Category Archives: Reviews

The Invention of Hugo Cabret

Also known as just plain Hugo, in the movie version.

Hugo Cabret is an orphan who lives in a train station in Paris.  After his uncle disappears, he has to keep all the clocks in the station running himself or else somebody will notice something is wrong and drag him off to the orphanage.  When he tries to steal clock parts from the old man who runs a toy shop in the station, he gets tangled up in the mystery of the man’s past.

The movie Hugo is an adaptation of one epic of a weighty book.  It’s 533 pages long and more graphic novel than straight-up text, full of lavishly rendered charcoal drawings.  The visuals in this movie live up to that book.  Go see this film if only to check out some of the fly-through shots.  Did I mention that most of the book takes place in a train station?  In Paris?  With lots of giant gears and automatons and clock-y things?  Eee!

… oh, right.  The story.  It is also quite good.  The scriptwriters tried to keep everything that was in the book and add in a few more things besides, so the plot is a bit involved.  Christopher Lee makes a delightful cameo as a train station bookseller.  “Hello, I’m a benevolent old man with a sephulchral voice.  Would you like a book?”  Another highlight is the guy who is ostensibly the bad guy, the station inspector.  He is much more fleshed out in the movie than the book, where he was not much more than a pair of prying eyes.  What with all the inspector’s hapless attempts to bring Hugo to “justice,” he’s too adorable for anybody to take him seriously as a villain.

Also, this movie got a 95% on Rotten Tomatoes.  Go see it.

Dragonsong

I remember the incident – venturing out of the little kids’ section of Whittier Public Library into the real kids’ section, where they had books with chapters and stuff in them.  I picked a book out of the shelf that looked interesting.  It had a crinkly plastic jacket and there was a dragon on the cover.  Dragonsong.  That sounded cool.

And so I was introduced to the world of Pern.  The story was about Menolly, who wanted to be a dragonsinger even though her freehold wouldn’t let her, but I confess I don’t remember much about the plot.  That world!  That creepy-ass Threadfall.  Those dragons who could teleport Between.  And the dragonriders who could telepathically communicate with them and keep the world safe.

Anne McCaffrey, you introduced me to fantasy novels.

Mine!

After starting at #47 on the hold list at Saint Paul Public Library, I have finally worked my way to the head of the line!  I went in there this evening and the hold was in.  I’ve got my hands on a copy of … Game of Thrones.

Expect a detailed analysis and comparison to the miniseries when it’s done.

A Tale of Two Poetry Anthologies

There’s a beat-up copy of Perrine’s Literature on my bookshelf.  It’s a 1998 edition, a hand-me-down from my older cousin.  She used it to get through IB English and then let me do the same.  And though we never used it for class, there’s a chapter in there on poetry that I read on my own.  This is by Wallace Stevens:

Is there no change of death in paradise?
Does ripe fruit never fall?  Or do the boughs
Hang always heavy in that perfect sky,
Unchanging, yet so like our perishing earth,
With rivers like our own that seek for seas
They never find, the same receding shores
That never touch with inarticulate pang?
Alas, that they should wear our colors there,
The silken weavings of our afternoons,
And pick the strings of our insipid lutes!
Death is the mother of beauty, mystical,
Within whose burning bosom we devise
Our earthly mothers waiting, sleeplessly.

This is hot stuff!  But if I want to read some more of the really good poetry, where do I find it?

The Best Poems of the English Language seemed like a good place to start.  It’s by Harold Bloom, a professor at Yale University and a prolific critic and writer of his own.  And to be sure, there’s a lot of good poetry in there.  There’s also this little gem:

… by reprinting only half a dozen poems published after 1923, I have largely evaded our contemporary flight from all standards of aesthetic and cognitive value.  Since there are no poems in this volume that are not among the best in the language, I will have to cite some bad or inadequate work not reprinted here in order to discuss how and why we legitimately should choose among poems.

I mean, the guy is a professor at Yale.  He knows what he’s doing.  But lordy!

Now contrast Good Poems, edited by Garrison Keillor.

Stickiness, memorability, is one sign of a good poem.  You hear it and a day later some of it is still there in the brainpan.

All the poems Keillor selected to go into this book are short.  They were meant to be read on the radio to an audience that had just barely woken up.  And all the poems are about real people.  There’s joy, grief, and lots and lots of poems about snow.  Well, he is a Minnesotan.

The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins

I must be turning into a grouchy old lady.  I read The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins – you know, that hit YA fantasy that’s scheduled to be made into a movie next year – and all I could do was cringe at the diction.

The story is nice enough, if not entirely original.  In a dystopian future, the government forces children from each of the twelve Districts to battle each other to death on live television.  When her little sister gets chosen to be this year’s contestant from District Twelve, Katniss Everdeen, warrior girl, volunteers to take her place.  There is also a subplot in which Katniss has difficulty deciding between two boyfriends.

I shouldn’t be sweating the small stuff, but what bothers me the most about this book are the adverbs.  Katniss is forever doing things “quickly” or “slowly.”  Not a semicolon in sight, dozens of places where one should have been.  Collins even goes so far as to word “actually” in a non-ironic fashion.

We are expected to believe that Katniss Everdeen likes dresses.  Katniss the pragmatic survivalist.  Katniss, who is reported to break out of the electrified fence surrounding the compound where she lives to hunt food for her family.  Okay, she’s a kid.  I liked dresses too, briefly.  When I was eight.  But you can’t move around in a dress and you can’t afford to spill rabbit guts all over it.

What is it with kids these days?

Small Favor: One of the Dresden Files

Harry Dresden is Chicago’s only professional wizard.  While he’s not solving crimes as a consultant with the Chicago PD, he’s trying to keep out of a turf war between the Summer and Winter Court of the Fae (think Queen Titania vs. Queen Mab), avoid demons who are trying to kill him, and escape the notice of Chicago’s supernatural crime bosses.  And he’d like to find a girlfriend and figure out how he’s going to make rent this month.  Yep.  It’s pretty much a hardboiled detective novel … with magic.

Jim Butcher has got a formula going here with the Dresden Files series.  But the formula works, and he’s running with it.  If you’re looking for a lightweight read with lovable characters, something you don’t have to analyze too much, Small Favor is for you.

Bridge of Birds: A Novel of an Ancient China that Never Was

 

‘Take a large bowl,’ I said.  ‘Fill it with equal measures of fact, fantasy, history, mythology, science, superstition, logic, and lunacy.  Darken the mixture with bitter tears, brighten it with howls of laughter, toss in three thousand years of civilization, bellow kan pei – which means “dry cup” – and drink to the dregs.’

Procopius stared at me.  ‘And will I be wise?’ he asked.

‘Better,’ I said.  ‘You will be Chinese.’

Plucker, by Brom

Sick and twisted Toy Story.

I do have to start off with one nitpick.  The author of this book is primarily a visual artist, and it shows in the text.  But… just wait till I tell you how this goes.  A boogeyman from Africa has gotten into this little kids’ room.  It’s picking off his toys one by one and eating their eyeballs, and when it’s done, it’s going to steal the kids’ soul.  Lucky for them, the housekeeper moonlights as a voodoo priestess.  She takes Jack in the Box (our hero), sews a snake heart into him, and sets him off on a mission of bloody vengeance.  How cool is that?

The Year 2021 According to The Year 1968

I just finished reading Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?  Don’t get me wrong – he’s an eerily good science fictionist.  His examination of the blurry line between real life and artificial life is as relevant today as it was forty-three years ago (and anticipates genetic engineering).  But some of the details of life in the year 2021 are hard to predict that far in advance.

According to Androids, ten years from now,

  • We will have flying cars.
  • We will have Skype.  (Yeah!)
  • People with mental disabilities will be referred to as “chickenheads.”
  • There will be no women in positions of power.
  • The Soviet Union will come back.  People will care what the Soviet Union thinks.
  • We will have the technology to produce android brains so sophisticated that they are nearly indistinguishable from human beings.
  • Police investigators will store information about these androids on pieces of paper.