My Recent Reads

So, with the help of my library’s on-line search and my cell phone’s list of downloads I think I’ve managed to collect a list of all the books I’ve read or listened to on the phone during the past fifteen months. In order of author: 1 The Big Sleep – Farewell, My Love… Chandler, Raymond 2 The Antagonist Coady, Lynn 3 Open City – A Novel Cole, Teju 4 The […]

Review: Visitor Q (Originally Bijitâ Q)

Dysfunctional family, healed with the help of an outside visitor. Sound like a good storyline? Now, how dysfunctional can you make the characters, both as family members and as individuals? How about using prostitution, and incest? How about combining the two so that the incest comes about when the daughter is charging the father for the sex, including a surcharge for cumming too early? Is that too wierd? Wait, it […]

Review: “Zoe Busiek: Wild Card”, the Ceiling of Mediocrity

I watch very little television these days. I do have a television in the bedroom though, and today I woke up an hour early and turned on the TV to see what was on. Between morning newscasts I found something intriguing on W Network. Googling it helped me to discover that the program is called “Zoe Busiek: Wild Card” and that it ran from 2003 to 2005 on Lifetime. What […]

Review: The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

Finally managed to watch this movie. Very nice. Does not fall into all the standard expected story tracks as it progresses. There were moments, like when Lisbeth Salander is forced to give her guardian a blow job, where I was hoping for a plot element like that she had a wire, but she didn’t. Then she goes back to him a third time with a video recorder. But this time […]

Writing analysis: Blue Roses, by Francis Hwang

Review of “Blue Roses” by Francis Hwang Published in “The New Yorker” November 1, 2010. SUMMARY: Chinese mother feels that her children don’t appreciate her and take from her without giving in return. She becomes angry with her closest daughter when the daughter is unwilling to invite the mother’s widowed friend to Christmas dinner. The mother refuses to go to the dinner, causing a crisis in the family. She admits […]

Review and thoughts; Memoirs of a Geisha

I don’t read a lot of books when they first come out, I don’t see a lot of movies in theaters or even when they first arrive in DVD format. It could be that I don’t like being part of a crowd, or that I like things to stand a little test of time before I spend the money and time required, but more likely it’s just that I’m lazy […]

Review/reaction: The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

Haven’t seen the movie version yet, but I read a reference to the book in an issue of the New Yorker a few months ago and realized that I should read the book. I requested a copy from the library but it took so long to arrive that I forgot my request until the book arrived last week. For me it’s an odd little book, very well written, with characters […]

Reactions to watching “Brokeback Mountain”

Recently we bought a new DVD player and with it came a month of free DVD rentals. The first movie that we chose is “Brokeback Mountain”. I’m sure that everyone knows what separates this movie from all other mainstream successful movies; gay cowboys. I don’t think that I’m a prude, for the most part at least. I have gay and lesbian and bisexual friends, co-workers, associates, though no family members […]

An Ideal Husband

I admit to not being much of a movie watcher in the past few years, and though I’ve been involved on a board level with a small theater festival for a while it’s been years and years since I’ve seen classic theater. So the other day I was flipping through the television channels I happened across a movie that I found interesting. I didn’t know whether it was a relatively […]

Review: Digital Fortress

Just finished reading an old Dan Brown novel, Digital Fortress: A Thriller. For those who don’t know, Dan Brown is the author of The Da Vinci Code and Angels & Demons which spawned the  movies of the same names. Some months back I had read another of his earlier books (of which “Digital Fortress” is another, lest you rush out hoping it’s a new Dan Brown novel) all of which […]