I finished Under the Dome this morning. Took me less than four days. My right shoulder is a little sore from holding the book up while I lay in bed reading. I’m going to recommend that people work out to prepare themselves–the hardbound copy will no doubt be even heavier than the ARC. Now it’s time to write the review. I received an ARC of Mister Slaugther, the next novel by Robert McCammon, so that one goes to near the top of my reading queue. I think I’ll finish How I Became a Famous Novelist by Steve Hely first.
I also watched the last episodes of season two of Ashes to Ashes. On the whole I liked it, and I’m glad I went back to it. Shrill Alex Drake is still a bit annoying, but the season-long plot about police corruption, something that reached even into Gene’s group in an unexpected way, was very good. They’ve been renewed for one final season in 2010, and I’ll be there watching.
We watched the first hour of Bounce last night, the one with Ben Affleck and Gwyneth Paltrow about the guy who hands off his ticket to another guy so he can shack up in the hotel with someone he met at the airport bar (Natasha Henstridge) only to have that plane go down. Complicating matters is the fact that he is an ad executive for the agency that represents the airline. We both agreed that they told too much of the story up front, and it might have been much more interesting if the film had started when Affleck first meets Paltrow at the strip mall where she’s trying to sell a property. He would have come off as something of a stalker and with her lie about being divorced it would have taken the audience a while to figure out what was really going on. The way they chose to plot it, though, meant that after an hour it became inevitable that she would find out the truth and there would be a very uncomfortable section where she confronted him with her knowledge and he tried to explain and blah blah blah we’ve seen all that before. If the discovery was sprung on the audience instead of dictated from the beginning it wouldn’t have been so tiresome.
A hot day. Another one, of many. I mowed the lawn, probably for the first time in a month. It was longish but not growing very fast in this drought. I can’t think of another summer when I haven’t had to cut the grass every weekend. The heat sure takes it out of a person. I felt like taking a nap when I was done, and I never take naps.
