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Thursday, December 29th, 2005
Today I finished The Shipping News; and also I read Roger Ebert's review of the movie based on this book. I must say Ebert captured the problems I had with the book pretty well, though I don't know if he read it. The characters in this book were not fully human, just collections of idiosyncrasies designed to highlight their author's cleverness. (And yet Proulx is such a good writer, the book still ends up being a fun read. I feel ungrateful, carping about its failings.)
posted evening of December 29th, 2005: Respond
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Tuesday, December 27th, 2005
We have read seven chapters of Prince Caspian; chapters 4 through 7 are a story-within-a-story, in which the dwarf Trumpkin tells the children how Caspian came to leave Miraz' castle and to be recognized as king by the old Narnians. Last night as we sat down to read chapter 7, I had almost forgotten that this was a digression, and was thinking of Trumpkin's story as the main story in the book. Sylvia however had not forgotten. She said she was bored with this story as I opened the book; I didn't quite get her meaning and asked if she wanted to stop reading about Narnia and find a different book. But that was not it -- after a little back and forth, searching for expressions, she let me know that she was tired of hearing the dwarf's story and wanted to get back to the main frame where the children were. So, we skipped 7 and read 8 last night. Funny, this was a little like The Princess Bride except in reverse -- Dad did not have it together enough to abridge the uninteresting portions of the book so young Sylvia took the task in hand herself.
posted morning of December 27th, 2005: Respond
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Monday, December 26th, 2005
I had the day off! I spent part of the afternoon in a bar, reading The Shipping News. It is a well-crafted story -- I am laughing at the jokes and feeling sympathy for the characters. But this is where I think it compares poorly to the short stories -- I can see the craft in the story, see Proulx making transitions and nod to myself in appreciation of a skillful transition, laugh at a punchline and think the joke was told well. When reading the stories I was much less conscious of my identity as a reader.
posted evening of December 26th, 2005: Respond
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Saturday, December 24th, 2005
I've been reading The Shipping News by Annie Proulx, gotten far enough in to start forming an opinion of it. I tentatively like the short stories better but am thinking this book maybe just starts out slow, and if it stays on the trajectory it's on currently, it could end up being a really good book. -- I guess short stories don't have as much room to start out slow before grabbing you. Why does it start out slow? It might be that Proulx is trying to show how Quoyle's whole life from his childhood until his wife's death has been spent in a fugue state, without any connection to the world around him. This would make sense to me but I don't think it quite worked -- I didn't have any connection to Quoyle in his fugue state. It might have worked better in first person. Since the family's arrival in Newfoundland, the story has really picked up and the characters are seeming a lot more real to me. This is only about a quarter of the way in, so there's plenty of room for the book to redeem its opening. One gripe I have is, Quoyle has no first name. Seems to me like his aunt at least should address him by first name. (I'm not sure now that she has yet called him by name at all, maybe when she does this will be resolved.)
posted afternoon of December 24th, 2005: Respond
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Thursday, December 22nd, 2005
Today and yesterday, I read Bad Dirt: Wyoming Stories 2, by Annie Proulx. (A better verb than "read" might be "drank in" or "devoured".) What an amazing book -- Flannery O'Connor has some serious competition for my favorite author of short stories. I got interested in reading Proulx from the story Brokeback Mountain, which I read last week prior to seeing the movie -- what struck me about that story was the fullness of characterization, and the palpable sense of time passing; I loved it and wanted to read more. So on my way to the movie theater I stopped at Montclair Book Center where I picked up Bad Dirt and Shipping News. Bad Dirt mixes gravity and whimsy deftly, I particularly loved how The Wamsutter Wolf -- maybe the most moving story in the book -- is sandwiched in between The Contest and Summer of the Hot Tubs, both lighthearted, almost superficial stories. The characters are great -- the two I identified most closely with were probably Creel Zmundzinski (who opens and closes the book) and Buddy Millar (who is only in one story, The Wamsutter Wolf). But I got to know every character well and to feel for them.
posted evening of December 22nd, 2005: Respond
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Sylvia and I have finished The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and moved on to the second Narnia book, Prince Caspian. (We are reading them approximately in order of publication, rather than in chronological order as Lewis recommended -- see this Wikipaedia article for more info.) Sylvia is getting the plot tie-ins between the two books very strongly. Tonight we read Chapter 4, in which the dwarf begins telling the children the story of how Prince Caspian came to learn of the history of Narnia. Early in the chapter, there is a confrontation between Caspian and his uncle King Miraz, with Miraz telling Caspian that the stories of Old Narnia are old wives' tales and lies. Sylvia was at first a bit perplexed; she knew the stories were accurate as the matched up with the previous book. She quickly figured out that Miraz was lying and each time he told Caspian not to believe in Old Narnia, she was quick to interject that he was wrong. That seemed to me like fun and like a fairly complex level of understanding the books.
posted evening of December 22nd, 2005: Respond
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Sunday, December 18th, 2005
This afternoon I'm going to watch "Brokeback Mountain" -- I've been really looking forward to this movie ever since I saw the trailer, when we went to watch "Capote" 2 months ago or so. I am thinking that this movie coming out could signify a new moment in mainstream acceptance of male homosexuality; for at least half a century the homoerotic subtext of the American Old West mythology has been made explicit by people like Burroughs and Pynchon -- lots of really intelligent authors with big names and small readership. But it seems to me like this is the first time it is crossing over into mass culture. Frank Rich's op-ed piece today, on the movie and what it signifies for the culture, is well worth reading -- unfortunately it is "Times Select" so you will have to spring for a newspaper if you want to read it.
posted morning of December 18th, 2005: Respond
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Saturday, December 10th, 2005
We just got back from the movie -- it was both unexpectedly delightful, and disappointing. Nice how they adapted it to the screen -- I was really surprised and happy that there was no voice-over. But the dialogue was a bit weak, really -- that it was anachronistic was the least of its problems. A high percentage of lines in the script did not ring true as what that character would say at that moment; and a related problem was that the characters were not very well developed. I'm not sure whether to blame this on the writers or the actors, who were (with the exception of Georgie Henley as Lucy) not great. This is coming out sounding a little like a pan; but I enjoyed the movie. It had a lot of weaknesses but it communicated well the joy and immediacy that is in Lewis' books. And the problems with the script were mostly in the first half of the film -- in general the second half (starting about when the children get to Aslan's encampment) was much stronger, and the cast really came together and started convincing me. One niggling problem: I have always thought of the Pevensie children as younger than they were portrayed in this movie. Like I would have thought Lucy was about 4 or 5 and Peter no older than 13 -- the characters here were from 8 or so to 16 or so. And I'm not sure why they tied the movie in to the historical moment so strongly with the first scene, of the Pevensie family in their bomb shelter. It might be a good idea to do so but I think it would have required some development in the rest of the movie to ring true -- otherwise it just seems tacked on. (It knocked Sylvia for a bit of a loop; she thought we were watching a preview for a different movie until the scene about 5 minutes in, where the children come to the Professor's house.) The visual effects and animations were in general great -- Aslan in particular, breathtaking. The only exception was the bit where the children are on the breaking ice in the stream, which looked pretty cheesy to me. (And note: this is something that was not in the book, appears to have been added in just to show what cool tricks they could do with CGI. That seems to me like a mistake.)
posted evening of December 10th, 2005: Respond
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Sylvia and I are off to watch the movie of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe this afternoon.
posted afternoon of December 10th, 2005: Respond
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Friday, December 9th, 2005
Bedtime stories for the past week or so have been chapters of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Reading Chapter 11 tonight (in which the children and Mr. and Mrs. Beaver begin their journey to the Stone Table and meet Father Christmas), I realized the narrative is reminding me a lot of The Phantom Tollbooth. It struck me while Father Christmas was giving his presents to the children, that that was like Milo getting his presents from the Mathemagician and Azaz -- and thinking about it, I am sure Juster modeled his book in some respects on Narnia. I read all of the Narnia books when I was quite young, and possibly had some of them read to me; my memory of them is faint but I do remember liking them. I am reading to Sylvia from a very nice edition that we bought when we visited the Eric Carle Museum in Amherst, MA. A really great discussion of the Narnia books has been taking place over the last few days in the comments to this post on Unfogged.
posted evening of December 9th, 2005: Respond
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