Being the judge for a literary award means you have to do a lot of reading. A lot. A lot. A lot. I’ve been up to my eyeballs in anthologies and short stories for the past few months. Some novelettes, too. But mostly short stories and collections thereof. Easily a thousand short stories.
I won’t be sorry when that part of the process is over. The only novel I’ve read recently is End of Watch (how could I not?). I’ve had a galley of Justin Cronin’s City of Mirrors for over a month and really want to dig into it, but I’m waiting for a time when I can tackle it without interruption. This morning, though, I picked up The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins and tore through the first sixty or seventy pages. It has an interesting structure. One set of chapters is narrated by an alcoholic woman, divorced, prone to blackouts, and another is narrated by a somewhat depressed woman, though the timeframe of her story is a year earlier. It will be interesting to see how it all joins up.
My wife and I binged through 11.22.63 last weekend, finishing up last night. This was my second time through the eight episodes, and it was good to refresh my memory of it for my News from the Dead Zone overview, which went up yesterday at Cemetery Dance Online. I don’t have much more to say about the series than I did there, but my wife really enjoyed it. She thought the first episode was okay, not compelling, but it got its hooks into her after that and she was as eager to see the next batch of episodes as I was. She hadn’t read the book, so it was good to get her fresh opinion of the adaptation. She was especially pleased with the ending.
I also finished Season 4 of House of Cards this morning. It was what I’ve been watching during my weekday exercise regimen. More of the same, more or less. Nothing too earth shattering, but it’s always interesting to see where they take the story. I wish they’d found more use for Neve Campbell, but it was terrific to see her again. It took me a while to realize where I knew Governor Conway from—he was played by the Swedish actor who played Holder in the US version of The Killing.
Speaking of Swedish actors, my wife had read part of a book called The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared by Swedish author Jonas Jonasson. I stumbled across the movie adaptation on Amazon Prime a couple of weeks ago, so we decided to give it a go. It’s about a centenarian who absconds during his birthday party and soon thereafter winds up coming into possession of a suitcase full of money. Hilarity ensues. It’s a quirky story, like something Roald Dahl might have written for adults. It has a surprising amount of explicit violence and some absurd coincidences, but it’s always interesting to see the sorts of things that other cultures enjoy. The stuff with Albert Einstein’s lesser known brother Herbert was particularly amusing. It’s the third highest grossing Swedish movie of all time, up there with The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. movies.
We also watched The Grand Budapest Hotel, which was a lot different than I thought it was going to be. For some reason I thought it was going to be about shenanigans at the aforementioned hotel, but it was actually more about shenanigans involving the concierge (Ralph Fiennes) and the lobby boy (who grows up to be F. Murray Abraham). It’s just as absurd as the Swedish movie, but we liked it. More than I expected we would, in fact.
