I received my Edgar nomination certificate this weekend. It’s ginormous, as my daughter would say. 11 x 17. Went out at noon to pick up a frame for it so it can hang on the wall of shame fame.
Speaking of framing, I finished Innocent by Scott Turow this weekend. Probably the best book I’ve read so far in 2010. It’s exquisitely plotted and the way he leverages the events from Presumed Innocent without explicitly stating many of them is quite brilliant, I think. If you haven’t read that book you won’t feel lost, but you won’t know what you’re missing, either. If you have read the book, many scenes take on added resonance. Highly recommended. I post a full review at Onxy later on, but not until closer to publication date.
I posted my review of Solar by Ian McEwan at Onyx Reviews last night. An interesting book. Lots of reviewers on Amazon turned off by either the fact that the main character is totally unlikeable or all the quantum physics, but I enjoyed it.
I know that I mentioned the full details of this, but my poem “24 Hour Psycho” will appear in A Sea of Alone, edited by Christopher Conlon. This book is still taking submissions until April 10, so there’s still a chance for you to get something in to this cool collection.
Here’s a round table discussion among current Stoker nominees, answering a couple of questions about being nominated for an award like this. Well, sort of. There was no table involved, and we didn’t exactly discuss the questions — we just each submitted our own answers to them.
I thought Jordan and Jeff were doomed on The Amazing Race last night when a dim taxi driver took them halfway to Denmark when they were supposed to stay in Hamburg. Fortunately it was a non-elimination round. However, that means they’ll have to make up time and do an extra task next week. Not promising. And, hey, the cops finally made it to the top of the heap.
We watched the first two hours of Edge of Darkness, a BBC mininseries from the 1980s that was recently remade as a two-hour movie with Mel Gibson. Haven’t seen the remake but read good things about the original series. It’s about a Yorkshire cop whose daughter is tangled up in a group called Gaia that is opposing nuclear power. She’s killed in the first episode, but it takes a while to work out whether she was the target or her father. When her hair turns out to be radioactive, he starts digging around. All sorts of government agencies have taken an interest in her and in the case. There’s an American CIA agent from Dallas who wears a cowboy hat and drives a white caddy in London–this was the era of Dallas, after all. A very funny scene where the Yorkshire cop is called out to meet this agent late at night at a bar. The CIA agent’s two buddies are hammered, passed out on the table, except they pop up every now and then to say something. After the agent and the cop carry them back to their room, one guy pops up again to say, “If the White House calls, tell them I’m out in the field.” In due course, the White House does call. Message relayed.
I only watched about an hour of the Academy Awards last night. I’m not generally a big Ben Stiller fan, but I thought his Avatar bit was pretty funny, and I liked the Tina Fey/Robert Downey, Jr. shtick, too. I like to think that Doctor Who fans discovered Carey Mulligan before the Academy did. I haven’t seen An Education yet, but it’s out on video this month so I’ll see it then.
