Dec

26

Good TV is Hard to Find

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Until recently, I had a lot to do and not much time on my hands.  This meant that Eric and I had a rather limited set of television shows that we would make a point of watching together and a couple we watched separately.  I would hear about other shows but wouldn’t be able to get on board because my dance card was full.  But these days I have nothing to do and nowhere to go and television is a good antidote.  So I’ve been going through back episodes of a bunch of shows I never really watched.  This has mixed results.  My options are not endless, a lot of what I don’t watch I don’t like.  But I am willing to watch something okay but not great if it’s just there to fill up my time, which is my #1 priority right now.  I like having something on while I sit and feel miserable or knit or do sudoku.

My best finds thus far have been shows recommended by other people, usually some time ago but that I’ve finally gotten around to seeing.  My first new favorite is Life, which is on NBC and which I remember seeing ads for and thinking, “No thanks.”  The commercials made it look like something completely different than what it actually is.  It is a police procedural, a genre I’m inclined to like even if they get repetitive.  (I have seen the married-to-two-women plotline on at least 5 different shows like this, for example.)  There is a big over-arching revenge plot, just as they sold it on the ads.  But really, both of those things are secondary to the fact that it’s just a really funny, well-written show.  The actors are good, there’s a great dry humor, and they manage to keep it fresh and interesting from week to week.  Maybe the plots occasionally feel a little stale, but the characters are good enough to keep it moving.

Please watch Life.  We need to keep this show on the air because it is an actual good show.  If you’ve never seen it, it is available on hulu.  It’s mid-season on season 2 right now, you can jump in if you’d like, but I would recommend getting in some of the old stuff.

The other favorite is a brand new one I’ve just started watching and one that JoLee recommended months ago.  It’s Burn Notice on USA.  I wrote off this show mostly because I’m not really down with the basic cable shows.  At least, not thus far.  But Eric and I have gone through the entire show really quickly and I’m very excited for when it comes back on in January.  This show, a spy procedural, has a lot of the same things I like about Life.  Great characters, a lot of humor, and strong writing.  But even more, I’d say Burn Notice consistently delivers good plots from episode to episode, which is really saying something for a show that has a lot to deliver each time.  They’ve found a good formula that works really well, and this is something that I don’t think I can say for any other procedural-style show on television.  I have yet to watch an episode where I get bored.  I have no idea why a major network or a major cable network didn’t jump on this show, but as long as it’s on I’m happy.

Mostly, I’ll be happy when regular shows come back on.  Right now I’m having to survive solely on old episodes of shows and it gets repetitive to work your way through a season hour after hour.  I’ve gone through all of Bones (better than I expected, though occasionally they mess up their long-term plot lines really badly), I’m on the second season of The Unit (also better than expected, but the constant maudlin woman-friendly stuff gets really old), and whatever else I run into I get into but it will be nice when I have different things to watch every day.  And, of course, any recommendations of things on or off the air are welcomed.

Dec

19

Gifts

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There’s already been a good solid month or so of end-of-the-year lists.  Mine won’t be up for a while.  I just brought home 5 more books from the library today and I intend to give them their chance just like all the others.

However, there’s been a troubling turn of events.  My library request queue has only one book!!!  In the last two weeks, I’ve had nearly 10 of my holds come in practically simultaneously.  Ones I made just the other day as well as ones I’ve had for months.  Crazy.  But this means that I need recommendations.  Must get the list going again.  Any books you’ve enjoyed recently, particularly new ones, are welcome.

I’ve just come back from completing my family Christmas shopping.  Books and movies make up the vast majority of my gift-giving this year, which shouldn’t be a surprise.  I’m particularly pleased with my two book selections and now I’m going to be antsy to see if they are well received.  (For his birthday, I gave my brother Battle Royale and Oryx and Crake, both of which I hear he loved, so I have a high bar to meet.)

I also managed another movie showing this week.  I finally caved and went to see Slumdog Millionaire despite the fact that I still haven’t read the book.  (In fact, I still haven’t found the book.  It’s in my house somewhere, I think.  I guess I’ll find it during our upcoming packing spree.)  I wasn’t in a great mood when I went and I wasn’t particularly pumped about the movie–this is mostly due to pregnancy not so much to my general movie enthusiasm.  However I adored the film.  I have nothing to criticize.  Seriously.  Nothing.  Which is crazy.  I enjoy nitpicking even those films I love dearly.  The only criticism I can invent is that it isn’t my favorite movie of the year, I didn’t have the kind of masterpiece experience I had with Wall-E, which I promise will be my #1 since I see no way the remaining contenders can oust it.  But I’d put Slumdog at a solid #3, coming in behind what I expect to be my #2, Let the Right One In.  It’s a weird top 3, but I’m happy with it.

What really gets me about Slumdog is how well it’s put together, both in a technical sense and an emotional one.  Technically, it’s an amazing film to watch.  I know it’s trendy to use all the fast cuts and such, the style made popular by the Bourne movies.  But I often feel whiplash after those films and I never felt that here.  This film managed to whip around you but never leave you feeling lost, in fact there were amazing and gorgeous sights to see along the way.  I also thought the film did a good job of adopting the carefree almost whimsical style that suited the storytelling so well.

The storytelling is mostly astonishing when you look back.  You know it’s good because you never think about it as you go through it.  It’s a story that has sweet highs but astonishing lows.  Looking back, it’s hard to understand how the lows don’t overwhelm the film and take over.  It’s the slums of India.  Nearly every story that takes place there is a sad one.  And yet, the fact that many of these stories are told through our child heroes makes it all have a lightness and an eagerness that keeps the film feeling buoyant and jubilant despite the horrors around.  It’s also a story that is full of cliche, the kind you see in children’s stories.  And yet the whole thing translates well for an adult audience.

Slumdog was my Oscar pick before I saw the movie (yes, I often make picks before I’ve seen the contenders), and now it’s cemented its spot.  It’s got audience appeal, it’s feel-good, but it’s also significantly artistic and beautiful so you can feel like you watched something much more than a popcorn film.  I think Danny Boyle, who I’ve admired for a long time, is yet again proving just how good he is.  In the wrong hands, this could have gone terribly wrong.  Instead, Boyle just pulls it off perfectly and I think he’s got a great shot at the Director award.  The only major movie I have left to see is Doubt, which is finally out so hopefully I’ll get to it soon.

Dec

14

Recent Reading

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My last post made it sound like I was on the verge of jumping out and seeing movies every day.  Sadly, I lacked the energy and haven’t gone once since my last outing.  But I have been reading.

I made the excellent choice of putting the book blog The Millions on my Google Reader.  They’ve had a great feature where authors list their favorite books they read this year.  I like it because it’s a good mix of new and old and it’s been a great resource to add books to my library reserve list, which was dangerously low just a few weeks ago.

Thanks to a birthday gift card (Thanks, Elycia and Lee!) I got two books I’d been wanting from Amazon.  I’ve already read The Other Side of the Island by Allegra Goodman, a futuristic, slightly-Orwellian YA book that perked my interest.  I think Goodman is amazingly talented.  Her recent book Intuition is perhaps the only insightful fiction I’ve ever read about scientists.  I also really liked Kaaterskill Falls, about a small community of Orthodox Jews.  (I’ve read a lot of books like this and it was definitely up there with the best.)  With all those expectations, it’s not surprising I was a little disappointed by TOSOTI.  I think the setup was great, the ideas were inventive, but it was really the wrap-up that got me.  I thought it ended too quickly and too easily without adequately letting our heroine really get into the meat of what was going on.  It felt a little rushed.  It’s a book about a super-organized future society with the kind of 1984-ish rules that get pretty scary.  But I wanted to see more of it than I got to.  For example, one kind of member of this society, the Orderly, is barely mentioned until the end when they suddenly play a major role in the plot.  It was frustrating, since we knew virtually nothing about Orderlies and where they fit in society.  I would have liked a bigger picture and a fuller ending.  Still, Goodman is an impressive writer and I have high expectations for her future work.

I also read another YA book recently called The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks by E. Lockhart.  It is definitely going on my top YA of the year list.  What seems like just your average everyday coming-of-age-in-boarding-school book ends up being a really interesting look at being a girl and what it means and the sacrifices girls often make while they’re deciding who they are.  It has really stuck with me, it was a real romp of a read but I was surprised at just how affected I was by the end.  I loved how instead of just telling a fun story, the author really went somewhere with it and had something significant to say.  YA is a great place to find books these days, though I do find that many settle with simple lessons and moral dilemmas.  This book’s complex issues really made me think about myself without feeling like an after-school special.  I am now going back to some of the author’s previous books and I’m really excited to see what I find.

Finally, I read one of the year’s most successful mysteries, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson.  It was obviously written by a journalist.  There were long dry stretches with information about financial reporting and publishing that really could have used a little editing.  But it was still an impressively built mystery that ended up having about 3 or 4 mysteries for the price of one.  All were well constructed and the plots driven expertly.  I have very little to criticize of the mystery itself.  Except that for a “locked-room” style mystery, there were something like 40 suspects in total and only a small handful were ever seen up close.  Even those remained mostly a mystery.  I personally prefer something like And Then There Were None, where you have a smaller group that you come to know intimately.  If I ever have it in me, you can bet I’ll do a locked-room mystery one of these days.  They’re my absolute favorite.  (Probably because I read ATTWN about 50 times as a kid.  And watched the movie version.)  I appreciated that while the author had some more cliched elements, they never played out in a cliched way.  It worked.

Now I’m in the middle of The Garden of Last Days by Andre Dubus III.  I remember hearing about this when it came out, and I’m betting I put it off because it sounded dismal.  Which isn’t surprising because it is dismal.  And I would have expected it anyway based on his last novel, The House of Sand and Fog, which was also dismal.  Still, now and then a little tragedy isn’t such a bad thing.  I like the book so far, although I prefer brevity to Dubus’s tendency to go on and on and on.  The story seems to be taking place just in one night, with several characters involved.  It’s a pretty long book, so to tell a single night’s story there’s a lot of stuff thrown in that feels irrelevant or unnecessary.  I have a tendency to skim now and then.  But I’m still interested and I have no doubt I’ll finish it quickly, so that’s something.

Maybe one of these days I’ll get to a movie.  But for now I still have several books in a pile waiting for me.

Dec

8

I Get Excited About Movies

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I love December, and not just because it’s my birthday month.  It’s because all the really good movies tend to come out in December and I get to make multiple trips to the theater that almost always go very well.  Since meeting Eric, my December routine has changed just a little.  We both love movies but have differing tastes, and so I go to a lot of stuff during the year that isn’t exactly art-house fare.  We nearly always go to movies together, but in December I often go it alone.  It’s much easier this year since I have virtually the entire month off work and Eric has long hours so he doesn’t have to sit through stuff he thinks is boring.

Today started off my lone-theater ventures.  I saw Milk at the little art theater close to my house.  (Which happens to be owned by a big chain so I can get points when I go and get presents like a free small soda–today’s gift.)  They had it on 2 of their 4 screens, and there was a decent-sized audience considering it was in the middle of Monday afternoon.  I enjoyed the film a lot.  I’m pretty hormonal and I knew going in that it was going to be impossible for me to make it through without getting teary-eyed.  I think it was most affecting to me because Milk was killed almost exactly a year before I was born, and it’s strange to see how much things have changed in my lifetime and how much farther there is to go.

As for the film itself, while I loved the experience and would certainly recommend it as required viewing, I admit there were certainly stylistic disappointments that the critic in me just couldn’t ignore.  I found the story surprisingly clunky, falling into many of the standard biopic traps.  There was too much story, I wish they’d focused more specifically on some of the early campaigns and then broadened the later material so we really got a chance to see Milk in action as a politician instead of just an issues-based character.  The big sweep also meant that many of the supporting characters got short-changed.  I can’t really tell you that Emile Hirsch or Allison Pill were really great or really terrible because there just wasn’t enough of them.  (I guess the fact that I want more of them makes it lean towards the great side.)  And to underuse an actor like Victor Garber, who barely makes an imprint, should be punishable with prison time.  I don’t know how I feel about James Franco or Diego Luna, two actors I really like, who played Milk’s young love interests.  I felt a hesitancy in Franco that seemed to extend beyond the hesitancy of his character, and I think Luna may have played the twitchy a bit too strong.  Neither one was fleshed out, though, feeling more like the lonely wife of your standard biopic than a real person.

I did think Penn was great, although there were a few low points now and then where I found it a bit muddled or a bit too strong, mostly in the early scenes.  (I’m wondering, is this because there’s so much more footage of Milk as a politican later in his career and he’s making up a lot more of the early stuff?)  The best acting, though, hands down, went to Josh Brolin.  I actually felt like I understood a lot of the motivations behind what ended up happening, and that relationship between White and Milk was definitely the most fully fleshed out one.  He makes the character someone you get, even if he’s not sympathetic.

I wish I’d seen more Van Sant in it.  I just watched My Own Private Idaho the other day, which is very heavy on the Van Sant.  I didn’t love it, but I liked what his style and his curiosity.  I wanted more of that here, I wanted more abstract storytelling.  Van Sant certainly handled many parts of the story very well, but I think the script dominated instead of the directing.  The framing device of a narration felt nice initially, but ultimately I didn’t like it.  (I rarely like narration.)  The element of danger it takes in someone’s life for them to seriously fear for their own political assassination is unimaginable, and I felt like it got dropped in much of the story.

Still, despite all my nitpicks, it’s a wonderful film and I think the timing is good.  A lot of people wanted to see it out before election day.  But I think it’s actually better to watch it after election day and the passage of Prop 8, when a lot of people are wondering how we pick up and move forward from that.  I couldn’t stop thinking about Prop 8 during the film, and I think that’s something the film does that we definitely need right now.

This was actually my second movie in 3 days.  Eric took me out to see a movie for my birthday and I was planning to see Milk then until another theater started running Let the Right One In, or as we call it “the Swedish Vampire movie.”  I’ve been really excited for it and Eric liked the trailer so I got him on board.

While Milk was an affecting experience emotionally and politically, Let the Right One In may be my favorite moviegoing experience of the year.  (Besides the fact that I think everyone in our theater was either 18 or drunk–perhaps both–since they tended to laugh at inappropriate times.)  I loved it.  Loved it loved it.  And Eric liked it too which is a bonus.  It’s a movie that involves vampires as a major plot point, and yet it is at its heart a story about growing up and loneliness.  I was often a lonely kid so I can relate, though I find movies often mess up these kinds of stories.  It was nice to see one go well.  The thriller element that the vampire thing brings was certainly done well.  The violence was well spread through the film, not dominating it like a horror film, but sprinkled throughout to give it extra effect.  I also found it strong and affecting without being gory.  I am pretty squeamish so that’s a requirement.  I admit there was one scene where I didn’t watch, but it was more out of a fear of being startled than a concern with gore.

The story at the heart about a lonely young boy who befriends a mysterious girl was sweet and creepy at the same time, which I think was just the right note.  I thought the casting of both kids was spot on.  The boy had the kind of face that made you think he might get teased, and yet he was so guileless that he made a good vehicle to follow the story through.  The girl was amazing.  Usually to make children scary involves a lot of makeup and special effects.  Both are employed here, and yet I felt the girl did so much on her own that the effects weren’t as good as her close-ups.

Technically, it was a beautiful film despite being set in something of a wasteland.  The forests are always filled with snow to the extent that they’re not really pretty but empty.  And much of the action happens in sparse apartments and an empty courtyard.  To make a beautiful film from that can’t be easy.  I also thought the storytelling was deftly handled.  The novelist wrote the screenplay, which is sometimes risky, but I think this one really understood how to tell the story he wanted to tell.  I’d really like to read the book now, though maybe I should wait a while to get it out of my head.

Mostly, I know a movie is good when all I want to do afterwards is talk about it and read about it and hear what people have to say about it.  That’s definitely how I know this is one of my favorite films of the year.  Last year, I felt similarly bowled over about There Will Be Blood, which was my year’s favorite.  This year I haven’t seen as much fancy fare as I would like and I’m not sure how I feel about what’s left out there.  I’m very excited about Slumdog Millionaire, though I’d planned to read the book first.  I even got it from the library and now I’ve lost it somewhere, so I’m not sure how that will work out.  (I think it’ll end up movie first, since it’s playing at that little theater down the street.)  I want to see Revolutionary Road even though my gut tells me it will disappoint me.  The book is almost definitely my favorite book of the year and I just don’t think the movie can live up to it.  I am not a big Sam Mendes fan, I find American Beauty overwrought and overrated, Road to Perdition was middling, and Jarhead in no way lived up to the very excellent book it came from.  So that troubles me enough to wonder, even though I think if anyone can rock those parts it’s DiCaprio and Winslet.  I hear bad things about Frost/Nixon, which initially I was really excited about, so I’m worried about that.  I have no interest in The Reader, since I found the book okay but not exactly great source material for a film.  Just the thought of Australia makes me want to puke.  (And is it just me, or does it feel like there should be an exclamation point in the title?)  I do want to see Benjamin Button, though I have doubts about Fincher pulling it off.  (I do think Zodiac was criminally overlooked last year.)  And Che just looks really long.

What am I actually excited about?  Doubt, definitely.  I wanted to see the play.  I love Amy Adams.  I just saw the trailer and it looks great.  Plus, John Patrick Shanley is doing it himself, which excites me.  The man wrote Moonstruck.  He deserves eternal devotion.  I also wish I’d seen some things earlier in the year like Rachel Getting Married (hey, it’s still playing!) or Vicky Cristina Barcelona.  I heard great things about Happy-Go-Lucky, though it looks like it’s not playing here anymore.  I want to see Charlie Kaufman’s new movie, Synecdoche New York, which looks like it’s on the way out of the little theater by my house so it’ll probably get bumped to the top of the list.  (That stupid Striped Pajamas movie which makes me want to hurl with its shamelessness needs to go away, it’s kicking out the good stuff.)  And I keep hearing about The Wrestler, so I’ll probably be there.

I’ve seen so little foreign stuff this year, it’s kind of criminal and yet there doesn’t seem to be a lot coming, which is sad.  And yet, despite all my complaining, I am still thrilled it’s December.  Even if I end up hating half the stuff I see.  It’ll just make me care that much more about the Oscar race, and I’m a huge sucker for it.  (My early pick: Slumdog Millionaire ftw!  And I haven’t even seen it yet.)

Dec

6

The Answer is: Never

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I wrote about Hunger Games very quickly after reading it because it was all right at the top of my head.  And now I have to do the same thing with When Will There Be Good News? by Kate Atkinson.  Last night, Eric and I just sat on the couch quietly reading for several hours.  Enough for me to finish WWTBGN and for him to read Hunger Games in one sitting.  A lovely way to spend a Friday.  Every now and then I would come out of my book and ask Eric where he was in his, and every once in a while I would have to add a little bit of commentary.  Like how the plot finally got moving around page 200.

This may sound like something of a sin when you’re reading a mystery-ish novel.  It isn’t.  Kate Atkinson burst on the mystery scene a few years ago with Case Histories after she was a much more traditional (and very successful) novelist.  (Her debut, Behind the Scenes at the Museum, is just knock-you-over good.)  I liked Case Histories, but I admit I was surprised when she wrote a second semi-follow-up novel, One Good Turn.  Surprised but thrilled.   The three books shouldn’t be called a series because I think that puts them in a category where they don’t belong.  All three novels feature Jackson Brodie, former cop, occasional PI.  And yet calling one a “Jackson Brodie novel” completely overlooks most of the book.

Brodie reminds me most of Inspector Sejer, from Karin Fossum’s mysteries.  Older, often unlucky in love, somewhat meditative.  Brodie doesn’t really want to solve mysteries for people, and only in the first book does he actually attempt to do so.  Brodie’s life is very involved in the books, much more so than I can say of other mystery novels.

My favorite thing Atkinson does is balance a wide variety of characters and stories that eventually come together perfectly.  All 3 books share this quality, and yet it never feels like she’s repeating the same trick.  Her narration is so good that I didn’t mind that I had no idea where the plot was going until nearly page 200.  (In fact, before that, I didn’t really know what Brodie was doing.  It seemed he was never doing anything.)  The best thing she does is write.  You don’t feel like you read a mystery when you read Atkinson, you feel like you’re reading a lush, character-driven novel.  A very depressing one.

But ultimately you have to call these books mysteries because Atkinson has nailed the denouement.  Resolution after resolution comes screaming at you.  Some are obvious, others are hidden between the lines.  And yet there’s always a few more that hit you when you think you’ve finally wrapped everything up.  There were two such closers in this book, happening so close to the end that I’d assumed we were all finished, and they both threw me for huge loops.  I loved it.

The only series-ish thing about them is that you should read them in order.  There are long periods between the books where things change, but it certainly helps since characters introduced in one book often carry over into the next.

Today I’ve been browsing end-of-the-year lists and adding a few requests to my library holds.  I am pretty high up on most lists and I expect to have another batch of books in the next week or two.  However, I am #162 for The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larson and there are only 8 copies.  I think it may be a long time and I’m considering just buying it.  Except it’s only in hardcover.  Guess I’ll be waiting a while.

Oh, and one last note.  I’ve been really really trying to read The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano, whose 2666 seems to be on every list I see.  I just can’t seem to do it.  I’ve heard from others, particularly women, who don’t really get the Bolano thing and I just have to assume I’m one of them.  I cannot see what all the fuss is about and my copy is overdue at the library.  So that’s that.

Dec

5

You Can’t Do That in YA

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So I’ve just (finally!) been able to read The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins, which I’ve been chomping at the bit for ever since I heard about it a few weeks ago.  Now that I’m finished with it, I would really like to sit down with Collins and have a chat.  This chat would have a single main question, followed by several corrolaries.  The main question being: Did you read Battle Royale by Koushun Takami?

In their simplest form, both books have identical plots.  A futuristic society where the powers that be have decided to make a bunch of kids kill each other once a year.  Sounds great, huh?  Battle Royale is definitely one of those cult books that once you find it you tell everyone you know about it (I gave it to my brother for his birthday this year).  It also led to not one but two movies in Japan, neither of which are going to be on the shelf at your local video store.  And ever since those movies, everyone seems to always be talking about making a US version.  And then they say it will never happen.  I always found myself agreeing.  While the movies are definitely kitsch, they are also supremely gory.  The first one strikes a delicate balance of fun and mayhem which works surprisingly well.  I just can’t see a movie like this coming out in the US without masses of protesters so thick you couldn’t get into the theater.

And yet.  Here is Hunger Games, which I’ve seen raves for in various newspapers of high repute and is already making plenty of year-end lists.  (It will definitely make mine.)  So how does Collins do the impossible?  Did she set out to do it or not realize her predecessor?

I think the key is that Collins, instead of making a detached almost satirical book has made an incredibly personal one.  The futuristic society in BR is never explained or examined in detail.  But HG spends most of its time looking at the pomp and circumstance surrounding the event.  BR follows nearly every character at some point.  (With all of their Japanese names, I had to make for my bookmark a list of all the characters along with a few distinguishing characteristics.  I admit, I took a bit of glee out of crossing off a name every time one was eliminated.)  HG focuses on a single character and her limited set of relationships and motivations.  It works well since much of the violence is not front and center.  In fact, I was surprised at how little violence there was compared to what I was expecting.  But it all meshed together and made sense, whether you saw it or not.

Overall HG is a better, more personal book because that’s what it wants to be.  I really enjoyed the main character, I found her story always complex and interesting.  And even if many of the plot twists were obvious from a mile away, it still managed a great number I didn’t expect.  But ultimately I find the two to be apples and oranges.  My very favorite scene is definitely still from BR (both the book and the movie) where a group of girls trying to shelter themselves from the insanity all start to turn against one another in the blink of an eye.  HG lacks the crazed villains of BR, which brought the book a lot of its spice, but its hero is a stronger one.  And there were probably more twists and turns in HG.  Especially since the society itself is so much of the target of the book.

Finally, props to Collins for making the book not only work but work as Young Adult.  That blows me over.

Besides that book, which I devoured pretty quickly, I had a bunch of little mysteries for the Thanksgiving holiday, all of which I dispatched in short order.  I am excited about my end-of-the-year haul.  I have Toni Morrison’s new one, which is supposed to be excellent and it’s been so long since I’ve read any Morrison.  (And I’ve never read a new Morrison before, I’ve only ever liked her old ones.)  I have Kate Atkinson’s new book (hurrah!) which I have already started and who I still just want to be as a writer.  I have Q&A, the book that the movie Slumdog Millionaire is based on.  I don’t have anything else from the library that I expect to get before the end of the year, but with my birthday coming up I may pick up a few little things for myself.  For example, I found out today that Allegra Goodman wrote a YA book.  A futuristic speculative YA book, even better.  I loved Goodman’s Intuition from a year or two ago and have read all her other books since then and I’m very pumped to see what she’s done.   I’d also like to get my hands on a copy of The Comedians by Graham Greene, one of my favorite authors.  My library has like 85 things by him, and yet doesn’t have this book.  I’m sure it’s one I’ve passed on several times before.  It’s funny with Greene, I tend to look over his foreign books and yet when I do read them they end up being my favorites.  The Quiet American, Our Man in Havana, The Heart of the Matter, all of them set all over the world and yet just so good.  How does he do that?

I’d kind of like to end the year with something meaty, but not quite sure where to go.  All the fluff of late has me wanting something bold that can hopefully make my best-of-the-year list.  It’s been heavy on the fluff, but I also feel it’s been a great year.  I don’t see how I’ll make a list with less than 20 books on it.  I’m thinking of a classic, maybe something mid-century since I was so lucky with Yates earlier this year.  Maybe one of those stuffy old white guys whose books I often refuse to read.  The Naked and the Dead ?  Maybe finally do a little Pynchon?  Read one of Bellow’s that I haven’t yet?  Suggestions?