very simple

Since my last book review, I’ve read 4 books. But, between the holidays (and holiday-related travel) combined with my general weather-related ennui, I haven’t posted reviews of them. So, here’s a quick hit list of each of them. All of them were very good to excellent, but I’m already on to something new…

The War for Late Night by Bill Carter

I never read Carter’s first book about the Leno/Letterman brouhaha (and since it’s not available for my nook, won’t be for some time), but this makes me want to. A really engrossing look at the battle between Leno and Conan O’Brien, with some really neat history of the “other” late night hosts (Kimmel, Fallon), I couldn’t put it down. I have no love for Leno, and he comes off as a bit of a joke-spewing automaton, but the fact that the show, and performing stand-up is pretty much the ONLY thing he does should have clued network execs into the fact that he wasn’t just going to go gently into that goodnight once his contract was up. Not to mention the assumption that Conan would continue to be the perpetual whipping boy – willing to take whatever scraps the network gave him on the altar of “someday you’ll get to host the Tonight Show”. The person that comes off best is Fallon, who seems to have found the future of late night in DVRs and internet-friendly pieces. So much so that I’ve started DVRing his show since I read this book.

The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

I’m not ashamed to say that I loved this book, in all of it’s young adult glory. There’s a reason people are obsessed with it. From it’s proto-feminist kickass heroine, Katniss, to the horror of the dystopian future in which she lives, I was engrossed from beginning to end. I would also point out that I had resisted reading this for some time, until even the non-book-reading Stephen Thompson of NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour, which I adore to no end, began his “Stephen reads a book” project with this. That pushed me over the edge.

Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter by Tom Franklin

There’s not a lot I can say about this book without spoiling it too badly – there are just too many secrets wrapped up in this tale of two southern men, one black and one white, one relatively successful and one a perpetual loser, who are tied together through a variety of tragic circumstances. Except that I was completely drawn in.

The Strain by Guillermo Del Toro

And, of course, on a completely different note…I just finished this pretty gruesome vampire tale (part one of three) set in New York City, where vampirism is a viral infection, and the vampires are pretty horrific. Closer to zombies or the monsters in I Am Legend than the mysterious sexiness of our current vampire craze. I’m still not sure I get all of the conspiracy aspects – but those probably (I hope!) get fleshed out in the next two parts of the trilogy. That being said, once the action really got started, I couldn’t put it down, and read the last 100 or so pages in one sitting last night.

As I do every year, I decided to take some photos of today’s big event, the ING Marathon. Because I had gone to the same spot in Central Park for the last two years, I wanted to change things up a little bit, so I headed to Columbus Circle. Which was a big clusterf*ck of people and security gates. Next year, it’s back to Central Park. Just as an example of how poorly planned it was at Columbus Circle, they had a whole slew of bleachers set up so that people could watch, except…The police had blocked off all access to them, so they sat empty while we were penned in behind security gates only a few feet away. Even the police officer I said something to agreed that this was remarkably stupid, but they were, of course, powerless to do anything about it in the face of direct orders to keep us penned in.

As a bonus, a supremely inconsiderate gentlemen, who was at least 6’5″, decided to push his way directly in front of me. I am, of course, 5’4″. This led me to have to contort myself and hang over the barrier in a really uncomfortable way to get any decent pictures at all. Quite a change from Central Park, where people take one look at the short girl with the big camera and pretty much just make room for me at the front, since they can see over my head anyway! Silly me, I thought the crowd would be less obnoxious further away from the finish. I’ve learned my lesson, and I’m planning on heading back to Central Park next year. Either that, or I’ll be really adventurous and head out to Brooklyn or Queens.

As far as pics, I got most of the front-runners (except for the women’s winner, because the one pic I did get of her had a motorcycle cutting off her head), and some silly costumes, and a few pics even came out decently. Once I got worn out from contorting myself (and, because of the way I was standing, cutting off all the circulation to my left leg), I headed to the Time Warner Center to get an aerial shot. Here are the pics (as always, click to see the full picture):

Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen

I loved this book. The fact that I read it in under 24 hours is a testament to how easy it was to read, as well as how engaging it was. The story of an almost-veterinarian during the great depression, who gets swept up into the rough and tumble desperation of traveling circus life, is just fascinating. And the sadness of Jacob at 93, wasting away his remaining years in a nursing home, while his family simply forgets to visit him, is just tragic. Until the end, which made me cry with joy (which was a little embarrassing, as I was sitting in a public cafe at the time!).

My only complaint about this book was that it wasn’t longer.

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31 Bond Street by Ellen Horan

It took me a little while to get get going with this book, but once I got “into” it, it was an engrossing read. Mixing a historical event (a sensational murder in the late 1950s) with a fictionalized account of the motives behind the murder, I was left guessing up until the reveal as to what actually happened. Being a New Yorker myself, and someone who loves anything to do with New York history, this was (theoretically) right up my alley. My only criticism was that I would have loved to see a more expansive description of the atmosphere of the time – Addresses were given, and “famous” locations were mentioned, but there was not a lot of “painting the scene” of New York that I love so much in books like this. But that’s a criticism that is personal to me, given my particular interest in the subject.

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I’ve got a nasty head cold at the moment, so I was very tempted to just melt into my couch and watch netflix streaming all day. But it’s Halloween, and the 69th street block association always puts together a pretty cool Halloween block party, and I wanted to go down there for at least a little while and see the decorations and costumes. And the aerial performers – Last year they did star wars, and this year they put together a disney medley. It started with Aladdin, then Peter Pan, and I stuck around for the beginning of Toy Story but, at that point I was ready to go home. It was supremely crowded, and the fact that I feel like someone poured cement into my sinus cavity was putting me in not such a great mood. But I’m still glad I got out for a little while.

Enjoy some pics from the evening below (as always, click to get the full view):

The Backlash by Will Bunch

An interesting investigation of some of the players in the right wing noise machine, along with some conversations with folks on the ground who have gotten involved in the tea party movement. But I found two things that were bothersome. First, it jumped around too much – activists are introduced for a few pages, and then never heard from again, while others are threaded throughout the book. Second, Bunch has this really annoying habit of writing in the 2nd person, but only half the time (otherwise it’s 3rd person). I found this completely distracting and irritating. “I’m” not driving anywhere. Bunch is. And he should just say that, rather than ascribing what was obviously his reaction to certain things to the reader. Even where I agreed in principle with his thoughts, I don’t like having that “put” on me. so…eh.

My interest in this book can also be measured by the fact that it was only 336 pages long, and it took me 11 days to read it. I was worried that I wasn’t going to finish before it expired (I borrowed the e-book from the Brooklyn Public Library), and found myself skimming over things, even though I didn’t intend to. Not quite an engaging/engrossing read.

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American Gods by Neil Gaiman

It’s not entirely fair for me to review this, as I got about a third of the way through and finally gave up. I borrowed it from the library, which usually forces me to race through a book, yet every time I picked up my nook, I searched for other stuff to read instead of continuing along. It felt like a chore.

Which is a shame, because I’ve had love for Gaiman since I read the Sandman graphic novels in college (and still have a set on my shelf).

I just couldn’t get invested in any way. And at page 160, I realized I was never going to get there. and there’s no point in spending the next two weeks that I’m entitled to keep it out of the library avoiding reading it. There are a dozen people on the waiting list, and I figure I’ll be considerate and just return the darn thing.

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The Lost City of Z by David Grann

a great tale of man’s unending need to keep looking for things, from Colonel Fawcett’s need to find Z, to everyone else’s need to find Fawcett once he disappears.

Fawcett was one of the greatest explorers of his age, charting vast swathes of the Amazon, an area so inhospitable to outsiders that few survived the experience. Fawcett became convinced that there had been some great society, which he dubbed “Z”, and which others have at times referred to as El Dorado, and set out on a final adventure to find it. He was never seen again. 80 years later, the author (with the help of modern technology, as well as the devastation brought to the rainforest by logging and the like) tries to find out what happened to Fawcett. He doesn’t find Fawcett, but what he does find is even more astounding.

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It’s incredibly dreary and rainy today, which is the perfect excuse for an unemployed person such as myself to not leave my apartment for the entire day. Except, lucky me, I had jury duty down at the federal courthouse. Again. So I had to pack myself onto a rush hour train downtown this morning with everyone and their dripping umbrellas.

You know what happens next. 15 minutes after the start time, the clerk comes in, thanks all of us for our service, and informs us that the case we were supposed to be in the pool for settled late last night, so we can all go home. And, as a bonus, we’re done with jury service, even though they could have kept us on the hook for another week of pool-sitting waiting for another trial.

This was actually great, in that (as I heard on NPR this morning) they’re apparently picking a jury for a large terrorism case next week. So, all-in-all, not a terrible way to do jury service – a half-day on Monday and 15 minutes on Thursday. and I’m done for 4-6 years. It just would have been nice to have not had Monday and Thursday be the rainiest days of the week.

But I got a cool picture as I was leaving so…that’s something.

Labor day weekend, we took a break from our normal routine of doing as little as possible, and spent an afternoon at the Norman Rockwell Museum and the Berkshire Botanical Garden. Pictures aren’t allowed inside the Museum, so I don’t have anything except the sign below, but it was the first time I had been to the museum and was really struck by how much more…well-rounded…Rockwell was as an artist than his most well-known Saturday Evening Post americana would suggest. I (of course) had seen some of his civil-rights era art before, most notably, The Problem We All Live With, but “Southern Justice” stopped me in my tracks.

I was really shocked by it. Of course, even without looking at the title, I knew exactly what it was in reference to, but more than that, both in content and in style, it’s incredibly different from anything we “expect” when we think about Rockwell. I’m pretty sure I stared at it for about 10 minutes, just devastated. I also took a brief tour that was given, and the guide (who clearly loved his work), talked about the fact that Rockwell chafed for years against the Saturday Evening Post edict that people of color were only ever to be depicted in positions of servitude toward whites. Which explains why this painting was done for Look magazine.

Changing subjects, the following are the photos that I actually took, at the Berkshire Botanical Garden. They had three specific exhibits going on – one dealing with chairs, one dealing with dogs, and one where these little cabins were decorated extravagantly. That should make these photos pretty self-explanatory.