Girl Detective

As part of our pre-long-car-trip buying frenzy, I got Ice Age, since the boys have watched and loved Ice Age 3 several times, Ice Age 2: The Meltdown once, but never the original. Then I forgot to take it on the trip. So on a recent dad-night-out, I made popcorn and snuggled down with the boys to watch it.

Like its sequels, they loved it, especially the action sequences. A mammoth, a sloth, and a saber-tooth tiger reluctantly team up to return a baby to its human tribe, with some wrinkles along the way. There are a few sad moments that aren’t spelled out that my kids didn’t get. Nearing the end, my 6yo exclaimed, “There are only 10 more minutes. When’s the mother coming back?”

“Sorry, honey,” I told him. “She’s not coming back.” He returned to the movie, though, and didn’t ask why. There was also a wordless scene in the middle that told the mammoth’s tragic backstory, but when I asked the boys what had happened, they couldn’t tell me. Probably for the best, for now.

This was decent for me, and great fun for them. Definitely a good family DVD.

At The American Prospect, (link from The Morning News) a celebration of female nerds* on television:

http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=rise_of_the_female_nerds

*correctly classified as nerds, not geeks, according to this classification, since they’re socially inept

I respect Grant Morrison’s work. But I don’t always get it. I’m fairly certain the deficiency is me, as I’ve read about the zillion obscure-to-me referents he used for whichever book I didn’t care for or understand, like his All-Star Superman. So I approached his take on Batman and Robin, Batman Reborn with trepidation.

From moment one, I was in the driver’s seat, first in the bad guys’ car, then in a Bat vehicle. Morrison tags between these two scenes, and quickly situates us in the Bat-universe:

Robin: I told you it would work. All I had to do was adapt my father’s blueprints.

Batman: I’m sorry I ever doubted you, Damian…

Robin: “Never use real names in the field.” Your words.

Batman: You’re paying attention. Good. You know, I’d have killed for a flying batmobile when I was Robin.

A few pages later, we learn which former Robin is the new Batman, because apparently Bruce Wayne is dead.

I have a passing familiarity with the Bat-universe. I knew who Damian was, and guessed who Batman was, before Alfred confirmed it, though I don’t know who all the Robins have been. This reboot, then, is not only for regular readers of the monthly Bat titles, but also for casual fans of the Bat. It’s quite good, and in the Morrison/Quitely tradition, often gruesome.

There are villains aplenty, like Pyg and the Flamingo, and a new antihero, the Red Hood. The first trade paperback collects issues 1 to 6, but doesn’t resolve everything. Even if you bought the individual issues, the collected edition is a good investment to avoid the ugly, intrusive ads. I look forward to the rest of the series; so far it’s a wild ride.

Reposting with its own entry:

I want to read Neal Stephenson’s The Baroque Cycle this summer. Quicksilver, The Confusion and System of the World are about 900 pages each.

With an average of 20 pages a day, we could get through the first two. With thirty pages a day, we’d get through them all from June to August. But 30 pp a day plus other reading is a big commitment, I know.

I had a great time reading Infinite Jest with a group last summer, and enjoyed the accomplishment of tackling such a big project. But that was only 74 pp a week plus footnotes, not 210, so it’s a big difference, though my husband G. Grod assures me the BC is a much faster read than IJ (unsurprising, right?)

What do you think?

Reposting with its own entry:

In honor of the woman profiled in the New York Times last year, who read a book a day for a year and blogged each one, I propose reading a book a day from your shelf starting Friday, April 16 (the day after US taxes are due, so you should have a little more time plus be in a frugal mindset) till April 30, 2010 and blogging a review, however brief, the next day, starting Saturday, the 17th.

I would post my entries the night before, so you could link each day starting the 17th in the comments, through May 1, 2010.

Does this sound good to anyone?

I’m afraid coming up with a logo, spreading the word far and wide, and setting up a group on a site like Good Reads is just too much for me, now, though I’m happy to take advice or help on these from more seasoned book challenge folks.

Via The Morning News, two articles about the dangers of faking it.

One, purchasing knockoff brands increases lying.

Two, Botox interferes with facial expressions, and can make a person slower to empathize, thus alienating others. (Hello, Oprah. Isn’t your empire founded on empathy?)

In the wake of my book-feeding frenzy for the Tournament of Books, I decided to catch up on comic books. While I’ve shifted from buying monthly title to buying collected graphic novels for most books, there are a few I won’t wait for, and Ed Brubaker’s noir and pulp series like Incognito and Criminal are among them. Not only are they on high quality paper with strong art from Sean Phillips, but there are no intrusive ads, there’s an informative author page in the back, and a noir/pulp related article. Neither of the latter are in the collections; Brubaker calls them the canvas goodie bag reward for those of us who buy the single issues, and I’m happy to do so. The quality of the story, art, and back matter is of the highest in comics.

During a break from the ongoing series Criminal, Brubaker and Phillips launched Incognito, about an unhappy guy in witness protection. The twist is he was a super villain, and got his powers taken away and witness protection for giving evidence against his former boss, The Black Death. In a nod to The Matrix, his fake last name is Anderson. In a nod to indie-comics great Harvey Pekar, he’s an angry file clerk. The topsy turvy ethics of the book, along with its dark humor, make it fast, bumpy, enjoyable ride. A sequel series is due this summer, 2010.

After Incognito, Brubaker and Phillips returned to the world of their Criminal series with “The Sinners“, and returning character Tracy Lawless. Tracy’s a killer, but only of those who deserve it. This is a slippery place to be, and Tracy doesn’t exactly finesse it. He’s having an affair with the boss’s wife, can’t figure out who is killing the boss’s peers, and has a guy from his past on his tail trying to drag him back where he came from. Things don’t end pretty, but there’s a lot to satisfy in this story. I don’t think we’ll be seeing Tracy again, at least for a while, but I was glad to consume this story in one fell swoop, having bought the issues but not read them till now, when the story was complete.

These are for fans of noir, pulp, crime, and comics. Violent and dark, they’re not for everybody. But if you like what Brubaker and Phillips do, you’re going to like most of what they do, so check them out, if any of this sounds like a good thing to you.

I’m not going to spend a lot of time defending Hot Tub Time Machine. It’s cheaply made, sexist, homophobic, and rude. It has a preposterous ending. Yet I enjoyed it anyway. The key was to go in with low expectations; that way, they were all exceeded. This is like the 20 year class reunion of the 80’s, where Grosse Point Blank was the 10 year.

Choosing John Cusack as the lead was key. He made his bread and butter on the 80’s teen flicks this movie both lampoons and celebrates, such as Better Off Dead, 16 Candles, The Sure Thing, Eight Men Out, Stand by Me, and most famously, Say Anything where he became the go-to everyman heartthrob, Lloyd Dobler, for a generation. (I recommend all the previous films. He was in tons of others, like Class, Grandview USA and One Crazy Summer, that sucked.) That Cusack plays a washed-up guy whose best days were in the 80’s is a nice use of deliberate irony, or art imitating life.

His buddies are Craig Thompson, Darryl from The Office, and Rob Corddry, from the Daily Show. Clark Duke plays his nephew, and is a chubbier, dweebier basket of Michael Cera mannerisms; the two collaborated on a web site comedy series, Clark and Michael. Thompson is especially hilarious in the dry, quietly reactive style of The Office.

Don’t go if you’re easily offended, or if you don’t have nostalgia for the 80’s. But if kooky cameos by 80’s faces like Chevy Chase, Crispin Glover, and the mean kid from Karate Kid make you smile, then lower your expectations and go for it.

I committed to reading Francine Prose’s Anne Frank: the Book, the Life, the Afterlife because my friend Amy was reading it for an online discussion at In Our Study, and because I was CERTAIN I’d be done reading the Morning News Tournament of Books books. That was before I faced down Wolf Hall, however. Thus I found myself reading Anne Frank:tBtLtA alongside Wolf Hall as March rolled into April.

AF: tBtLtA pulled me in quickly and drew me through, hardly what I expected of a book of literary analysis. I have fond memories of reading Anne’s diary when I was a girl. But the last time I remember reading the book was in 5th grade for a book report; I’d have been 10 or 11. I had read it at least once before. Its details were vague until I started reading Prose. Her careful reading of the book and thorough research into its history immediately brought back many particulars.

The myth of Anne, begun with the publication of her diary and fueled by a later play and film, is that she was a girl like any other, writing in her diary while hiding in an attic from Nazis in WWII Holland. The group was caught by the Nazis, sent to camps, and all but Anne’s father died. Most teaching plans for the book focus on Anne as a typical teenager in a unique situation. They don’t usually deal with her intelligence, her skills as a writer. They don’t often study the reason she was in the attic, and how racism and genocide are alive in today’s world.

Prose has immense respect for Anne, not only as a person who was killed in the Holocaust, but as a writer and skilled editor of her own work. Anne’s diary, we know, survived. But what most don’t know, and Prose tells carefully and compellingly, is that Anne’s diary isn’t one simple thing. Near the end of their time in the attic, she heard a broadcast by an exiled politician urging Dutch families to document their experience in war, so others would learn of it afterward. Anne started then to edit her diary in longhand on loose sheets of paper. Both the diary and the loose sheets survived, and her father edited them using mostly the revised version, with some original entries added back in, and some passages about Anne’s tempestuous relationship with her mother removed. (Extensive handwriting analysis has proved that Anne was the author of the documents, her father only an editor.) So there are really three versions of Anne’s “diary”: the original diary, the revised diary, and the edited compilation know to most people.

Prose divides her book into four sections. The Life deals with the historical details of Anne’s life. The Book is about her father’s struggle to find a publisher for the book. The Afterlife is largely about the play and movie based on the book, and the critical problems they raise: that Anne is presented as a silly, flighty girl characterized by hope, and that her Jewishness, and thus the reason for their internment in the attic and later deaths, is largely effaced. A segment on teaching the book in schools ends the book.

I recommend this book highly to anyone who ever read Anne’s book, and even for those who haven’t. I plan to watch the PBS production of Anne Frank this weekend, and hope it presents a more nuanced, complex and Jewish heroine than have previous adaptations of the diary. Prepared by Prose’s excellent book, I also very much look forward to reading a version of the diary again, which will be done by the group at In Our Study.

So here’s what’s been rattling around in my head:

For now:

15 books, 15 days, 15 blogs: In honor of the woman profiled in the New York Times last year, who read a book a day for a year and blogged each one, I propose reading a book a day from your shelf starting April 16 (the day after US taxes are due, so you should have a little more time plus be in a frugal mindset) till April 30, 2010 and blogging a review, however brief, the next day.

I would post my entries the night before, so you could link each day starting the 17th in the comments, through May 1, 2010.

Does this sound good to anyone?

I’m afraid coming up with a logo, spreading the word far and wide, and setting up a group on a site like Good Reads is just too much for me, now, though I’m happy to take advice or help on these from more seasoned book challenge folks. I know this is last minute, but that’s me–always running on the ragged edge of disaster. OK, perhaps that’s an exaggeration.

For later:

Call me crazy, but I had a blast last summer reading Infinite Jest, and was thinking of doing something similar: reading Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle, or at least the first two, Quicksilver and The Confusion. They’re each about 900 pages, but so was Cryptonomicon and I loved that and read it at a brisk pace.

Anyone else interested in a Baroque Summer? I’ll probably do it in any case, but it would be way more fun (as Infinite Summer was) with a gang.

I was initially put off from reading Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall by its lengthy character list (98 people plus 2 family trees) and guarded reviews from Entertainment Weekly and Publishers Weekly. Friend Kate F recommended it, then it was chosen as a contender in The Morning News 2010 Tournament of Books after it had already won the Man Booker prize; I decided to go for it, even buying it as the queue for it at the library was so long. It went on to win the National Book Critics Circle award, as well as the rooster prize in the ToB.

And so, I wish I could say I loved it more. At 500+ pages, it’s big, but not prohibitively so. Set during the reign of Henry VIII, its main character is Thomas Cromwell, son of a drunk, abusive blacksmith father. He rises to power and becomes a confidant and councillor to Henry during the latter’s “Great Matter”–his desire to divorce Katherine of Aragon and marry Anne Boleyn. Along the way, Cromwell also stealthily aids England’s break with Rome and the protestant reformation.

As Mantel writes him, Cromwell is a fascinating, complex character. Yet I found him too perfect. He “can draft a contract, train a falcon, draw a map, stop a street fight, furnish a house and fix a jury.” He knows every language, can psychologize everyone, can remember everything (including the entire New Testament), and makes money as if he were breathing. The book ends when he’s still in his ascendancy, without a hint of his fall, five years hence.

I found the book too much, too. There were so many characters, so many ups and downs, that as I neared the end I stopped trying to remember or go back for which lord this was, or what event that referred to.

I struggled with the writing, as well. Mantel chose 3rd person present tense. I often became disoriented with her third person, till I realized that when in doubt, “he” usually meant Cromwell.

So: Stephen Gardiner. Going out, as he’s coming in. It’s wet, and for a night in April, unseasonably warm, but Gardiner wears furs, which look like oily and dense black feathers; he stands now, ruffling them, gathering his clothes about his tall straight person like black angel’s wings.

“Late,” Master Stephen says unpleasantly.

He is bland. “Me, or your good self?”

“You.” He waits.

“Drunks on the river. The boatmen say it’s the eve of one of their patron saints.”

“Did you offer a prayer to her?”

“I’ll pray to anyone, Stephen, till I’m on dry land.”

Third person, though, allows her access to other characters besides Cromwell, and present tense makes for an immersive feeling of the time. This did convey the slow, agonizing process of Henry’s divorce and remarriage to Anne, yet didn’t endear the book to me.

The book has been almost universally lauded, along with its awards. Mantel writes evocatively and concisely. Cromwell and the characters are fascinating and engaging. Additionally, her choices, such as the ambiguous third person and the abrupt ending, can be seen as brave authorial choices, as noted in Stephen Greenblatt’s review from The NYRB:

The point is not to create an insoluble puzzle but to make you, the reader, do a little work in order to orient yourself. And orienting yourself in this novel always means returning to Cromwell

and Olivia Laing’s in The Guardian:

By ending without a dramatic resolution, she allows the “what happened next” of the historical record to underscore her central, sobering message: that human kindness and idealism are no match for the fickleness of fortune.

In the end, I I found Wolf Hall chilly, distant, and over populated, but still admired it and learned from it.

Watching the Olympics with the kids this year was both fun and tiresome, as they insisted we watch every single commercial that featured How to Train Your Dragon. Since the interest was clearly there, and early reviews were good, we took the kids to see it opening weekend. The theater near my hometown doesn’t have 3D, so we saw it in 2D, but enjoyed it immensely just the same.

There aren’t a lot of surprises: skinny Hiccup is a disappointment to his he-man father, and no good at fighting dragons, a sign of Viking prowess. Does he befriend a dragon? Make nice with his dad? Get the girl?

Well, what do you think?

The dragons are what make this movie, and the charm of imagining a dragon of one’s own is infectious. The flying scenes are spectacular, (perhaps more so than the ones in Avatar, I dare say) and the main dragon, Toothless, is so great I may make a trip to Wal Mart to buy a toy. For the boys, of course. Ahem.

For our recent family car trip, my husband G. Grod and I rationalized the purchase of some new DVDs, since we were borrowing a DVD player from friends, and wanted some new things to distract 6yo Drake and 4yo Guppy. We also got a few from the library. For a few, I was surprised to see what worked and what didn’t for the kids and grownups.

Both kids and grownups:

Fantastic Mr. Fox
Kung-Fu Panda
Toy Story 2
Pinocchio
Wall E
Schoolhouse Rock

Grownups, not so much the kids:

Up

Kids, not so much the grownups:

Cars
Tom & Jerry
Scooby Doo
Yo Gabba Gabba

DVDs the kids refused to watch:

Free to Be You and Me
Mary Poppins (6yo Drake is afraid of the cannon)
Ralph’s World
Fraggle Rock

DVDs the kids watched that G. Grod and I want to, but haven’t watched yet:

Wallace and Gromit: A Matter of Loaf and Death (even if it’s only full screen)
Shaun the Sheep: A Wooly Good Time

I know, entries have been sparse, lately. I was diligently reading for The Morning News Tournament of Books, which ended with a bang, not a whimper, today, and preparing for our first-ever long family car trip last week. Fifteen hours there, five day visit, and sixteen hours back in a four-door sedan with 2 parents and 2 boys, 4 and 6yo. It went surprisingly well.

These helped:

Age-appropriate books on CD; we listened to Nate the Great and Dr. Seuss
New activity books for the kids
Games, like Rubik’s Cube, Fifteen Puzzle, Rush Hour, and Amaze
Lap desks
2-screen DVD player (borrowed from friends) BUT wait as long as humanly possible to break this one out
Age appropriate DVDs
Healthy food: grapes, berries, cut-up apples, carrot sticks, sandwiches (PBJ and turkey/cheese), juice boxes, bagels with cream cheese and jam, pretzels, granola bars.
Print outs for things like spot the car maker and color the license-plate state.

As I said, it went well. But I’m glad to be home, where I don’t have to drive very much, very far.

For a loved one’s 40th, I took Baked’s Sweet and Salty Cake recipe that I made for my husband G. Grod’s bday, reduced it by 2/3 to make a double layer cake, and didn’t whip the ganache. This eliminated one extra batch of salted caramel and a POUND of butter. So while its calories are reduced from the original, G. Grod noted it only meant he could finish a whole piece, not that it wasn’t still decadent.

Glossy Sweet and Salty Cake

Makes one 8-inch 2-layer cake.

1/2 cup cocoa powder
3/4 cup hot water
1/2 cup sour cream
1 3/4 cups cups all-purpose flour, plus more for pans
1 1/4 teaspoons baking powder
3/4 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter, softened, plus more for pans
1/3 cup vegetable shortening
1 cups granulated sugar
2/3 cup dark brown sugar
2 large eggs
2 teaspoon pure vanilla
Salted Caramel Sauce, divided (see below)
Dark Chocolate Caramel Ganache Icing (see below)
Fleur de sel, for garnish

For the cake:

1. Preheat oven to 325 degrees. Butter two 8-by-2-inch round cake pans. Line each pan with a parchment paper round, butter parchment paper and flour; set aside.

2. In a large bowl, whisk together cocoa, 3/4 cups hot water, and sour cream; set aside to cool, about 10 minutes.

3. In another large bowl, sift together flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt; set aside.

4. In the bowl of an electric mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, beat the butter and shortening together until smooth and it appears to create strings inside the bowl, about 7 minutes. Add both sugars and continue beating until light and fluffy, about 7 minutes. Add eggs, one at a time, and beat until well incorporated. Add vanilla, scrape down the sides of the bowl with a spatula, and mix again for 30 seconds. Add flour mixture alternating with cocoa mixture, beginning and ending with flour mixture.

5. Divide batter evenly between prepared pans. Bake until cake is just firm to the touch and a toothpick inserted into the center of the cake comes out clean, 18 to 24 minutes. Let cool completely.

Caramel (for Salted Caramel Sauce and Dark Chocolate Caramel Ganache Icing)

1 cup sugar
2 tablespoons light corn syrup
1 cup heavy cream, divided

For Salted Caramel Sauce:

1/2 teaspoon fleur de sel
1/8 cup sour cream

For Dark Chocolate Ganache Icing

10 ounces dark chocolate (60% to 70%), chopped

Directions

1. Combine 1/4 cup water, sugar, and corn syrup in a medium saucepan; stir to combine. Bring to a boil over high heat. Cook until the mixture reaches 350 degrees on a candy thermometer, about 10 minutes.

2. Meanwhile, in another small saucepan bring cream to a boil, 3 to 5 minutes. Remove from heat and set aside.

3. When the caramel mixture has reached 350 degrees, remove from heat and allow to cool for 1 minute. Carefully add 1/2 cup warm cream; stir to combine. Divide caramel into 2 batches.

4. For the Salted Caramel Sauce, whisk in fleur de sel and sour cream. Set aside.

5. For the Dark Chocolate Caramel Ganache Icing, place chocolate in bowl, whisk other 1/2 cup warm cream into 2nd batch of caramel, let cool 5 minutes. Pour caramel sauce over chocolate. Wait one minute. Stir to combine until chocolate is melted.

(Yes, dividing a batch of caramel is kind of a pain. But not as much as making an entire second batch, as in the original recipe.)

To assemble the cake:

Using a serrated knife, trim tops of cakes to make level. Place four strips of parchment paper around perimeter of a serving plate or lazy Susan. Place the first layer on the cake plate. Spread Salted Caramel Sauce on the cake, allowing some to soak into the cake. Follow the caramel layer with a layer of about 1 cup of the ganache icing. Place the second layer on top, bottom side up. Pour remaining ganache icing over entire cake. Sprinkle with fleur de sel.

This Root Beer Bundt Cake was the first recipe I made in the new bundt pan my sister Ruthie got me for my birthday. Alas, it tasted almost nothing like root beer, but was a very good, fudgey cake. Like so much I’ve been baking lately, it was from Baked: New Frontiers in Baking by Matt Lewis and Renato Poliafito.

Root Beer Bundt Cake- yields 1 (10-inch) Bundt cake

Cake
2 cups root beer (do not use diet root beer)
1 cup dark unsweetened cocoa powder
1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter, cut into 1-inch pieces
1 1/4 cups granulated sugar
1/2 cup firmly packed dark brown sugar
2 cups all-purpose flour
1 1/4 teaspoons baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
2 large eggs

Frosting
2 ounces dark chocolate (60% cacao), melted and cooled slightly
1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter, softened
1 teaspoons salt
1/4 cup root beer
2/3 cup dark unsweetened cocoa powder
2 1/2 cups confectioners’ sugar

Topping
Vanilla ice cream

For the cake:

1. Preheat the oven to 325 degrees F. Generously spray the inside of a 10-inch bundt pan with nonstick cooking spray; alternatively, butter it, dust with flour, and knock out the excess flour.

2. In a small saucepan, heat the root beer, cocoa powder, and butter over medium heat until the butter is melted. Add the sugars and whisk until dissolved. Remove from the heat and let cool.

3. In a large bowl, whisk the flour, baking soda, and salt together.

4. In a small bowl, whisk the eggs until just beaten, then whisk them into the cooled cocoa mixture until combined. Gently fold the flour mixture into the cocoa mixture. The batter will be slightly lumpy–do not overbeat, as it could cause the cake to be tough.

5. Pour the batter into the prepared pan and bake for 35 to 40 minutes, rotating the pan halfway through the baking time, until a small sharp knife inserted into the cake comes out clean. Transfer the pan to a wire rack to cool completely. Gently loosen the sides of the cake from the pan and turn it out onto the rack.

For the frosting:

1. Put all the ingredients in a food processor. Pulse in short bursts until the frosting is shiny and smooth. (My frosting never got shiny and smooth; it looked like mud.)

2. Use a spatula to spread the fudge frosting over the crown of the Bundt in a thick layer. Let the frosting set before serving, with the ice cream on the side.

I was warned off A Gate at the Stairs by more than one reader friend. Eh, they said, it’s not her best. Read her stories instead. So I was a little disappointed to see it on the short list for this year’s Morning News Tournament of Books, but decided to read it anyway. I agree it’s not a great book, but am not sorry I read it.

In the fall of 2001, Tassie Keltjin is a midwestern college student who grew up on her father’s boutique farm in Wisconsin. Searching for a job, she stumbles into a nanny position for an older couple who are adopting. An older, more experienced Tassie narrates, so there’s often a mismatch between the voice telling the story and the naive, inexperienced girl whose story it’s telling. The couple, Sarah and Edward, are socially awkward and uncomfortable, and there is little comfort to be found in the pages of this novel. But it’s even unsettling in its unsettlingness, as the book itself seems cold, distant and disjointed. A paragraph toward the end of the book captured the feeling I had when I read it:

The people in this house, I felt, and I included myself, were like characters each from a different grim and gruesome fairy tale. None of us was in the same story. We were all grotesques, and self-riveted, but in separate narratives, and so our interactions seemed weird and richly meaningless, like the characters in a Tennessee Williams play, with their bursting, unimportant but spell-bindingly mad speeches (249)

This book has many threads. There’s Tassie’s coming-of-age story, the mystery of why Sarah and Edward’s marriage seems so strange, a subplot about terrorism and another about the military, a critique of well-intentioned liberals, and, throughout, questions about race and racism. They never quite came together for me, and perhaps that wasn’t Moore’s intention, as she hints at in the above paragraph. And while she can write beautiful, attention-getting sentences and passages, I found myself wanting a deeper, more coherent narrative. I can see why her style might be better suited to short stories.

After refusing to helm Spider Man 4 (a good choice, given Spidey 3’s current status as most recent really bad 3 movie, replacing Godfather III), Sam Raimi returned to his horror roots, but with a bigger budget, and the result was Drag Me To Hell, a solidly entertaining B movie. It’s a little bit funny, scary, campy and silly by turns, and full of gross-out effects. It does what it sets out to do, which isn’t high art. If you liked the Evil Dead movies, you’ll likely enjoy this, and appreciate seeing the Big Yellow Car again.

I’m not a Tarantino fan. I liked Pulp Fiction. Didn’t like Reservoir Dogs. Didn’t bother with the Kill Bills or Grindhouse because I didn’t want to deal with the OTT violence. So when Inglourious Basterds came out, I skipped it.

But the good reviews kept coming in. And the superlatives rained down on Christoph Waltz for his supporting role. And then Linda at NPR said that even though SHE didn’t like Tarantino either, she’d really liked Inglourious Basterds. So we bought it on DVD, and watched it.

I loved it. Thought it was great, and a far better Best Picture contender than Avatar was. More ambitious than Hurt Locker, yet still perfectly executed. Like Hurt Locker, too, it maintains tremendous suspense for long periods of time. The opening scene is astonishingly good and lasts about 20 minutes. And when the tension is resolved, it’s never in the way I thought it would be. The movie constantly surprised me.

Except for its scenes of over the top violence, like bloody gunfights and scalping scenes. By the end, I wasn’t even closing my eyes, looking at the ceiling, or watching through diamond fingers. I don’t consider that desensitizing a good thing, though. The rest? Fabulously entertaining. This shoulda been a stronger contender for best pic.

I saw Nicholson Baker read from The Anthologist at last fall’s Rain Taxi Festival of Books. He was funny and clever, but I wasn’t moved to read the book till it was a contender at this year’s Tournament of Books. I’m glad I didn’t skip it.

Paul Chowder, the narrator, is a poet trying to write the introduction to an anthology of rhyming poems he’s put together. Paul’s writers block is the stuff that 12-step programs are made for. His girlfriend has moved out, he keeps injuring himself and he’s obsessed with cleaning his office instead of writing.

In between his dryly hilarious musings on his sad sack life, Paul holds forth on poetry, explaining in a clear, entertaining manner why rhyme is often reviled, and why pentameter is just plain wrong. He quotes many poets, including Mary Oliver, who I read and enjoyed last year. Chowder made me like poetry, which I generally don’t, and made me want to read more, which is unusual for me. There’s not much by way of plot here, but there’s plenty of Paul, who’s a great character. And the ending is not only charming, but a clever way of reframing the book. This was a smart, quick, funny read that I thoroughly enjoyed.