wednesday november 29
One of my favorite parts of my job is talking to people about what they’re reading. Watching people light up when they tell me about something really, really good, and listening to their voices become urgent when they tell me “you’ve just got to try this”—I find that absolutely irresistible.
And of course, if it’s something I’ve read, we get to do that “isn’t he an amazing writer” and “wasn’t it wonderful when” and even “ooh, if you liked that, you have to read.”
I love writing for this blog, because of course I get to do the “you’ve just got to.” (You can probably tell from some of my much-too-long entries how enthused I can get.)
But it’s not one-way. It just occurred to me that everything I have out on my card right now and everything I currently have on hold was recommended to me personally by a library user or another librarian.
Continue Reading…
tuesday november 28
Charles Dickens wrote a masterpiece when he came up with A Christmas Carol. I am partial to stories with ghosts in them, and this is one of the best. We have not only the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Yet-to-Come scaring the socks off Scrooge, but old Marley long deceased showing up as well. And how about the homeless suffering poor that wail their dirge outside Scrooge's window? Creepy, but he deserved it.
I will never forget that Scrooge was in denial as long as possible. He blamed the manifestations on "an underdone potato" or "an undigested bit of beef"!
There have been lots of film adaptations of the story with terrific portrayals of Scrooge, including George C Scott, Patrick Stewart, musical Albert Finney, and even Bill Murray in the modern "Scrooged". My favorite has to be "Scrooge" (1951) with Alastair Sim capturing the old miser perfectly!
It's just amazing to me how a story created in 1843 can be so timely today. Merry Christmas, 163 years later!
Continue Reading…
friday november 24
Sad news on Tuesday. Robert Altman, “one of the most adventurous and influential American directors of the late 20th century,” passed away. Over the course of his career, Altman directed an enormous variety of movies. Of course, there are the classics, such as M*A*S*H*, Nashville, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, California Split, and The Long Goodbye, but let’s not forget about his smaller, more eclectic movies: Quintet, Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean, Vincent & Theo. What an amazing body of work—he will truly be missed.
So what better time than now to find out what the great man himself had to say about his films?
David Thompson and Robert Altman first crossed paths in 2001, when Thompson was working on a documentary for the BBC about the making of
Gosford Park. Afterwards, Thompson asked the director if he would be willing to sit down for some informal interviews about his career. The result is
Altman on Altman, a candid discussion of his life as a filmmaker.
Continue Reading…
The United States of Arugula: How We Became a Gourmet Nation by Vanity Fair writer David Kamp is a must read for anyone who has any semi-serious interest in the state of American food. Kamp disputes those who claim the good old days were the highlight of American eating and leads the reader through a brief history of our national food ways until he gets to the post-war years and the rise of the Big Three: Julia Child, James Beard and Craig Claiborne.
These three very different individuals taught us how to cook, eat and read about food and opened the door for a new generation of food professionals that has led us to new expectations about what we eat and how we shop for food.
Continue Reading…
wednesday november 22
It's the day before Thanksgiving, which is the quintessential American family holiday, and I have the peculiar nature of the family on the brain. Families are funny. No, let's face it, most of our families are quirky, odd, downright weird.
Because of all the shared history involved, it can be hard to tell a family story correctly and succinctly. Some things translate, and some don't work at all. For instance, although I can explain to strangers why nearly every gift my aunt Dar gets has a goose on it somewhere (she had a fundamentally bad experience with a goose when all my aunts were children), I'm not nearly as capable of elucidating why another of my aunts has an entire photo album full of pig posteriers.
Continue Reading…
I was reading Publisher’s Weekly’s list of their top 100 books of the year yesterday, and I was surprised and delighted to find C. J. Cherryh’s Pretender on the list. (We won’t go into how surprised I am to find that it’s November already, and best-of-the-year lists are coming out.)
Surprised because Pretender is the eighth volume in a complicated, densely sociological science fiction series. It’s hard to imagine what kind of book would be more difficult to persuade someone to try than a book that can only be read after going back and reading seven other books, all in a genre that tends not to be wildly popular anyway.
Delighted because I love this series. Because I think Cherryh is one of the best writers of science fiction today. Because Cherryh uses the conventions of speculative fiction to tackle big, thoughtful questions about humanity and civilization. And because she writes the coolest aliens around.
Continue Reading…
tuesday november 21
Not that anybody could have missed it, but TomKat got married over the weekend. One of the guests at the wedding was Brooke Shields, with whom Tom had a very public spat last year. Tom, as you might recall, criticized Brooke's use of antidepressants to help treat her severe postpartum depression. Brooke responded with an op-ed piece in the New York Times that denounced Cruise's "ridiculous rant" and suggested that perhaps Mr. Cruise should keep silent on the issue, since he had "never suffered from postpartum depression." As indicated by her presence at his wedding, the two have since made up.
Cruise and Shields's war of words began shortly after the release of Brooke's memoir Down Came the Rain: My Journey Through Postpartum Depression. After enduring two years of unsuccessful IVF attempts and a miscarriage, Brooke gave birth to daughter Rowan in 2003.
Continue Reading…
