I'm still in the middle of a bunch of books, and I haven't had a ton of time lately but finished off these few while traveling.
"The Road" by Cormac McCarthy was a let down. It was probably over-hyped by the notoriety that it got via Oprah and her club. Given that the new Coen brothers' movie is based a book of his I thought I'd give it a try. Basically a post-"end of the world" novel about a boy and his father walking on a road across what is left of America. I just didn't get anything out of the book. No brilliant insights into mankind, no clever twists on story, just slogging through the basics of survival. Find food, lose food, get beat up, beat someone up, flashback to life before the end, wake up in desolation, repeat fifty times, end.
"Gentlemen of the Road" by Michael Chabon is a treat. A short little adventure set back 300 or 400 years in the past on the roads of the middle east. He admits that he originally called this book "Jews with Swords" but got too many snickers from friends. If you like his feasts (like the recently reviewed book about yiddish policemen) you'll enjoy this slim morsel. He just writes so well and has such fun with his characters that its hard not to devour it in a single sitting.
"Fragile Things" by Neil Gaiman is a collection of short stories and poems of horror and fantasy. I think I like his long form work better Maybe resetting every few pages and reading the same kinda story (or at least the same theme) so many times from so many different angles is just too much to take. This might have been better if I checked out a story or two and then hid the book away for a month or two before reading another story. In any case I think this is the year of Neil Gaiman with his recently released "Stardust" which was quite well done to the upcoming Beowulf movie that he co-wrote. If you haven't read "Anansi Boys" or "American Gods" you're missing some fine fantasy (and bear in mind I don't like fantasy as a rule).
"The Book of Lost Things" by John Connolly is a good enough example of why I don't read fantasy. It wasn't bad but it wasn't in any way rewarding. Basically the tale of a boy growing towards manhood during World War II in England. He stumbles into a world of stories (mostly riffs on Brother's Grimm tales) and learns how to be a better person by the end.
"The State of the Art" by Ian Banks is a collection of short stories from a master. If you've never read any of his novels this would be a good place to start. Many of the stories are set in his future civilization called the "culture." Think English manners and sense of humor but with a few thousand years of evolution and stagnation. It makes for a curious projection into the future of society and how it may work. All good.
Not books...
"The Darjeeling Limited" by Wes Anderson is another typical Anderson film. If you like his films you'll really enjoy this one. The cinematography is perfect, the colors are amazing, the characters are just plain fun and the locations (throughout India) are breathtaking. Anderson always makes some location into a character, in this case its a train (in other movies it was a sub, a building, or a school campus). For a taste of the movie they released a prequel called "The Hotel Chevalier" for free on iTunes. Watch it and decide if you want to see the movie, note the colors and the framing of the scene, gold. By the way, great soundtrack too.
"Across the Universe" by Julie Taymor is a flawed film but a worthy experiment in retrospective history-telling and musical collage. Formula? Take a bunch of Beatles songs, weave them into a story about a boy named Jude and a girl named Lucy with plenty of sidebar characters (the best of course being the three played by Joe Cocker). Include someone crawling in through the bathroom window and a cameo with Bono in a slightly too long psychedelic sequence add some freaky costumes left over from one of your Broadway productions and beat the audience senseless with edits, repeat. If you like the Beatles and can stand a bit of amateur directing, its worth seeing... on DVD.
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