Monthly Archives: April 2012

Movies made me do it.

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I bought new books:  Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, by John Le Carre and War Horse, by Michael Morpurgo, and it’s all because of movies. 

I first heard about War Horse because of the play based on Michael Morpurgo’s book.  It sounded fantastic, with the horses represented on stage by life-size puppets.  There was a tiny excerpt of the play on last year’s Tony Awards, and it looked fantastic too.  Then there was the heavy ad campaign during the holiday season for Steven Spielberg’s War Horse.  It looked like the kind of movie that would have me sobbing uncontrollably in the theater, so we didn’t go.  Now Netflix has the DVD, it’s on my list, I want to see it, but I want to be prepared.  I bought Scholastic Books’ attractive, well-priced paperback edition from Amazon and I’ve read about half, flipping forward a bit to check how sad the sad parts are going to be.  I think I’ll be able to handle the rest of the book, not so sure about Spielberg’s movie version.  Michael Morpurgo has written about 100 books for children, many of them about animals.  War Horse is aimed at younger readers, but it’s well-written and a good read.  For a first person horse story, I think I prefer Black Beauty.  And the movie has Sean Bean and David Thewlis.

I was really looking forward to the Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy movie, but I thought it was awful.  They messed with the characters and important details of the story, and the 1970s were not that camp-ugly.  And they left the commas out of the title.  I needed to get the bad taste out of my eyeballs with the excellent BBC TV production, made in the real 1970s.  Unfortunately, Netflix had a very long wait for it, and I had to buy my own copy.  The BBC left the commas out of the title too, but it was so good, I wanted to read the novel again.  My paperback copy, also from the real 1970s, has been read so often it’s falling apart, and I decided it should be retired to the back of a shelf with my worn out copies of Lord of the Rings and Tales from the South Pacific.  The price on a new trade paperback from Amazon was good, so I ordered it.  What a great book, worth re-reading after many years.  I’ve read it several times, and I can take the skewed timeline in my stride and really focus on the small perfect details.  I have several of Le Carre’s post-USSR novels, but they never caught me up like his older books.  I’m hoping that Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy will inspire me to read more Le Carre.

Digression: The Wizarding World of Harry Potter

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We went to Orlando last week, and visited The Wizarding World of Harry Potter at Universal Orlando.  We went on the outstanding Forbidden Journey ride three times, ate food at the Three Broomsticks and drank beer at the Hogshead twice, and saw Olivander’s wand emporium once.  Butterbeer tastes like a rootbeer float.  The a capella Hogwarts choir, with toads accompanying, were very good but their Hogwarts wool sweaters and robes looked kind of uncomfortable in the 86 degree weather.  We gave the Dragon’s Challenge roller coaster a miss, but the little Hippogriff coaster was fun.  Hogwarts Castle and Hogsmeade village look like the ones in the Harry Potter movies, only better because the construction and the details are beautiful and you get to be right there.  It’s so good that you hardly notice the hordes of tourists in scruffy holiday attire.

Finished books: Hunger Games trilogy, The Spellman Files

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I finished reading The Spellman Files, by Lisa Lutz, on my Kindle, and was doing so well in the eBook format, that I finished the second and third books in The Hunger Games Trilogy, by Suzanne Collins, on the Kindle too.

I decided I enjoyed The Spellman Files enough to finish it, although it’s put together in a quirky way and the mystery I expected never really happened.  By quirky I mean flash forwards that hold out tantalizing promises of suspense that pay off contrary to expectation.  Lots of details about protagonist Isabel Spellman’s strange and often unpleasant family, and her pushy relationship with a dentist.  The way Lutz uses past, present and future reminded me of Catch-22; she actually handled the time shifts pretty well and the method made all the establishing and exposition of her family history a lot more interesting.  Lisa Lutz’s Spellman series is high on my library list, I’d like to see if she can keep up the quirky.  The Kindle version of The Spellman Files is now $11.99 on Amazon, and later books in the series are $9.99.  So library list, or the used book store.

I had stalled on Catching Fire, the second book in Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games trilogy, a couple of months ago, but gave it another try and clicked right into the story this time.  The cliffhanger ending led me right into the third book, Mockingjay.  These books repeat too many of the first book’s details and devices, but they do develop Collins’ themes of predatory political domination, violence and revenge to a satisfactory resolution.  Satisfactory only, because I felt the violence and death escalated to a horrible level, more than Collins needed to make her points about evil government and war.  The character developments were intriguing, I’m still trying to decide if they happened naturally or mainly to serve the plot.

  • I’ve never read the classic Lord of the Flies, but I want to see how its account of kids’ violence against each other compares to this contemporary popular trilogy.
  • I saw The Hunger Games movie, and thought it was very well done, largely due to Jennifer Lawrence’s excellent work in the role of Katniss.  Good job overall of showing the Capitol’s decadence and abuse of power and the tragic consequences for the tributes, without graphic violence.  I suppose the producers also want to film the rest of the trilogy; not sure how they’re going to keep up the balancing act with the rest of the material. 

Reading as of April 14

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A long time since my last post, mainly because I haven’t finished many books, and haven’t been reading much in general.  I did finish Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World, by Michael Lewis, about the causes and effects of the financial breakdown in five different countries.  A fast, interesting read, I need to go back and skim through the articles again.  Cause, effect and reaction in each country are different, although there is some overlap.  Overall, the problem seems to come down to laziness, greed, selfishness, willful ignorance, lack of responsibility and overall lack of adult supervision.  Too many people were turning a blind eye on a bunch of bratty kids, or being bratty kids themselves.  There were people trying to warn of the danger – some of the ones I followed were Steven Pearlstein, economic columnist at WaPo, who wrote many columns about fiscal stupidity, Liz Weston offered prudent financial advice on MSN.com, and there was a great YouTube video called “Peter Schiff was right” about the real estate bubble.  Pearlstein did win the Pulitzer Prize for columnists, unfortunately after the fact of September 2008.

After this, it was a pleasure to read Happy All the Time, by Laurie Colwin (my book).  This one has been traveling unread between different bookshelves with me for some time.  I bought it because I really liked Colwin’s Home Cooking, a collection of columns she wrote about – cooking at home.  The novel follows four people who meet, form two couples and experience the doubts, frustrations and pleasures of intimacy with another person.  Nothing dramatic happens to any of them and nice interesting people come in and out of their lives.  There is one jerk of a supervisor who is dealt with neatly.  The story is very subtle but engaging, with deft realistic insights into human nature.  Reading time well and happily spent.  

I read all the stories in Crime through Time III, except for a couple that were just too weird and farfetched. 

I’m currently reading The Spellman Files, by Lisa Lutz (Kindle), first in a series about private investigator Isabel Spellman.  Sister Lynda said this was 99 cents for her Nook, and it was making her laugh.  Since it was also 99 cents from Amazon, I bought it for my Kindle – I just checked, and it’s gone back up to $7.99 now.  The later books in the series cost even more.  I’m about 25% through the book, and haven’t reached the mystery yet, it’s mostly about Isabel’s nutty family of private investigators so far.  It is funny though, I have high hopes for the rest of it. 

Haven’t been to the library since I returned Flashman on the March, mainly because there seem to be so many books in the house and on my Kindle that I’m neglecting.  I do have a list of books to look for the next time I go, and I also want to check out a used bookstore that looks interesting.