Sorry this is a few days late.



Audio

Harry Potter and the Sorceror’s Stone, JK Rowling
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, JK Rowling
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, JK Rowling
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, JK Rowling
It struck me, at the World Cup, when they saw the Salem Witches Institute banner, that wizards really don’t get muggles. Anti-muggle security would have been best handled by telling the campground people that they were a convention of some sort of eccentric folk.

The House of the Scorpion, Nancy Farmer
Matt is a clone. In the ordinary course of things, clones are lobotomized. Matt was not. He had no idea he was a clone until he met children from the house. It’s a very good book, though I advise skimming through the bit about the communist orphanage, which comes more or less out of nowhere.

Memoirs of a Geisha, Arthur Golden
The storytelling device is that Sayuri is dictating her memoir to the man who later published it. This makes it particularly well-suited to the audiobook format. I’m actually not sure I would like it as much if I were reading it.

My Side of the Mountain, Jean Craighead George
My Side of the Mountain has a lot of the same detailed survival stuff that I loved in Julie of the Wolves, but I'm having a much harder time buying the premise. It's a lot easier to believe that an Inuit girl is running away from an arranged marriage than that a teenager from New York City would be permitted to live alone in the woods for eight months. I have to remind myself that this is before the days of the Department of Social Services swooping down on the parents of truant children. Aside from that, I enjoyed it quite a bit.

Outlander, Diana Gabaldon

Two Plays for Voices, Neil Gaiman
Snow Glass Apples – Snow White from the perspective of the stepmother. Snow White is some sort of evil vampire creature, and Prince Charming is a necrophiliac. Neil Gaiman is severely twisted. A very good take on the story.
Murder Mysteries – Didn’t hold my interest. Had something to do with angels.

Print

Anansi Boys, Neil Gaiman
This book takes place in the same universe as American Gods. The main character, Fat Charlie Nancy, discovers after his father’s death that his father was none other than the trickster-god Anansi. And he finds out that he has a brother. Sort of. That's when things start to go weird for our poor hero...

Old Man’s War, John Scalzi
I liked this one quite a bit. This book is very conversational in tone, and slightly blog-flavored. It’s a couple hundred years from now. (The timing is only important in that humans have been colonizing space for about two hundred years.) There’s an interplanetary war going on. Seems not all aliens come in peace, or are at all interested in sharing planets with humans. The Colonial Defense Force is waging this war, and the recruits are senior citizens. No one on Earth knows how they do it, but somehow they make people young again. They recruit people at age 65, to join at age 75.

Video

Battlestar Galactica, 1978
Battlestar Galactica, 2005, Season 2

Blade Runner, 1982
Everyone seems to think this movie is the be-all and end-all of science fiction. Didn’t do much for me.

Boondock Saints, 1999
I actually watched this in March (I watch it every St. Patrick’s Day) but forgot to include it on the March list.

Dune, 2000
This is the William Hurt mini-series.

Jesus Christ Superstar, 2000
The 1973 version is unwatchable (except for Judas), but the 2000 version is really good. It’s my Easter movie.

MacGyver, Season 1, Disc 2
More good clean 1980’s fun. In one of the episodes on this disc, MacGyver’s nemesis is a stampede of ants. They’re normal-sized ants, but there are billions of them, eating everything in their path, including at least two men. Doesn’t make it any less funny that MacGyver has to think of a means of defeating ants.

Mean Girls, 2003
Meh. It’s no Heathers.

Memoirs of a Geisha, 2005
Wow. I’m not surprised that it was amazing, because you would have to have a pretty terrible script to overcome the combined screen presence of Michelle Yeoh, Li Gong, and Zhang Ziyi, and this was not a terrible script.

Nell, 1994
Jodie Foster plays Nell, a woman raised in isolation by a mother with a speech disorder. It’s really an impressive piece. Nell has never seen people other than her mother (who has just died), so she learned to speak the way her mother did.

North by Northwest, 1959
North Dakota isn’t 3000 miles from New York! (For that matter, the direction from New York to North Dakota would more accurately be described as west-northwest. It's certainly not north-northwest. It's 3° north, and 30° west.)

This was on my “to watch” list before Chief Justice Roberts said it was his favorite movie (along with Doctor Zhivago) during his Senate confirmation hearings. Roberts’s recommendation just bumped it up a bit in the queue.

Anyway, it's a very good movie.

The Outsiders, 1983
This movie was even better than I remembered, which makes me all kinds of happy. Some of the cinematography (ok, quite a lot of it) is just beautiful. Also, it’s an entertaining game of “find the baby celebirties.” Pretty much all of the Greasers went on to become big stars.

The author of the book, S.E. Hinton, had a bit part as a nurse. I had no idea the author was female. The S is for Susie.

The Recruit, 2003
I’ve seen this movie three times now, and each time, I’m surprised by just how good it is. First, I worship the ground Al Pacino walks on. He’s a really amazing actor. What really gets me is his ability with non-verbal acting. There’s a scene towards the end where you can just see an unpleasant truth hit the character. Colin Farrell is also quite impressive.

Sideways, 2004
These are not terribly sensible people. As I mentioned last month with respect to Rent, there are some behaviors that are understandable and even almost expected from undergrads, but just kind of pathetic from someone pushing 40.

Star Trek: The Next Generation, Season 1
Star Trek: Enterprise, Season 3

The West Wing, Seasons 2 – 5
I love this show. I really do. Also, since my knee flared up, I spent much of the last two weeks on the couch.

Tags: book list, books, movie list, movies