Tag: books

In which I talk fuzzily about Ryszard Kapuściński

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The Shadow of the Sun, by Ryszard Kapuściński

The Shadow of the Sun, by Ryszard Kapuściński

I’m having a moment of interested consideration about the new biography of Ryszard Kapuściński which claims that much of his reporting was heavily fictionalised and about some of the outrage about this.  As outrage goes, it’s fairly mild and seems mostly confined to those working in journalism (for example in Jon Snow’s latest blog post)  – but then Kapuściński is hardly a household name in the UK, and I’d be prepared to bet that the majority of people here who have read his work have come to it as travel literature, where the line between ‘truth’ and ‘atmosphere’ is more easily, and perhaps more legitimately, blurred than in journalistic reportage.    I came to him through his collection of essays/reportage, The Shadow of the Sun, which I thought sounded interesting based on a review I read and which I then bought with some Christmas money and enjoyed immensely.  It’s been a while since I read it, but I’m still inclined to think that it’s one of the best collections of writing about Africa that I’ve read – not necessarily factually, but in terms of painting a picture and capturing an atmosphere.  Read more...

: Arts,Media,Musings,Travel
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Books and Films of 2010

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As ever, if I don’t list ‘em, I don’t remember all of them.

Books
1. Manhood for Amateurs -Michael Chabon
2. Naked – David Sedaris
3. The Tipping Point – Malcolm Gladwell
4. When You are Engulfed in Flames – David Sedaris
5. Shades of Grey – Jasper Fforde
6. Consider Phlebas – Iain M. Banks
7. Barrel Fever – David Sedaris
8. A Most Wanted Man – John Le Carre
9. The Broom of the System – David Foster Wallace
10. Changing My Mind – Zadie Smith
11. Beauty – Robin McKinley
12. After the Quake – Haruki Murakami
13. Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 8, volume 6: Retreat – Jane Espenson and Joss Whedon
14. The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet – David Mitchell

Films
1. The Princess and the Frog
2. Invictus
3. Sherlock Holmes
4. A Serious Man
5. Up in the Air
6. The Ghostwriter
7. Shutter Island
8. Green Zone
9. A Single Man
10. Iron Man 2
11. Robin Hood
12. Four Lions
13. Twilight: Eclipse

Last Year’s Lists

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Noughties lists…

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I wanna join in! Lists of the year, PAH. Lists of the decade, HURRAH. Though, at the risk of turning into Toby Ziegler, why does the decade end this year, and not next year? Why is the  decade not 2001-2010, rather than 2000-2009?  Can we bring up the bit where there wasn’t a year nought, or is that all cliche and annoying? Anyway, moving on…  Lists! Lists are fun. Top Tens!  I can do books and TV and movies of the decade, although we should all bear in mind that I have not yet started watching The Wire.  I probably can’t do theatre, not sensibly, since I don’t go very often (as often as I’d like), though I can wave my arms up and down and talk about the few things I did see and the plays that really stuck with me, and music. Hmmm, I’ll try, but that might get quite random, and will essentially be ‘Ten records what I have loved with absolutely no critical or aesthetic thought behind it’. I think they’re going to be unordered lists, because, well, trying to rank things like The Assination of Jesse James, The Lord of the Rings, and The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind against each other is kinda daft. They’re also going to be lists that mix up the things that I think have been really really good with things that have become a part of my personal furniture. So the Eyre Affair may knock Fortress of Solitude out of the books list because it has been a bigger part of my decade.  Just be warned, it’s going to be a little bit bonkers, and pretty much all about me, with no real grounding in any theories of aesthetics.  Read more...

: Arts,Musings
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J'adore.

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From Pictures for sad children. It’s perfection.

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Infinite Jest

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So, in order to Get It Read, I packed David Foster Wallace’s Monumentally Huge Novel Infinite Jest in my bag for Tanzania. And now I find that bunches of other people are also reading it this summer, and blogging about it. For example – here at Infinite Summer, or here at A Supposedly Fun Thing. Matt Yglesias, of Think Progess is reading it too. There’s also an Infinite Jest wiki, and a guide to reading Infinite Jest that I really wish I’d seen in advance – although I would have skipped to page 223, because I am that person.

A little bit of me is doing the dance of ‘I read it first’. Because I have now finished Infinite Jest, so clearly I am ahead of the pack, making me cooler than cool. But a little bit of me is sad, because it is an amazing idea to read Infinite Jest at the same time as a bunch of other people, and share the experience with them. I keep wanting to talk to people about it, and no-one I know has read it. I think I have Eleanor convinced to read it now, because I kept telling her about it whilst we were away. And I know Joe wants to read it, he just needs to find the time. And time is the issue – I wouldn’t have had time to read Infinite Jest over the summer, because I am embarking on the final editing process of my thesis, and Big Fat Absorbing Books are a big no-no. So I’m just going to enjoy watching other people enjoy it. It’s an amazing piece of literature, though, and I’m going to read it again just as soon as I can find the time because I still need to puzzle out the ending a little. I know I love it, even without entirely getting it, but I want to try and get it a little better.  Read more...

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In which my inner fanboy goes awry

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Oh Watchmen Watchmen Watchmen.

So here’s the thing, I get why the Watchmen fanboys have gone to town on their love for it. And I get why the snotty-nosed (and also, few less snotty-nosed) don’t. It is both a brilliant film adaptation of the comic, and a fairly rubbish film. Simultaneously.

It’s just too damn faithful, which is the reason for its success and its downfall. They clearly haven’t massacred the source material, so yay, BUT, it also doesn’t add anything to it, and if it doesn’t do that, what is the point of filming it at all? It tries to bring in everyone’s backstories, and everyone’s arcs, and get everyone from character point (a) to character point (b), and completely fails to focus the viewers attention on any particular elements. And the film just can’t cope, it’s collapses under the weight of the material of the book – a book just can do so much more than a film in that regard. The film really needed to decide whether it wanted to focus on either Rorshach *or* Nite Owl/Silk Spectre, and do more with Ozymandias before the end, and follow that through in a way that would do at least for them what the novel does for them all – which is to show the problems inherent in “superheroes”.

So although it’s a very faithful film, it just doesn’t really work as a film. You might as well read the comic whilst listening to the soundtrack.

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Things I discovered last year…

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1. There’s tension involved in travel, even when you go on your own. The ‘why am I here’, ‘what’s my purpose in life’, am I just jumping through tourist hoops’ kind of tension. I think it happens every trip, and yet, when you come back you just sort-of forget about it. So, just learn that when it happens you should consider stopping seeing the things you’ve got on your list that you want to see – even if you really really really want to see them – for an afternoon and find a park or a sofa to sit and read a novel, or write screeds of nonsense working through your tourist-monkey issues, or email all the folks at home. And then go out the next day and get over it – chances are you’ll find something wonderful that makes you think that even if you are being a tourist-monkey, it’s probably worth it (hello, Kinkaku-Ji and Nanzen-Ji, Kyoto.

2. There’s more tension involved in watching other people travel – especially to historically sensitive places like Auschwitz. You have to work through that too – normally with the aid of pen and paper, but you’re allowed to talk to other people about it, ‘cos it’s not just emo-esque self-indulgent wank. It’s something worth thinking about. What kind of photos should you take in such places?  Read more...

: Arts,Musings,News,Travel
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Books and Films of 2009

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The annual attempt to keep track of at least part of my life…

Books:

1. Consider the Lobster – David Foster Wallace
2. The New Kings of Non-Fiction – Ira Glass
3. The Player of Games – Iain M. Banks
4. Watchman – Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons
5. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen – Alan Moore
6. A Constitution of Many Minds – Cass Sunstein
7. America: Empire of Liberty – David Reynolds
8. Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail – Hunter S. Thompson
9. America: Empire of Liberty – David Reynolds
10. The Men Who Stare At Goats – Jon Ronson
11. Starbook – Ben Okri
12. Scott Pilgrim’s Precious Little Life – Bryan Lee O’Malley
13. Sandman: Preludes and Nocturnes – Neil Gaiman
14. Lost in a Good Book – Jasper Fforde
15. Scott Pilgrim vs. The World – Bryan Lee O’Malley
16. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Season 8: The Time of Your Life – Joss Whedon & Jeph Loeb
17. Scott Pilgrim and the Infinite Sadness – Bryan Lee O’Malley
18. Matter – Iain M. Banks
19. Infinite Jest – David Foster Wallace
20. Scott Pilgrim Gets It Together – Bryan Lee O’Malley
21. Scott Pilgrim vs. the Universe – Bryan Lee O’Malley
22. The Wine Dark Sea – Patrick O’Brian
23. A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again – David Foster Wallace
24. Ghost – Robert Harris
25. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies – Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith
26. The Year of the Flood – Margaret Atwood
27. Turbulence – Giles Foden
28. Much Obliged, Jeeves – P.G. Wodehouse
29. Men and Cartoons – Jonathan Lethem
30. Better than Sex – Hunter S. Thompson
31. This is Water – David Foster Wallace
32. The City and the City – China Mieville
33. Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader – Neil Gaiman
34. A Tale Etched in Blood and Hard Black Pencil – Christopher Brookmyre
35. Snow Crash – Neal Stephenson
36. Everything is Illuminated – Jonathan Safran Foer
37. Lustrum – Robert Harris
38. And Another Thing – Eoin Colfer
39. Brief Interviews with Hideous Men – David Foster Wallace
40. The Boys on the Bus – Timothy Crouse
41. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Season 8, volume 5: Predators and Prey – Joss Whedon et al.
42. Sputnik Sweetheart – Haruki Murakami
43. The Gone-Away World – Nick Harkaway
44. Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game that changed a Nation
45. Me Talk Pretty One Day – David Sedaris  Read more...

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Coraline

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It’s been a wee while since I read Neil Gaiman’s Coraline, but I do remember really enjoying it. Gaiman is a greater storyteller than he is a writer, I think, so it makes sense that his kids stories and fairytales are better than his adult novels. I far prefer Stardust to American Gods, for instance.

Anyway, the trailer for Henry Selick’s film version is now online. As I can’t bring to mind too much of the plot of the novel, I can’t really comment on that aspect of it, but I really do like the look and tone of it. Stop motion is beauteous.

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catholicism makes you miserable. no really.

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I went to see the tnew film of Brideshead Revisited last night. Brideshead Re-edited.

First off, I’ll admit that it was not at all the trainwreck I was expecting. Nor was it wholly and unentirely unlike the book – except that the Catholicism Screws You Up Theme was much much stronger in a way that Evelyn Waugh might not have liked. And of course the inevitable plot changes – Julia in Venice, WTF?

It was, however, Brideshead Revisited at Warp Speed as whole years went flying out of the window and everything crashed about at the same time in the plot. Bridey and Cordelia nearly ended up flying out of the window after them. Surely the fact that Cordelia is by-and-large content should be important, especially in contrast to her siblings? And whilst Ed Stoppard is a thoroughly repulsive Bridey, he is thoroughly repulsive, where beloved Simon “Arthur Dent” Jones in the TV series was perfectly disconnected, which is how I think Bridey should be. Cousin Jasper wouldn’t say of FilmBridey: “Brideshead went down last year, a very sound fellow…” FilmBridey is not sound to any point of view.  Read more...

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