Book & Movie Reviews

Books
Teacher Man by Frank McCourt. Loved it, loved it, loved it. I read Angela’s Ashes but then I was just too depressed about his life to read ‘Tis. Teacher Man is about his time teaching in New York City. It was great. I think I will try ‘Tis now.

Whitethorn Woods by Maeve Binchy. Classic Maeve Binchy, very enjoyable & easy to read. Can’t really tell you what it’s about now. Oh yeah, some woods, and a sacred well, and a highway potentially going through the woods and destroying the well. Everyone’s problems all get resolved very neatly. I like all her books.

Shopaholic & Baby by Sophie Kinsella. This is the first Shopaholic book I’ve read. It was cute, I’ll look for the earlier books.

The Guy Not Taken by Jennifer Weiner. This is a collection of short stories. I’ve only read one of her earlier books, Little Earthquakes, which I liked alot. These stories were good.

Secret Confessions of the Applewood PTA by Ellen Meister. Pretty good, despite the goofy Lisa Kudrow comment on the front. ("I feel like I just made three new friends!" – uh, ok?) A first novel & kind of rough in places. It had one passage that I liked, describing a mom embarrasing her teenage son in a grocery store. The gist of it was, to teenagers, social interaction is like a novel of which they have just read the prologue, the main idea of which is "keep a low profile in public". They have mastered this chapter. They don’t know that their parents have read the whole book, kept the chapters that made sense to them, and thrown away the rest. The source of their embarrassment is that they think their parents have never even heard of the book.

The Book of the Dead by Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child. I hate when I start reading a book that is part of a series and I didn’t know it was part of a series. That is apparently the case with this book. I had read Relic, I also read a long time ago a non-fiction book about Ebola by these same authors that scared the pants off me. Apparently they introduced a character in Relic that they have continued writing about unbeknownst to me. I don’t even remember him as a character in Relic. Anyway, this is kind of a freaky/scary book. I’m not quite finished with it. I don’t know if I will go back and read the rest in the series.

Movies
Because I Said So Yawn, and groan. I mean, it was ok. We recorded it to a DVD. I’ll probably never watch it again.

Children of Men I usually like my science fiction more along the Star Wars lines than along futuristic post-apocalyptic lines, but this movie was ok. I had no idea what it was about until I heard the line "The world’s youngest person died today" then I remembered the previews. So yeah, it takes place in a future where no children have been born for 20 years. Then a young girl turns up pregnant, but it’s a secret because she’s a "fugi" (I think they were saying – fugitive I guess). Because she wasn’t British, and that was illegal. (The movie takes place in England). Between the accents and the darkness it was kind of hard to follow. David recorded this one and it was more his style than mine.