters, no aliens, just XZibit?  Really?  And you’re going to add yourself to the endless list of movies where Amanda Peet stars, but does practically nothing of interest?  (Seriously, Amanda, what is up with your career?  You are cute and spunky, why do you waste it?  Is it just that since you’re married to the hunky and awesome writer David Benioff that you don’t feel the need to rub it in our faces?)

You couldn’t even give us a decent manhunt or serial killer.  Not to mention the litany of reasons why the whole thing made no sense.  Scully notices something on a toxicology report that the army of FBI agents missed?  Really?  Because if they’d been actual FBI agents, they would have found the killer based solely on that one piece of information and done it a heck of a lot faster than the movie did.

But really, the movie was just boring.  It reeked of all those annoying Chris Carter habits.  The speechifying, of course, worst of all.  We get it, Scully is religious and Mulder will believe anything.  But you didn’t even give us the kind of back-and-forth that is standard for any given episode.  We didn’t get Scully providing rational explanations while Mulder sets out irrational ones.  And you can’t have an X-Files without following your own formula.

It was like you sat down with all this soul-searching in your head and just forgot about plot and character development and oh, you know, the people who actually pay to sit through your movie.  Mostly I am hoping that David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson, who seem to be relatively smart and capable actors, were contractually obligated to do the movie, instead of reading this script full of drivel and saying, “Gee, this sounds like something I’d like to get involved in!”  Let’s let them get back to their soft-core Showtime series and their fancy gig at Masterpiece Theater and leave them in peace.

I hate to have such a great show end badly FOR THE SECOND TIME, but okay, fine, if that’s how you want to do it.  I think your punishment should be never working in Hollywood again, for one.  But for the real kicker, I think you should be strapped down and forced to watch the last two seasons of the show on an endless repeat.

I mentioned a couple posts ago how it bothers me how few women you see in film these days.  It’s one of those things that never stops throwing itself in my face, especially in the middle of summer with its super-male super-heroes.  There aren’t enough women writing and directing in Hollywood, so we end up with a lot of the same stuff, guys being guys and women dealing with it.

So, a couple of links are in order to at least pretend that people care.  Even if nothing changes.

First, this great write-up at Salon on Scully from The X-Files.  (The 2nd movie comes out Friday.)  The show never let gender roles define it, if anything it went the other way exactly.  It’s no coincidence that I spent most of my high school years planning to join the FBI and be her.  (I actually took the test after law school.  Passed.  And I was one of about five girls in the room.  I could have been there right now, except I realized that the next step was to go to Virginia and pass the fitness test.  Wait, you mean I have to do sit-ups?  No, just joking.  See, that was a little send-up of the female stereotype thing.  Yes, very witty.  No, actually it was because I didn’t want them to tell me where to live for the rest of my life.)

Second, this awesome interview with Teri Garr.  She looks backat her career, but it’s women’s issues that really come to the forefront.  And she’s convincing.  She’s even made me admit that Tootsie, one of my favorite movies, is actually pretty anti-woman.  She’s also hilarious, which helps.

So now that we’re a little more than halfway through the year, I thought I’d make a little best-book list.  Mostly, I think I’m going to have a very very hard time in December making a Top 10 book list, because I’ve read a pretty good amount of good books.  Plenty of not-good books, but enough good ones that it will be a tough call.  To make it a bit easier for me later, I’m going to compile the best so far, in no particular order.  (Also, the list doesn’t involve anything I read over again, only first-time reads.)

1. The Road by Cormac McCarthy.  I’m generally Oprah-resistant, but they’re making a movie which means I have to read the book first.  At first, this novel felt like it had ADD.  Very jumpy and quick, all in little bursts.  I had a hard time for a while, but once I settled into it I liked it a lot.  It’s a new direction for McCarthy and I approve.  However, if you haven’t read McCarthy before, I recommend starting with something lighter, since this book is about as dark as it gets.
2. On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan.  McEwan is kind of an easy add.  He’s one of the best writers living, I think.  (Though many argue with me on that.)  Not his best book, but it does very well what he wants, which is to look at a single evening which goes horribly wrong and to pick apart just how it got there.  I was very involved with both characters, and seeing them misinterpret and misunderstand was very heartwrenching.
3. Lush Life by Richard Price.  I love Richard Price.  I was ecstatic when I saw he had a new book.  All the things that bother me about crime fiction don’t apply to Richard Price because he gets everything exactly right.  He is like Law & Order on speed.  Clockers probably still remains his masterwork, but Lush Life takes an amazing look at the Lower East Side.  Most impressive isn’t just his dead-on accuracy, but the way he manages to juggle so many characters, but have you completely with him the whole way.
4. Howards End by E. M. Forster.  It’s not a new book, by any means, but it’s one I read this year and really loved.  I saw the movie first, and then went ahead and watched A Room With a View, too, which was a stupid idea because the books are always better.  Forster literally wrote the book on the novel, and you can see why.
5. In the Woods by Tana French.  I could write a love letter to this book.  Can all mysteries be this solid?  Please?  Because I was so wound up in this one.  None of it felt artificial, and the characters were so strong.  Also, the mystery wasn’t bad, either.
6. The Philosopher’s Apprentice by James Morrow.  This book is one of the reasons I’m making this list.  I’m apt to forget it in a few months, but it was a lovely crazy read.  Satire is hard to find these days, and this was really good satire.  I felt kind of like I was reading Voltaire.
7. PopCo by Scarlett Thomas.  This book has secret codes.  What more can you ask for?  Also, I think I already wrote a love letter to it in a previous post.
8. Breakable You by Brian Morton.  The kind of novel that sounds boring, but reads like a dream.  I really admire how much Morton gets every one of his characters.
9. Tie between Under the Skin by Michel Faber and A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess.  I read these around the same time but they’re kind of linked in my head.  UTS is a very strange and weird book, but one that stuck in my head.  ACO is described in much the same way.  It’s also one of those literary sins of omission that’s been weighing on me, so that’s off my shoulders.
10. The Astonishing Adventures of Fan Boy and Goth Girl by Barry Lyga.  No one should underestimate YA fiction.  I loved this book a lot.  More than anything I can think of reading lately, it reminded me of how you actually feel in high school.

Honorable Mentions:

• Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln by Doris Kearns Goodwin.  I didn’t include non-fiction in the list, but this was a really fabulous book.  I learned a lot about the Civil War, and a lot about Lincoln.  It was also really fascinating and satisfying, despite its size.
• The Spellman Files by Lisa Lutz and The Girl Who Stopped Swimming by Joshilyn Jackson.  Both writers are fun and effervescent.  It’s my third by Jackson, and if you haven’t read gods in Alabama, you should find it right away.
• The Uses of Enchantment by Heidi Julavits.  Julavits has a very particular style that can be frustrating, it’s all bendy and twisty and you never really find out what you want to.  But she’s good.
• A Pale View of Hills by Kazuo Ishiguro.  As I said in a previous post, I have to re-read this one to get the full effect, so give it some time.

Update: I made an episode of Filmspotting again!  And this time Eric also gets on, sort of.  The episode number is 219 and it can be downloaded on iTunes or the filmspotting website.  Cue it to about 20:00 in.

Small things first.  I read A Pale View of Hills, Ishiguro’s first novel.  This more than most other books I’ve read is the kind I think is probably best on a second reading.  Ishiguro is so good at pulling you through his narrative that it’s easy to miss the subtlety as well as the beauty of his writing.  And he’s good for his patented twist ambiguous ending, which makes you want to revisit the whole thing to see if things were as you thought they were.  There is nothing I love more than an unreliable narrator and there’s a doozy of one here.  The book is very dark, it’s about a woman from Nagasaki after the bomb has gone off, who now lives in England.  She reflects back on her life in Japan as she thinks about the recent suicide of her adult daughter.  So yeah, dark.  But so lovely.  I think it’s a good intro to Ishiguro for anyone who’s unacquainted with his work and doesn’t want to read Remains of the Day.

I’ve been playing along with the recent filmspotting marathon of classic heist movies.  We’re halfway through and so far I have learned that committing a heist is not a very good idea.  The best so far was definitely Rififi, or Du Rififi Chez Les Hommes, in the original French title.  (It basically means Rififi Among the Men, and Rififi is supposed to mean a kind of brutal streetwise-ness.)  As heist movies go, they don’t get a whole lot better.  You’ve also got an extra tragic dimension here that makes it feel a bit Shakespearean, which is saying something.  Great actors, and a really amazing heist sequence.  One thing that bugs me about heist movies is that the actual heists always feel like you could never really pull them off.  You know, like Ocean’s 11 stuff, where they seem to have limitless resources and incredible luck.  Rififi’s heist involves a group of guys whose resources are limited and it also shows you how they think through some of the more difficult parts, such as how to deal with the alarm system.  (Perhaps my favorite scene in the film.  Who says methodical stuff has to be boring?)  Mostly, these criminals are very very patient.  The famous heist scene is over 30 minutes long and has no dialogue and no music.  But you really believe it.  Apparently the film was banned in Mexico after several copycat robberies.

Now, if you’ve managed to make it this far, you’ll be treated to what may be a rant based on our trip to see The Dark Knight last night.  It is spoiler-heavy, so if you plan on seeing it, I’d stop reading.  First of all, let me say, I like the movie.  I thought it was expertly made and is the kind of thing Hollywood should be giving us a lot more often.  It answers a lot of my complaints about something like Iron Man, which was plenty of fun but lacked a sense of grandeur, decent camera work, any moral struggle, and a villain.  All these things are more than prevalent in TDK, but while I appreciate the Nolan’s raising the bar, I think they got a little tangled up along the way, if you don’t mind my mixing metaphors.

There are some things I really can’t complain about.  Like how Christian Bale is given very little to do.  That’s pretty much par for the course when it comes to superheroes, and he had plenty to do in the last one.  And how there were only three women who showed up for more than 30 seconds but one died, one was bad, and the other spent all her on-screen time crying.  (It’s not that I can’t complain about the lack of women, it’s more that this is a problem in every single movie that comes out, and this isn’t really the one to zero in on and complain about.  Especially since they brought in Maggie Gyllenhaal, who I really like.)  And I won’t really complain about the action sequences, even though you know in your heart the last one with that sonar stuff was totally lame.

The first thing that gets me is that the Nolan’s can do dark, but they don’t seem to get light.  And the first 20 minutes or so of the movie has a lot of introductory moments that attempt to be jaunty and fail miserably.  The two brief courtroom scenes were among the worst I’ve ever seen in any movie.  I know I’m a lawyer and courtroom scenes are bound to bother me, but these were really that bad.  They also failed at their main objective: to humanize and flesh out Harvey Dent.  As the most important new character, we needed to get a sense of who he was.  All I sensed from the early scenes was that he was a jackass.  I couldn’t see why Rachel saw anything in him, and I wasn’t terribly invested in him.  Plus, there’s always a problem when you already know a character is going to turn bad.  (Anyone remotely familiar with Batman mythology knows Two Face and his coin.  Although I bet you Christopher Nolan was pissed off when he saw the similar coin scene in No Country for Old Men, that was the first thing I thought of every time.  “Friendo.”)

Second, I get that the Joker’s thing is to mess with people’s heads.  This started out well and worked for about half the movie.  Then they started throwing in all this emotionally manipulative stuff that left me feeling (again) less invested.  Two people on a phone where you know only one of you will be saved?  And you’re going to make me watch this whole tearful conversation?  Really?  Is this a Lifetime movie?  But that was nothing compared to the stunt with the ferries which just made me want to fast forward.  I don’t want to watch the moral dilemmas.  I don’t want to watch them struggle with the thought of murder or death, and they stretched it out as long as they could possibly manage.  It’s boring and it’s manipulative.  Especially when the beginning of the film has so many instances of gleeful destruction and death.  You can’t have it both ways.  If you have those dilemmas, you have to treat them with a careful hand or else you end up moralizing.

And that is my third and final problem with the film.  All the speeches.  Good Lord, the speeches.  Speech from Batman, speech from Alfred, speech from Morgan Freeman, speech from Joker, speech from Aaron Eckhart (BYU alum!), speech from the mayor (the guy from Lost), and speech from Commissioner Gordon.  Can we get enough of the speeches already?  Do you have to hit me over the head with a frying pan to explain to me how good and evil works?  Because you really don’t.

Put together, those three things put together turned the film into something rather bloated and squishy at the times when it should have been smooth and sleek.  A slight rewrite and a better edit would have made this the hands-down best superhero movie ever.  As it is, I like it a lot, but I’m not sure I’m going to want to sit through it again.  I think reading Nietzche might be a more uplifting experience.  Compared to Iron Man, its polar opposite, at least that film is something I could have fun with more than once.  But I will say that had the movie not had Heath Ledger it would have been nowhere near as good.  He carried the whole thing and he was awesome.  I wonder how they’re going to find a decent villain to match ever again.

Reading-wise, it’s been a dark week or two.  There was Duma Key, which I wrote about in my previous entry.  What it lacked in style, it made up in creepiness.  It was followed by Trauma by Patrick McGrath.  This one wasn’t really that creepy, but it was pretty dark.  It was a real disappointment, though.  I’ve been waiting for a new Patrick McGrath book for a long time.  A couple years ago I read his book, Asylum, which was a twisty gothic psychological historical thriller.  It was loads of fun.  (Now that I think about it, it’s a lot like Angelica, one of my favorite books from last year.)  Trauma seemed like it might be twisty, but then wasn’t.  It seemed like it might be interesting, and then it wasn’t.  It didn’t have the same air of suspense or horror or… I don’t know.  It was set in New York in the 70’s, and it just never seemed to transcend the real, which is kind of important for the stuff he writes.  It was too short and too dull.  I was quite sad.

I finally finished The Unconsoled, which was a crazy experience in the surreal.  I never got my big reveal, but I’ve made my peace with it.  I really admire the book, I admire what he was trying to do, even if it’s not my favorite book to read.  After all, painting, sculpture, dance, and film are all media where the surreal flourishes.  So why is it that we have such a hard time with experimental literature?  I don’t think anyone can disagree that The Unconsoled is most like a very long and strange dream.  That he uses the strange elements of a dream to ground the book in something you can understand, even though it’s not somewhere that’s very comfortable.  I also did a bit of reading afterwards and felt very pleased when I saw more about how people felt on its themes.  There was a very clear message if you looked, the idea that emotion and relationships can get lost in the chaos of the day to day.  There were also some interesting ideas about different characters all representing the same person.  It’s the kind of book you could write and write about, I would have liked it quite a lot in my day when I enjoyed taking home whole books of criticism.  College classes in modern fiction should certainly add it to their lists.  There’s no doubting that Remains of the Day is such a masterpiece that Ishiguro may never surpass it.  But The Unconsoled is a very different and very gutsy book, which in its own way is worthy of attention.  I admire Ishiguro more for having the guts to do it.  (Which is probably good because Eric is still pissed at him for the ending of Never Let Me Go.)  I’m going to try and find Ishiguro’s first two books at the library, I’ve read his four most recent.  And I think Eric will actually make an attempt to read Remains when we take our trip in a couple weeks.  While it doesn’t seem quite appropriate to read a stuffy British novel about a stuffy British butler on a beach, it’s better than nothing. (I have designs to finally get him to read A Prayer for Owen Meany, which is one of my favorites.)

And finally, after crazy and dark and disorienting, there was all three together in House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski.  A crazier book I have never read.  I think I am safe in saying that.  The closest runner-up is The Magus by John Fowles, a very favorite of mine, but one that doesn’t quite take it’s craziness to the level of sheer and total insanity.  To get an idea, you can go to this page and see a particular piece in the middle of the book.  It’s one of the crazier pages, but it’s not that unusual. The little blue box in the middle of the page does have the print backwards, but if it makes you feel better, it’s forwards on the opposite page.  There are footnotes, which are occasionally annoying, but I learned to ignore the citations.  And there is a story within a story within a story, etc.  Mostly, I liked the story on the very very inside.  The story that was captured on film, then written about by Z, and then re-written and written about some more by J.  It was very enthralling and weird and creepy all at the same time.  I didn’t like reading it before bed.

I admit, I’m surprised Eric didn’t find it first.  It seems like the kind of thing he would’ve read years ago.  We are a bit late to the game.  I didn’t fall over loving it, but I was pretty glued to it for a couple days and that is pretty high praise coming from me.  I’m curious to see what Eric thinks.  We’re going to get a copy tomorrow for him to take to the beach.  (We aren’t taking library books, thus we avoid having to worry about getting our library books wet or filled with sand.)

It’s funny that I enjoy kind of scary books.  I think I enjoy kind-of-scary movies, but when it comes to actually scary movies, I don’t.  I would like to, but I am too much of a wuss for my own good.  The other day, Eric and I watched [REC], since I’d heard it was good and he felt like watching something scary.  It was scary.  Scary enough that for several sequences I could not look.  I missed the last 5 or 10 minutes completely.  Much of it was in total darkness, so you can’t really say I missed a lot.  I wish I had the guts to watch scary stuff, but sadly I don’t.  But [REC] had enough story and enough parts in the middle where I could watch, that I was able to enjoy it.  The sad ending to this story is that it is an awesome Spanish flick, which has now been made into what is destined to be a crappy American flick.  Based on the preview, they seem to be outright copying many of the shots, but the main actress (we know her, she was in Dexter) lacks the charisma of the actress in the Spanish version.  She was great.  She had to be, since she carried most of the movie on her shoulders.  Apparently Spain is the place to be for scary movies these days.  Last year they had not just [REC] but The Orphanage, which was also totes scary, but not so bad that I couldn’t watch 99% of it.

If you feel like watching a scary spanish horror movie, [REC] is more along the lines of something like the new version of Dawn of the Dead, which I like quite a lot.  Or like Cloverfield but in a smaller space, and way better actors and writing.  (While it has the same follow-the-camera gimmick as Cloverfield, it’s better executed, and doesn’t make you dizzy or nauseous.  No shaking.)  The Orphanage is more along the lines of an old school scary movie like The Changeling. (I saw them both around the same time and saw definite similarities.)  Though it has some really seriously scary moments, they are the exception and it’s much more of a suspenseful narrative than a shock-you horror flick.  Still, both are recommended by me despite me covering my eyes for portions of them.

I feel like I should stick to sweetness and light for a while, eh?  I have replaced The Unconsoled with Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh for my pre-bedtime reading.  It’s a big literary sin of omission (I have read nothing by Waugh) and I’m enjoying it a lot so far.  I know Waugh is often a humorist, but the little bits of humor still take me by surprise every now and then, just slipped in the narrative.  My only other book from the library right now is an Indian novel that may or may not be depressing.  (My money’s on depressing.)  I need to find something beach-y for our trip.  We’ll be scouring the bookstore tomorrow.

My movie-watching continues to be pretty minimal.  Though this is partly because I’ve had the bad habit of misplacing my netflix dvd’s, thinking I’ve already mailed them, and then finding them days later when I’m wondering why I haven’t had anything in the mailbox lately.  I’ve also had several foreign films lately.  Well, that’s not right.  Actually, I’ve accumulated several foreign films over the last several months that I haven’t gotten around to watching yet.  Right now, sitting, waiting to be seen are Persona, Grand Illusion, Battle of Algiers, and a few others.  I just never feel quite in the mood for them.  My netflix queue promises relief, though.  Miller’s Crossing, the only remaining Coen brothers film I haven’t seen, and The Killing, which is up next in the Filmspotting Classic Heist film marathon.

My netflix queue amuses me.  Coming up now for the most part are movies I put in the queue ages ago.  Next week I’ll probably get In the Name of the Father and My Beautiful Laundrette, both put in months ago when I saw A Room With a View a few months after seeing There Will Be Blood and decided I needed more Daniel Day-Lewis in my diet.  Last month I went through several old noir films when I thought it might be fun to throw some in the queue.  It’s actually kind of a cyclical thing.  I put those noir films in months ago, then after watching The Big Sleep, I went back to the queue and added some more Bogey and Bacall.  So in a few more months I’ll get around to those.  It’s a long queue.

I’ve been doing plenty of reading.  I’m still at work on The Unconsoled.  I believe I’ll finish, but I’m pushing through mostly just to see if Ishiguro’s going to pull a big reveal at the end.  I admit, if he doesn’t, I’ll feel somewhat cheated.  It’s one of the more surreal reading experiences I’ve ever had, and I’m worried that might be all he meant by it.  It feels like a dream.  The main character, Ryder, is a famous pianist coming to an unnamed town for a show.  Except he doesn’t remember coming, he doesn’t remember anything.  He plays along when he talks to people.  And gradually he’ll remember he knows someone, he’ll remember specific things about them.  But it took several chapters for me to realize one of the women he’d encountered was his wife.  I say it feels like a dream because it has so many dream-like qualities.  Being somewhere that is simultaneously unfamiliar and yet you know where you’re going, meeting people you’ve already met but not remembering them, coming up with a backstory in the middle of doing something else, starting in one place and suddenly ending up in another, forgetting what you’d been doing moments before, always being led but never knowing where you’re going.  In some ways things are much clearer now, and yet I still feel mostly lost as I read.  Having read a few other Ishiguro books, I’m banking on the reveal.  There were big reveals in When We Were Orphans and Never Let Me Go.  In some ways, even The Remains of the Day is one big reveal.  But I’m still skeptical the whole thing is a very long exercise.

I just got through Duma Key, the new Stephen King.  I enjoyed it and made it through pretty quickly.  Lisey’s Story, which I read a couple years ago, remains his best.  I was pretty floored by that book and I didn’t expect Duma to measure up.  It didn’t.  But it does show how far he’s come.  It contains many of the things that bug me about King’s books.  Characters who all share the same little verbal tics and jokey asides, often a total lack of character development.  But I enjoyed how he used art as a device in the book, I loved how he put the pieces together, and you’ve got to give it to the man: he knows suspense.  He did an impeccable job of building so you felt gradually more and more unnerved.  I wouldn’t recommend reading it in the dark.

I read another piece of fluff before that, Nineteen Minutes by Jodi Picoult.  I called this research.  Because I’m thinking of comparing myself to Picoult in the eventual query letters I’m hoping to send out should I finish the novel.  (Finished Chapter 7 today.  It was a long time coming.  I’m now at 30,000 words, which means I’m about a third of the way through.)   Her books often involve female characters, she has kind of a formula, inserting multiple parties into controversial situations and covering them from all sides.  I’m planning to get through a couple more of hers, and it’s helpful to see where I fall on the spectrum with her and others like Laura Lippman.  I get annoyed with Picoult’s twists (this is only the second book of hers that I’ve read, but both shared an annoying last-minute twist).  I saw this one coming about a mile away.  Or rather a couple hundred pages away.  One throw-away sentence and I immediately knew what was really up.  Maybe I’m getting too good at this?

Happily, I’ve heard Tana French’s new book is out in the US now.  She wrote In the Woods, which may remain my favorite book so far this year.  Just everything a mystery should be.  I doubt the library will get it in before our vacation in a few weeks, but I can hope.

At my last library trip, I also picked up some Evelyn Waugh and Hunter S. Thompson.  Trying to broaden my horizons and I’ve never read any of either of them.  Another Brian Morton, too.  Hopefully I’ll make some good headway this week.  It’s always a little hard to move into something more substantial after you’ve been playing in the fluff.  Wish me luck.

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