I first wrote about the Alice books here in early 2010.
While it was clear that they and discussion around them were things I loved, I’d not
yet begun this series of posts — although Martin Gardner’s Annotated Alice work got referenced in the debut installment later that year. So inducting them officially into my roster of 55 Favorites (and counting) didn’t feel necessary until a few recent events persuaded me.
The above pic came to light as I was going through some cloud photos. I had wanted
to provide a look at my Alice items on the shelf, unpacked from the boxes they’d been in; however, I’d rearranged and decided the best place for them was on a vintage dresser topped with a mirror — if you get it, you get it — and pieces set to hold small lamps but also good for teacups. Since the items have been sitting piled on that dresser with other stuff mixed in for too long now, I’m sharing the older incarnation despite having added to my modest collection and sadly not being able to revert the photo to the wider shot I must have taken back then.
As I think I’ve said here before, I prefer to have a nice buffer between reading books
and watching the movies on which they’re based — with the book, ideally, coming first.
The film adaptation of Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl is scheduled to open in early October, so I’m glad to have finished the novel last week. I don’t want to spoil even a bit of it for those who haven’t, but I will say that it’s both a page-turner of a mystery and a surprisingly dark, incisive look at domestic partnership.
While I’m not sure whether the film attempts to evoke the book’s structure, I suspect
by dint of that alone they’ll be different enough works that you could pick up the book in the next few weeks and have the movie feel like its own thing when it rolls out. I’m still chewing on the controversial ending; I recommend the book, though, and hope to read Flynn’s previous novels sometime.
Related: A Great Escape • Grit Expectations • Forest Gumption
I was finally successful this year in not writing about the Oscars before or after the event. The bad news is that this wasn’t due purely to willpower; I’ve been sitting on this post for a while with the aim of running it on, as they say, Movies’ Biggest Night, but I couldn’t.
Sometime last year I came up with a couple of the following lines and realized that the concept would make a fun hashtag game. What you do is take a reasonably well-known quote from books or films and substitute one or two words with food. I’m very rarely on Twitter anymore, though, so I ended up just brainstorming a bit and setting the list aside to run on the blog as my...
Top Twenty Supermarket Lines of Dialogue
20. “All right, Mr. DeMille, I’m ready for my cold cuts.”
19. “Nobody puts baked beans in a corner.”
18. “Take your stinking pasta off me, you damn dirty apes!”
17. “It was the best of thymes, it was the worst of thymes.”
16. “Open the pad thai doors, HAL.”
15. “There’s no cayenne in baseball!”
14. “Oh, Stewardess… I speak chives.”
13. “You’ve got meat? Who’s got juice?!?”
12. “Here’s looking at prunes, kid.”
11. “It’s the ship that made the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsnips!”
I was thinking recently about my school library in 3rd grade.
Not sure why. It could’ve been the recent news reports on libraries without books — without physical books, anyway; rather, they’re community spaces with computers where users can surf the Internet and check out E-books — that got me remembering how I’d settle down in the stacks in front of the encyclopedias and basically use the references in the article at hand like we use hyperlinks online today.
I have several fond memories, general and specific, of libraries. One suspects many readers do. Those I’ve shared on the blog before include — nestled in a post on TV’s Supernatural — memories of my favorite aisle in this particular library. What brought me to that aisle was books on Greek and Roman mythology, a subject I read about voraciously and to an almost literally exhausting degree. Based on periodic scans of various library and bookstore shelves, I may well have gone through every relevant volume in print. Some books were, from my youthful perspective at least, stuffier than others, a category in which I preferred Edith Hamilton’s Mythology to Bulfinch’s. There were plenty of slim paperbacks and large, illustrated tomes aimed more directly at my age, too, with D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths atop the heap of the latter.
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42 Favorites: #1-3 ... #11 | #12 | #13 ... The Page
When the dad of a dear friend gave me a copy of Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy in 5th grade — for me, obviously, not for him — I’m sure I didn’t think of the cosmically resonant number of 42 in terms of the age I’d be over three decades hence.
And yet here we are. I don’t know if reaching, in human years, the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything will impact my existence in any positive way but it’d sure be nice.
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The downside to not sharing my entries in hashtag games here within a day or so of them being a thing on Twitter is that anyone interested in heading over there to see the full range of contributions will turn up zilch.
Maybe a hashtag comes back into fashion or someone joins in late or a totally different group of people hit on the same idea, maybe, but those earlier entries are gone. Twits seem to leave Twitter’s institutional memory pretty quickly, unless there are tricks to its search function I don’t know about (which is very, very possible). You can at least head to my own Favorites on Twitter, scroll down a bit, and see a heaping handful of others’ offerings that I found amusing enough to save. It’s not at all the same, though, as being in the thick of it — and this one, #unpromisingsequels, was a good one.
And so, in roughly the order they were posted, it’s time for my...
Top Twenty-Five Unpromising Sequels
25. The Day After the Day After
24. Hastily-Dressed Lunch
23. Monday in the Park without George
22. Acquaintances on a Train
21. Love in the Time of Cholera Vaccines
20. The Executive Producers
19. Fiddler at the Window
18. Evaporation Man
17. The Well-Scrubbed Dozen
I didn’t read any reviews of Rachel Hartman’s delightful fantasy novel, Seraphina, before settling in to enjoy. The little I knew already felt like more than I should. A secret carried by the title character is revealed to the reader fairly early on and, I think, to be suspected well before that; still, even if a good story is often less about the What than about the How and the Why and the consequences of the What, it’s best to let the story unfold on its own terms.
Avoiding chatter about Seraphina was hard because Hartman’s novel is clearly what they call in the book trade a triumphant debut.
Even with far more time and attention than I have right now it wouldn’t be possible
to do justice to Maurice Sendak with this post.
Sendak passed yesterday, at the age of 83, following a stroke. His career spanned
65 years and nearly 100 books as well as notable work in other media. You can find a timeline of his life and creations at the website of The Rosenbach Museum & Library, whose director also offers a nice remembrance of that Philadelphia institution’s relationship with the Brooklyn-born Sendak. (I recommend a visit to the place if you’re ever in town — its holdings include a large repository of Lewis Carroll memorabilia, James Joyce’s handwritten manuscript to Ulysses, and “over 10,000 Sendak objects, including original drawings, preliminary sketches, manuscripts, photographs, proofs, and rare prints of Sendak books.”)
[Note: The specific links no longer lead to where they once did, unfortunately, nor does the Rosenbach still house Sendak’s papers, although it maintains his rare-book collection.]
I saw The Hunger Games opening day. Based on the strength of Suzanne Collins' novel, on how good I expected Jennifer Lawrence to be in the lead role, and on advance word that the movie was not a complete travesty, I wanted to show my support for the film. So I was a small part of the $152.5 million it racked up that weekend in the US — making it third on the list of domestic opening weekends to date, behind 2008's The Dark Knight and 2011's final Harry Potter flick.
A few spoiler-free remarks follow.
Still from The Big Sleep © 1946 Warner Bros. Pictures.
Raymond Chandler. William Faulkner. Leigh Brackett. Max Steiner. Howard Hawks. Lauren Bacall. Humphrey Bogart.
Some films with such a pedigree end up as perceived if not actual failures. On The
Big Sleep, released by Warner Bros. in 1946, everything went right — at least judging by the end result, never mind this oft-circulated anecdote:
For my 40th birthday I thought I’d share a few musings on favorite things.
Not wanting to get mired in a swampland of categories or graphics nor too much internal debate, I settled on a casual catch-all catalog of whatever popped into my head. The items have been jotted down and put in rough order; now they’re being written up in varying levels of detail as time permits.
Of course such “things” as my nieces and nephews are indescribably precious to me,
but while I share the occasional story about them here I wanted to keep these posts focused on pop-cultural diversions.
Slipcase of DC Comics: Year by Year — A Visual Chronicle © 2010
and elements TM/® DC Comics. Main Figure Art: Ryan Sook.
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I’ve joined my grandparents for dinner the past couple of evenings, although that’s the extent of the similarities between this post and last year’s “Bing!”.
On Wednesday, Grandmom and I spoke about Lost. I’m taking a break from that subject for at least one post, however, since the coming weeks will be full of it.
I’m still not writing enough about my lifelong passion for comics.
Convenience stores, newsagents, and 5-&-10s in South Jersey fed my early habit,
as I shared last year. Only so much history could be gleaned from comic-book reprints and editorial pages, however. Luckily, a bevy of books on comics awaited at the Cape May County Library, where surveys of my favorite four-color fantasies and their forebears could be found in (mostly) cold, hard black and white.
The one I checked out most often was a 1973 tome aptly titled The Comic-Book Book, edited by Dick Lupoff and Don Thompson.
Although The Oprah Winfrey Show isn’t usually my bag, I taped and caught up with
its pre-Oscars episode featuring Roger Ebert last week. Ebert and his wife, Chaz Hammel-Smith Ebert, visited to discuss his long battle with cancer and longer battle with that battle’s complications — and to debut a new computerized voice specifically designed for the now-mute Ebert using nearly 30 years of television appearances as reference.
When my health made it difficult for me to get out much and my finances were fairly literally nil (a set of circumstances that I can’t entirely relegate to the past tense) I frequented Borders. Sometimes I would arrange to meet friends there, it being a good destination for browsing on my part and theirs in case I was early, late, or unable to make it. Sometimes I would stop in for a respite among errands. Sometimes I would make it a destination unto itself, to soak in the social atmosphere and seasonal music
or decorations even if I wasn’t up to actual interaction; plus, of course, I enjoyed browsing the books.
As I said, I had no money to spare; I also had trouble reading. In my post “The Slog”
I wrote about how trouble concentrating made it hard to write. I had to all but re-learn how to read, as well, and if there was one thing that defined me in life more than writer it was reader. Short and simple nonfiction as in magazines was easiest, thankfully, so that I could keep up with news and reviews — the latter often, masochistically, purely for vicarious purposes.
I own more editions of Lewis Carroll’s Alice books than of any other book — not counting adaptations or excerpts, just the original texts of 1865’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and 1872’s Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There.
Martin Gardner’s The Annotated Alice, which recently got referenced (again) on an episode of Lost to a hoot from me, could well be my favorite book ever. It’s not the sole or necessarily even the best way to experience Alice, but if you only know the Disney film by all means read Carroll and if you’ve enjoyed Carroll by all means plunge into Gardner’s exegesis and celebration of his work.
I was reminded yesterday of David Moser’s delightful “This Is the Title of This Story, Which Is Also Found Several Times in the Story Itself”.
While I first encountered it in the form of some unattributed, photocopied pages enthusiastically foisted on me by a friend, I discovered not long after that it was published in Douglas R. Hofstadter’s Metamagical Themas, which became one of my favorite and most frequently re-read books. It collects installments of Hofstadter’s column of the same name for the magazine Scientific American, a column that succeeded — and was named by rearranging the letters to the title of — the venerable Martin Gardner’s column, Mathematical Games. Hofstadter is best known for his opus Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, winner of the 1980 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction. Gardner is the editor/curator of another of my favorite and most frequently re-read books, The Annotated Alice; he has written many more, the latest of which is an essay collection titled When You Were a Tadpole and I Was a Fish: And Other Speculations About This and That, published two weeks before the author’s 95th birthday. My grandfather hit the same landmark three weeks before Gardner, and I hope that my mind is as fresh as either gentleman’s at that age.
The Lost Rewatch hosted by Nikki Stafford wraps up its review of the pivotal
third season this week.
I couldn’t join in when the Rewatch began in July but jumped on board last month
with Season 3. While I’ve fallen behind again, I’m trying to catch up and looking forward to discussion of Season 4, on which more in a few paragraphs.
