Phew. It’s been a busy few weeks, but I’m finally starting to reduce my to-do list to a more manageable size. I had a great Spring Break, but a full week out of the office can do chaos to the schedule sometimes. (It was very worth it though. Just takes a few days to climb out of the pile.)
To do a brief catch-up, I thought I’d use a format that other bloggers have used and which I rather like as well…
Currently: I’ve just been to a breakfast meeting with a potential new faculty member who seems to be very nice. Plus – breakfast was yummy. Plus – I finally got to got to know some other faculty who are in my department, but who have very different schedules than I have so we didn’t know each other very well. We do now!
Reading: I’m a little bit behind in my book reviews, but I have had some crazy-good reads lately. Reviews to come. I’m now in the middle of a non-fiction anthology, “Cooking and Stealing: The Tin House Nonfiction Reader” (Charles d’Ambrosio, editor). A mixed bag for sure, but a good chunk of the articles have been excellent. (But there are typos scattered throughout. Why are there typos? Grr.)
Watching: In the middle of the latest season of “True Detective” (a little intense but very good), along with whichever Seinfeld episode we can find at the moment of watching. Over Spring Break, my mum and I binge-watched a lot of HGTV which we both happen to really enjoy. 🙂
Listening: Just found a good remake of Tom Petty’s “Free Fallin’” song, this one by Hardy, so that’s on quite-a-lot-of-repeat right now.
Planning: The weekend ahead of us. Right now, it’s a choice between a movie of some type or a local play. We’ll see how this pans out. Either way (or something completely different) is fine.
Starting next week, it’s Spring Break where I am and I’m off on an adventure with my English mum. Posts might be a little sparse for the next few days, but I’m back soon!
Happy Spring (or perhaps Autumn) wherever you may be!
There’ve been some good movies lately, so thought I’d bring you a couple of thoughts about two that we’ve seen in the past month or so. Both of them were good (although one was miles better than the other), and both were pretty different from each other.
Warning: SPOILERS AHEAD.
I’d been curious about seeing Bryan Cranston/Kevin Hart’s project called “The Upside.” The trailer had made it look like a light-hearted comedy (and Hart is a comedian) so that was the approach I’d taken and was expecting. It was a pretty good movie, but the end result was that I felt that the producers couldn’t decide if they wanted this to be a comedy or a serious drama. Due to this indecision, it felt like the movie didn’t really reach either of these goals and so I walked out feeling slightly dissatisfied.
It’s got a fairly standard plot line contrasting two very different characters who are more or less forced to be together and then hijinks result. Cranston’s character is a quadriplegic who happens to have oodles of money. He needs to hire a full-time live-in caregiver and that’s the (slightly clumsy) way that Hart’s character is introduced – as a candidate for that position. Hart, on the other hand, is a foul-mouthed newly-released ex-con who has to prove to his probation officer that he’s been applying for jobs. Hart needs a signature on his form to show that he’s been on a job interview, and so this is how the two people cross paths.
(You know, it reminded me of the older movie called “Trading Spaces” with Eddie Murphy which has a similar set up between its characters, and is actually, you know, funny.…)
However, as mentioned, the movie couldn’t decide whether to play up the comedy angle (two colliding worlds) or whether it would be a serious drama (life lived with serious disability and the impact it has on the person), so at the end, I was left feeling confused. It wasn’t hilarious (as the trailer had sold it) but it also wasn’t a serious drama (which it could have been). It ended up being somewhere vaguely in the middle, which left some frustration.
The other movie that I saw was the brilliant “On the Basis of Sex” about the life of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg (played by Felicity Jones who’s actually English but can do one hell of an American accent). I was slightly concerned when I saw the words “based on a true story” right at the beginning of the film since that can mean several things: is it only slightly based on the true story? Which piece(s) are not factual? And why did the producers decide to veer off the true life and when?
However, despite these concerns, the bio pic ended up being really good (although I’m still not clear which bits were factual or not). Bader Ginsberg is a true American hero for me, and with the recent Cavanaugh hearing (he of the “I like beer” comment), the contrast between her views and that of other justices is huge – almost as though they are from completely different planets. With Bader Ginsberg alive and kicking, I feel safe that she’ll represent the more liberal views of this country, but she’s getting on in years and people don’t live forever…
Back to the movie: it was very well done and although I kept wondering what the true and not-true bits were, the plot line did show how driven Bader Ginsberg had been to be one of the first group of women to attend Harvard Law School, how she balanced home-work life with her husband (who seemed to be very cool to me), and how Bader Ginsberg had used her considerable legal knowledge to help to bring down the very-established gender discrimination which had been in place in the laws of the U.S. for eons.
Her plan seems to have been to show the courts that gender discrimination works in both ways, and so she developed a great argument for an unmarried male caregiver who had been denied tax relief for his caring for his old mum. By using such a non-threatening (to the males) approach of demonstrating the unfairness of such bias in the laws, Bader Ginsberg carefully paved the way for addressing the numerous other ways that the law had discriminated against women. An absolutely brilliant approach for the day and age in which they were living.
The film focuses around her law school years and on this particular case so it’s a fairly narrow time period, but it clearly shows the widespread discrimination that Bader Ginsberg and other women had to deal with. Looking back, I shake my head that it was allowed to continue as long as it did (and still does in some places), and so I am filled with admiration for Bader Ginsberg’s courage and leadership to change things.
SPOILERS NOW FINISHED.
Anyway, I just loved this film and I’m still curious about what was true and not-true in the movie. Maybe this is the year that I finally read a biography of Bader Ginsberg to find out for myself. 🙂
TV-wise, we’ve been getting into Jason Bateman/Laura Linney’s crime/drama series called “Ozark.” Goodness me – they know how to ratchet up the suspense on these episodes (without Netflix bloat) , and now we’ve reached the end of Season Two, we’re all atwitter for Season Three. (Luckily, the series got renewed so there will be continuation. Phew.) Highly recommend it if you’re looking for a new series to watch – just know that it gets a little tense at times. 🙂
All calculations based on experience elsewhere, fail in New Mexico.
Lew Wallace, Territorial Governor, 1881.
The day after Christmas, the Superhero and I made a quick run to get out of town for a long weekend, and so we ended up in Santa Fe, New Mexico, which is one of our neighboring states. It also happened to be at the exact same time as what TV stations were calling “the biggest blizzard of the last 20 years”, but we had our new truck with 4×4 and we were looking forward to a bit of snowy adventure so off we set. 🙂
Santa Fe is at a higher altitude than where our home is, and there was an enormous (as wide as New Mexico) blue cloud on the radar. Due to the storm that was slowly plodding across the area, the drive was a bit of an adventure. In the end, the total time in the car was about nine hours which is almost double what the typical journey takes. Snow really slows you down.
Luckily, New Mexico is very good with its snow management so there were enough snow-ploughs to keep the roads mostly clear, but we were pretty grateful to be in the Superhero’s four-wheel drive truck. (There were so many cars who had slithered off the road and were waiting somewhat forlornly for a rescue truck. We would have stopped to help if anyone was in critical danger from cold or otherwise, but most of the cars that littered the roadsides were perfectly fine. Just stuck.)
We had splashed out and booked up at La Fonda, one of the nicest hotels in the city, and although it was really only an overnight trip, the hotel made it more special than usual since it was pretty posh.
Santa Fe is the capital city of the state, and is an interesting place to visit, interesting for many reasons but for this trip, it was notable as it looked so different in the snow.
The small city has an ordinance that all the buildings within a certain distance of the central town square have to abide by certain architectural standards and design, principally based on using adobe, so there is a pleasing symmetry to the streets as you walk around. It’s an arty community with citizenry from both ends of the income spectrum, but mostly wealthy. It’s a little bit like walking around a rich area such as Aspen, with lots of expensive art shops and restaurants all with the adobe architecture that reflects the area’s influence from the numerous First People’s tribes.
It’s not a city that looks like any other that I’ve been to (by design), and when it’s snowing, the red sand of the adobe buildings looks very pretty against the falling snow flakes. Plus, since it was only a day or two after Christmas, a lot of the decorations were still up: lights in the trees around the main square, and a Santa Fe version of an adobe gingerbread house in the hotel’s lobby:
The hotel’s version of the classic Christmas gingerbread house… Adobe!
So, that was a fun trip (even with the snow!). The cold weather also meant that not many cars were on the roads, and though the road trip was almost doubled in terms of its typical travel time, we even had a long enough drive-time for us to listen to a complete audio book, which is a record for us. (It was a murder mystery by Mary Higgins Clark, but not sure which one. It was surprisingly good.)
It was great to get out of town for a break of sorts, and when we returned home, we still had another week or two before going back to work (which was nice).
So, since I haven’t said this yet: Happy new year! May you have peace and lots of good reading!
The main square in SF all decorated with colorful fairly lights…
When school finished up in mid-December, there was the usual crush of reviewing final exams and getting the grades in on time and so it was a few days before I could really sit down and chill out. Since I’m now faculty, I earn the same university breaks as the students which ended up about three weeks, give or take a day. (I still find it amazing that I’m now on the faculty side of the university after twenty years as a staff member. That staff work experience definitely enables me to be a stronger faculty member, I must say.)
So, to the reading:
I really enjoyed a solid read of The Butchering Art by social historian Lindsay Fitzharris. About Joseph Lister and his quest to revolutionize Victorian medical care via anesthesia and better hygiene, this was an NF which ticked almost all of my reading boxes: well written, well researched, Victorian times, medical history, social history, dry sense of humor – and I really enjoyed this read. (See here for a more in-depth review.)
Then, I embarked on the journey of Alex Haley’s Roots, the fiction-y saga of Haley’s family who were shipped to the U.S. as part of the Slave Triangle trade route and have stayed in the States since then. True or not, this was a really interesting narrative. Does anyone remember watching the old TV series of Roots when it came on? I’ve always meant to read the book, and finally got around to it. I think that there is some debate about what exactly is true and what is not, but just speaking about the plot – it’s a good read and really demonstrates how strong Haley’s family (and others in the same situation) must have been to make it through all these years.
(Roots was also a Big Scary Book in terms of page numbers, so go me. It’s the little things, right?)
I read some more of Ray Bradbury’s sci fi, this title being The Martian Chronicles (see review here), and it happened to be one of those library books which have the well-turned yellowing pages with a perfect type font and size as well which made it a really enjoyable read. (I can’t help it. A reading experience involves much more than just the words for me!)
Traveled to a plot set in India with Lavanya Sankaran’s 2013 novel, The Hope Factory (another really good read with interesting characters and a fast-moving plot but no blog post), and then followed that up with a library checkout of the latest book Homebody by Joanna Gaines, an HGTV interior designer who (along with her husband Chip) has a series of TV shows about doing up old houses. This led me to redoing some of the decorations around the house and getting inspired that way – plus it had lots of pictures to look at!
Then a solid read of the 2018 America’s Best Travel Writing volume which was pretty bad until about halfway through when suddenly the read clicked for me. It was edited by Cheryl Strayed, and since I’m not the biggest fan of her work, I think this was the reason that I didn’t get on with the initial selections in the book. We did become more friendly in the end, but if I had stuck with Nancy Pearl’s rule of 50 pages, it would have been a DNF for sure. That’s the gamble with a curated collection of stories in these volumes… Still, as mentioned, I did come across some good selections which saved the read for me.
The new year brought more determination to read from my own TBR pile, so I pulled a random title with an old Virago volume, The Orchid House by Phyllis Strand Allfrey (1954). No real blog post, but this was an ok read (albeit slightly strange). This novel is widely considered to be one of the stalwarts of Caribbean literature despite the fact that Allfrey was of Caucasian descent and of a family that benefited significantly from the slave trade.
However, this seems to be generally forgiven since this narrative, her first (and only) published novel, was from the perspective of an old island nanny of the family. It’s a pretty dark and rather strange book though. However, this was more of a broccoli book for me in the end. Nothing too outstanding though, and I’m glad to have finally read it after it being on the TBR shelves for longer than I will admit. 🙂
I’m in the middle of reading some Wodehouse for light relief, and just about to pick up another one from the TBR, this one called The Rotter’s Club, a 2001 novel by Jonathon Coe. Very different from the Caribbean novel as this one is set in the much colder and grittier parts of Birmingham in England in the 1970s, and is from the perspective of a young lad. It’s been really funny in places so far – enough that I burst out laughing at the gym this morning – so I’m looking forward to the read.
So that’s me all caught up for now. How have your reads been lately?
So, in the manner of a lot of book bloggers, I have compiled a list of my “Best of…” titles that I’ve read last year for both fiction and for non-fiction. In the same vein, titles on these lists are not necessarily published in 2018 – this is just when they made their wending way into my grubby little mitts and off the TBR pile (for some of them)…
Similar to others in the book blogosphere, I rather enjoy being quite nerdy and reviewing how my reading patterns went over the past year, although I had thought I had read more than this. However, no worries. It’s not a race so all is fine. Just interesting.
So, to the numbers:
TOTAL books read in 2018 – 78. (Average: 6.5 books/mo.) Biggest monthly totals in the summer months (when school is out). Smallest total was in March (which coincided with Spring Break travel and prep for said trip.)
This was composed of almost 50/50 with regard to F and NF. (Actual numbers were 40 F and 38 NF. Of the NF, the majority were bio/autobio.)
Authors: Another category that’s almost 50/50: 41 M and 37 F
Authors of color (AOC)/Topics related to POC: 30 (38%, just over one in every three).
Where were these books from?
I’m pleased with this one: 50 percent were from my own TBR. (Progress of sorts.)
I read an average of one e-book (Kindle) for each month. Library was the other source.
Publication details:
Year range of publication date: 1899 (The Vampyre/Polidori) to 2018 (various). 1993 average.
Shortest book length: 32 pp (The Vampyre/Polidori). Longest: 912 pp (Roots/Hailey). 295 pp. average.
Overall, this was a fun year. Additionally, I had two solid reads of the AP Style Book (for professional development), so it was a good mix of work/play. I had an enjoyable year.
Goals for 2019? None really (apart from the yearly read of the AP Style Book :-] ). Just more of the same, so long as it’s fun. 🙂
