Best Actor
* Oscar de la Hoya
Best Supporting Actor
* Oscar Wilde
Best Original Screenplay
* Oscar the Grouch
Best Director
* Oscar! (1991)
Best Picture
* Oscar Meyer
Better Oscar Nominations
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Writing
Review: The Sense of an Ending
The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
The trouble with this book is that the first third is a blisteringly well-written story of young love while the second two-thirds flies forward forty years and is the blisteringly well-written story about a man writing emails to an angry ex-girlfriend.
The plot concerns Tony, an isolated man in 60s, who is trying to recover the diary of an old friend from an ex-girlfriend, Veronica, who refuses to let him see it. Why Veronica is upset with Tony after forty years of no communication is the novel’s big mystery–and it’s one I found myself quite invested it. Tony wants to figure out why Veronica hates him and overcome her contempt, but searching for answers seems to only further infuriate her.
“You never got it, Tony–and you never will,” she says, and Tony wonders if the key to understanding everything isn’t buried somewhere in his own frustratingly imperfect, shifting memories.
At times, I was reminded of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, insofar as the story’s protagonist is a man with little to do but sit around and find the world endlessly perplexing and inscrutable.
But while I hated the endless drone of Murakami’s book, I really liked Julian Barnes’s book a lot. Maybe because it was tightly focused and had a compelling central mystery that actually resolved in the end. This book was more of a page-turner for me than all the genre fiction I’ve been reading lately. While I was a touch disappointed with the ending (it felt like it relied too heavily on a reveal that I didn’t find entirely shocking, and I was left wondering what becomes of the main character), I was enchanted and moved by the idea that as life progresses and friends are lost, so too is the sense of one’s own history without corroborators needed to give us some sense of our own reality.
Brilliant, and close to perfect, but the ending struck me just a shade too prudish and judgmental.
I’m Gonna Die (On My Way to Work Today)!
One block from work, my phone stops playing music for no good reason. Ordinarily, I’d assume I’d hit my pocket just so, but there’s no chance this time. My hands were out, drumming the air in a mostly unobtrusive way to “Zero” by the Smashing Pumpkins. I really don’t think it was me. The phone’s on the fritz. Sometimes it does this, and I have to just find another song. Just one of those things–something else in the world going wrong. I’m scrolling through artists, wondering if I want to spend the rest of the day listening exclusively to The Police, when I think, “HOO BOY! I’m really going to die someday!”
I said I thought that, but really I shouted part of it at a street vendor. Picture a man walking along, thumbing through his iPhone, walking past a food cart, suddenly screaming, “HOO!” with a look of surprise and a bit of a faint smile.
It’s certainly not the first time this thought has occurred to me; first time I had it I believe I was three or four years old. In the pie chart of Thoughts Most Thought in My Head, it’s probably somewhere between “I want to have sex” and “I could really go for some tater tots.” In junior high, I almost stopped reading horror novels because it no longer seemed to matter if the characters lived or died, since they were all going to die someday (only later realizing that, all things considered, it was better to go in one’s sleep than to be carved up by a clown wielding a rusty chainsaw). These days, I’ve gotten used to the thought, scolded it for being cliche, and yet still it comes bounding along from time to time, in varying strengths and severities. It stops by, says hello, menaces me a bit, then flitters away again to wherever it goes after that.
But like a slap, the thought can be playful or painful. For whatever reason, this morning, it’s born hard–a real sharp crack right across the cheek of my half-awake mind. The smile on my face is because I find the sudden severity of it amusing, and my masochistic side is closely tied to my sense of humor. Call it self-schadenfreude.
It’d be the same if someone came running around the corner with a giant mallet and hit me hard in the stomach. I’d go down, sure, but I’d do so laughing, because, honestly, who does that to someone? Like putting pureed habanero in someone’s OJ, it’s rude but so funny.
Then I’m on the south side of 20th Street, heading west toward my building, watching people walk past me with their dogs and their own iPhones and iPads and Kindles and things, thinking, “Yep. I really am gonna die. Rumor has it it can’t be avoided. And no afterlife, not for me, dirty atheist that I am. It’ll be like before I was born. Remember that? Sure don’t! That’s the good part. I don’t think I know what death’s like, but, really, I do.”
The mind-melting idea of nonexistence, the suffocating lack of any thoughts at all, terrifies me. I cling to fantasies: that maybe everyone else is playing a giant joke on me and no one really ever dies and someday all the people I think are dead, like Stanley Kubrick, my grandfather, and Osama bin Laden, will pop up over the other side of my cubicle and say, “Surprise!”; or that someday, given infinite time, the universe simply has to repeat itself, and I will return to relive my life an impossibly long time from now–a resurrection through recycled molecules, the spiritual equivalent of monkeys eventually randomly retyping Hamlet.
Such thoughts rarely work, and they didn’t today, either. The people passed me, I passed the people, that old drink-to-the-face thought evaporated, and I pushed play on “Next to You.”
Then I went into work and wrote some computer code.
Review: Seed
Seed by Ania Ahlborn
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
This is the story of Jack Winter, who ran away from home when he was a boy to escape a demon he met in a cemetery behind his house. Now that he’s older and has a wife and two daughters, Jack discovers his youngest daughter has been claimed by the same demon he’s been trying to avoid for so long — a demon which may or may not have caused him to do some diabolical deeds when he was a boy.
Seed has a good ending, and it obeys a lot of my own guidelines for horror stories (try to be actually scary, make us care about the characters, limit the involvement of computers and guns and cops, and make your villain as lethal as possible), but the trouble is that the book is mostly stage direction and internal monologues, neither of which proves that interesting (Jack tends to think most about things the narrator chooses not to share with the audience, which is annoying). Also, it’s a little unclear if the demon is inside the daughter or an external presence. (It can be photographed, annnnnd yet it never attacks anyone? Huh? What IS that thing?)
But hey, at least it’s not vampires or werewolves and no one is sparkly shiny! Points for original horror.
I think this would have made a totally badass short story. As a novel, I think it’s stretched way too thin, and there aren’t enough details to keep the prose interesting. There’s also no second act at all, and the story spins its tires forever until the end decides to happen. I like Ahlborn’s sensibilities, but this feels like a warmup to something better.
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Review: Short-Stories
Short-Stories by Various
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This small collection of a handful of classic stories proves refreshing, if a touch moralistic. I love Hawthorne’s writing, but his stories I find just a touch too direct. (Don’t lecture me, old man!) My favorite in here is one I hadn’t read before, “The Griffin and the Minor Canon,” which is basically the story of a gargoyle coming to stare at its likeness above a church. Its presence terrifies the villagers, and the further reactions made for interesting reading. Something about that story really works on me.
What I love about this collection is how representative it is of horror stories as literature.
Some bad formatting in this free kindle version frustrated me at times.
Review: The Day of the Triffids
The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Stop me, oh-ho-whoa stop me, stop me if you think that you’ve heard this one before: A man wakes up in a London hospital to find no one around, stumbles out into Piccadilly to find the world has gone all apocalyptic while he’s been sleeping.
Yep. Turns out this book was made into a movie called 28 Days Later, among others.
There’s a lot to recommend this book by John Wyndham, which details the attempts to rebuild civilization after a meteorological event renders most of the world blind, leaving them at the mercy of dangerous, scientifically-engineered plants known as triffids, which are tall clumsy things with vicious stingers that now run rampant over a population too sense-deprived to effectively corral them anymore. For one, I liked the author’s vocabulary, and the guy can actually write a nice sentence. For another, I thought a lot of this book was really well-imagined. The details and reactions to the events were nicely convincing, and I adored the second chapter, which discussed the origins of the triffids.
Unfortunately, the book as a whole was perhaps just a little too languid in its pace. It felt cozy and safe most of the time, and I wished that it could have been more exciting. Until very close to the end of the book, the triffids play a painfully minor role, and while it’s interesting that most of the conflict arises from the need to find a solution to meeting the needs of a population that’s gone blind … I just, what can I say, I wanted more triffids. I loved their design, I love the way Wyndham describes them moving with their long stalk swaying nearly comically front-to-back, but it annoyed me how little drama they ultimately provided.
I really want this killer plant book to be scarier. Alas.
Review: The 39 Steps
The 39 Steps by John Buchan
My rating: 1 of 5 stars
Richard Hannay’s been feeling bored with his life in London. Reading the paper one morning, Hannay sees something about a politician he admires, and next thing he knows, he’s conjured an anti-semite out of thin air to spin yarns in his parlor and tell him there is a plot to kill the admirable politician and launch Britain and Germany into war. Luckily for Hannay, this anti-semite is murdered mysteriously, leaving Hannay looking pretty suspicious, so what can he do but become the author’s wish-fulfillment and go on the run and engage in a little international espionage.
By which I mean he runs around in the fields. A lot. He hides in this field. He hides in that field. Some shadowy figures close in, and off he goes, running again.
I much prefer the move version, Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song. At least that has good music for all the running around parts.
This book is a series of improbable scenes of a man adopting various disguises to avoid detection while he does next to nothing of any import — until the final chapter, where he unravels it all in one of the most ridiculous scenes I have ever read. Seriously. He realizes that the man sitting right in front of him with NO DISGUISE ON is a man he met and had a conversation with a few chapters earlier. And it’s treated like an ah-ha! moment.
Credit where it’s due, I suppose for being one of the first of its kind. Rumor has it this book started the spy genre. If so, I wish they’d had a better blueprint. This is one of the worst books I’ve ever read. It has little resemblance to the Hitchcock film of the same title.
And they call it a classic …
Review: The Amazing Screw-On Head and Other Curious Objects
The Amazing Screw-On Head and Other Curious Objects by Mike Mignola
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I’d read the single-issue comic before and always wanted more. This collection of short stories by Mignola (and special-guest story conceived by his daughter) rounds out the experience in satisfying ways.
The eponymous story features the character of Screw-On Head, who is a small mechanical hero under the employ of Abraham Lincoln, sent on a mission to save the world from some ne’er-do-wells. Great writing and artwork, as per Mignola’s usual, abound, although the story itself might be a little bit of a standard-issue MacGuffin-driven yarn.
But the following stories, which feature and expand upon characters and elements of Screw-On Head, are shockingly good. I especially liked “The Witch and Her Soul,” which has the single most beautiful depiction of a “mortal coil” in a story that made me laugh out loud.
All of these are winners, though, and I thought the last piece, which was sort of a coda for the rest of it, depicting objects from the other tales in an atmospheric museum, was so inspiring and effective it made me want to read everything again right away.
This is a book I will cherish for quite some time.
Ten Things to Remember When Making a Top Ten List
I know I’ve been guilty of a lot of Top Ten lists in the past myself, so I thought I’d offer some basic pointers for those looking to get into the list-making game. Without further preamble, here then are the most important things to remember this year, determined through science:
10. If you put more than ten things on your Top Ten list, the next time you play chess with me I get to play with two extra pawns. Oh, you don’t think that’s fair? Some anarchist you turned out to be!
9. If you leave something off or put something on that you shouldn’t have, I will come to your house and stay either way too long or simply punch you in the face and disappear into thin air.
8. Most people probably already know your list is subjective opinion. You might not need to remind us all that your rankings are not factual or objective.
7. The most blatant lies are usually put in the number 7 and number 2 spots.
6. Generally #6 is freaking mind-blowing. This is where people will be surprised to find you so wise and erudite.
5. While you have never stood out in a crowd of 1,374,398 people, putting this list together and posting it online may/may not be the time you finally rise above the rest and get people to pay attention to you, although probably only if you’re ranking the top ten things your pet monkey or your pet robot did this year. (If you don’t have a pet monkey or pet robot, you should making getting one a New Year’s resolution.)
4. Putting a documentary about inner city life or a rap album on your list only gives your list credibility if you are ranking the best rap albums or documentaries about inner city life. Extra credibility, though, can be earned if the rap album appears on the documentary list and the documentary on the rap album list.
3. In all likelihood, you will enjoy the process and find it deeply rewarding, and it will help you understand what has happened to you this year, which was painful and horrible. Let’s hope it doesn’t happen again, though–the list-making.
2. It probably would have been a better use of your time to learn a new word in Spanish than to make your list. Did you know embarazada means pregnant, not embarrassed? Now you do, so I’ve undone that mistake for you. (Always remember to practice safe sex when making a list, even if making it en la ciudad de mexico.)
1. Someone will die, no matter what you do, while you write your list. Probably unrelated, but I thought you should know.