I read something on the order of 66 books this year, including the two that are still in progress: The Mysterious Island by Jules Verne (on my iPod) and I’d Know You Anywhere by Laura Lippman. If you’re interested in the entire list, go here. Many of the title have links to my reviews on Onyx Reviews.
The next two books in the queue are The Silent Land by Graham Joyce (a galley of which I requested via Amazon Vine yesterday) and A Drop of the Hard Stuff by Lawrence Block, the new Matt Scudder book. The publisher sent me an ARC of that one last week. I finished Postscript to the Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco a couple of nights ago. He concluded with a fascinating intellectual exercise in which a group of literary theorists decided that in the matrix of all possible murder plots there is still to be written the book in which the murderer is the reader. Boy, does that set the mind reeling.
Veteran reviewer Paul Goat Allen calls Evolve “one of the best vampire anthologies I’ve ever read” in his Best Vampire Releases of 2010.
We watched Robin Hood last night. I had resisted the movie based on the trailer, because I thought it was going to be another one of those films where people yelled all the time. “We are Spartacus.” “Release the Kraken.” Turned out not to be the case. Though the story plays fast and loose with historical facts (the death of Richard the Lionheart, Philip II’s attempt to invade England—and didn’t that look like the D-Day invasion of Normandy?) and with many of the established stories of the mythic figure of Robin Hood, they spun a nice tale. It does a fine job of depicting the ardors of life in that era and the oppression of a distant and distracted monarchy. Big battle scenes where it’s terribly difficult to see who’s whacking whom. Max von Sydow as a sympathetic and genuinely nice old man—that’s a switch! Keamy from Lost as Little John. I have vivid memories of the story of the Magna Carta from high school, so it was interesting to see an alternate version of how that document might have come about. They emasculated the sheriff of Nottingham in this version (“I’m half French,” he pleads when Godfrey [Lord Henry Blackwood from Sherlock Holmes] shows up with his French troops) and introduced the Nottingham Forest Irregulars. In short, not as dire as I thought it would be. A little too serious and intense for a retelling of a legend that usually has a jocular side (rarely so much as in the TV series When Things Were Rotten or in Men in Tights), but there wasn’t nearly as much shouting as I feared.
I’m not in the habit of mentioning religion on this blog, but I have to include a link to a Wall Street Journal blog in which Ricky Gervais responds to some questions generated by his recent essay about why he’s an atheist. “Saying atheism is a belief system is like saying not going skiing is a hobby. I’ve never been skiing. It’s my biggest hobby. I literally do it all the time.”
