A Year Between the Pages

When, in January, I started keeping track of all the films this year, I decided I ought to also keep a record of all of the books I had read as I was interested to see whether I read more books or watched more movies. Until I went on holiday in September, the numbers were about equal but despite spending the first half of my holiday indulging in my random Pynchon whims, over the next month, my book reading took off and I ended up having read 74 books this year (well, technically, I'm still only three-quarters of the way through #74, Philip Roth's Letting Go but then I haven't included The Interpretation of Murder, which I started in Cannes after running out of other reading material, but only got to page 150 before it was time to head to the airport).

I was also interested to find out whether I would read more fiction or non- but despite having had such a fiction dearth until about September, the final tally was 27 non-fiction versus 47 fiction (the numbers are slightly flexible because I think I was a little inconsistent in my tallying, sometimes counting a biography as "fiction" if it reads like a novel), which surprised me. My reading rate was hardly very even--I read 38 of the books between the summer solstice and the end of the year. This imbalance is partly due to being on vacation and/or in the US, partly due to my new habit of commuting thrice weekly and partly because somehow, making these lists made me more competitive with myself and gave me a stronger desire to finish more books by the end of the year than I would have done otherwise.

The top five were easier to list than the movies, but then I didn't limit myself to books published this year (mainly because I read fewer than a handful of those, all non-fiction):

1. Never Let Me Go--Kazuo Ishiguro (still haunting me).
2. Birdsong--Sebastian Faulks (not the bits set in 1979, though, and despite the award-winning bad sex).
3. The End of Mr Y--Scarlett Thomas (still not sure I've learned not to judge a book by its cover).
4. The Hotel New Hampshire--John Irving (however, choosing books because of Dawson's Creek episodes with the same name can sometimes pay off).
5. Revolutionary Road--Richard Yates (pretty damn devastating but then I've never been one to require a happy ending when it comes to fiction).

Token non-fiction: Bad Science by Ben Goldacre (I've already read it twice and it's really good--and funny; perhaps I only chose it because I couldn't be arsed to differentiate between all of those books of the Long Tail/Everything is Miscellaneous/Wikinomics/Wisdom of the Crowds ilk).

Honourable mention: Against the Day by Thomas Pynchon (I sustained severe wrist injuries as a result of it but was surprised to find that I actually understood parts of it and that there were some semblances of a plot, although I was less surprised to discover how hilarious parts of it are and how many great sentences it contains).

The full reading list of 2008:

• Mind Hacks--Tom Stafford and Matt Webb
• Monarchy--David Starkey
• The Six Wives of Henry VIII--David Starkey
• The Norton Psychology Reader--Gary Marcus
• On Chesil Beach--Ian McEwan
• Great Movies--Roger Ebert
• The Black Swan--Nassim Nicholas Taleb
• Elizabeth and Leicester--Elizabeth Jenkins
• The Diving-Bell and the Butterfly-Jean-Dominique Baubin
• The Dreamers--Gilbert Adair
• What Good Are the Arts?--John Carey
• 1066 and All That--W.C. Sellar & R.J. Yeatman
• Empire of the Sun--J.G. Ballard
• Inversions--Iain M. Banks
• The Quickie--James Patterson
• Your Brain Is Almost Perfect--Read Montague
• Everything Is Miscellaneous--David Weinberger
• Kluge--Gary Marcus
• The Economic Naturalist--Robert H. Frank
• Super Crunchers--Ian Ayres
• An Utterly Impartial History of Britain--John O'Farrell
• Holidays in Hell--P.J. O'Rourke
• Dissolution--C.J. Sansom
• The English Patient--Michael Ondaatje
• Microtrends--Mark J. Penn
• The Alchemist--Paulo Coelho
• Notes on a Scandal--Zoe Heller
• Mergers & Acquisitions--Dana Vachon
• Love Falls--Esther Freud
• Ghostwalk--Rebecca Stott
• The Long Tail--Chris Anderson
• How To Lie with Statistics--Darrel Huff
• The End of Mr Y--Scarlett Thomas
• Bad Science--Ben Goldacre
• Mind Performance Hacks--Ron Hale-Evans
• The Hottest State--Ethan Hawke
• Less Than Zero--Bret Easton Ellis
• Against the Day--Thomas Pynchon
• The Silence of the Lambs--Thomas Harris
• Posh--Lucy Jackson
• The Accidental Tourist--Anne Tyler
• The Duchess--Amanda Foreman
• A Sport and a Pastime--James Salter
• Liar's Poker--Michael Lewis
• The Tropic of Cancer--Henry Miller
• The Cement Garden--Ian McEwan
• Making Money--Terry Pratchett
• The Hotel New Hampshire--John Irving
• Service Included--Phoebe Damrosch
• Queen of the Road--Doreen Orion
• The Fountainhead--Ayn Rand
• The Ghost--Robert Harris
• Payback--Margaret Atwood
• Glamorama--Bret Easton Ellis
• A Prisoner of Birth--Jeffrey Archer
• Why Not Catch-21?--Gary Dexter
• Use of Weapons--Iain M. Banks
• La Bella Figura--Beppe Severigni
• The Appeal--John Grisham
• The Business--Iain Banks
• Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy--John Le Carre
• The Player of Games--Iain M. Banks
• Revolutionary Road--Richard Yates
• Never Let Me Go--Kazuo Ishiguro
• Choke--Chuck Palahniuk
• Ulysses--James Joyce
• Birdsong--Sebastian Faulks
• High Fidelity--Nick Hornby
• The Remains of the Day--Kazuo Ishiguro
• The French Lieutenant's Woman--John Fowles
• Charlotte Gray--Sebastian Faulks
• Disgrace--J.M. Coetzee
• The Quiet American--Graham Greene
• Letting Go--Philip Roth

A Year in Film

Given that I didn't make any New Year's resolutions this year I didn't really do too badly to stop biting my nails and to dramatically increase the number of times I went to the cinema compared to 2007. In total, I saw 67 movies, although this includes those I watched on DVD, on the TV or on planes. It was tough to pick my top five of the year, mainly because so many on the list weren't actually released for the first time this year and so didn't count. The following made the final cut, although apart from #5, I'm not really sure I can place them in order of preference, so they are listed chronologically:

1. Lust, Caution (among the first films of the year; not much lust or caution but plenty of tension, sexual and otherwise, plenty of violence and plenty of treachery--of course I liked it)

2. Juno (token comedy; superb soundtrack and hilarious script) 

3. The Diving-Bell and the Butterfly (based on a supposedly unfilmable book, beautifully, stylishly shot, warm, poignant and surprisingly funny)

4. The Dark Knight (in the absence of any films with Clive this year, Christian has to make up the phwoar quotient)

5. Un Secret (I'd better not tell Monsieur E there were two French films on the list)

As for my Sisyphean task to watch all of the films in IMDb's top 250, I've now reached 101, at the last count, although as movies leave and enter the chart so frequently, it's hard to keep up. Here is my complete list of films I have seen this year (not including those I've seen before and remember well enough for them to count):

Les Chansons d'Amour

Lust, Caution

Paranoid Park

4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days

Juno

The Diving-Bell and the Butterfly

There Will Be Blood

Patriot Games--TV

A Clear and Present Danger--TV

Breaking and Entering--DVD

My Blueberry Nights

Belle de Jour

The Other Boleyn Girl

The Apartment--DVD

Some Like It Hot

Paris, Texas

Terminator 2--TV

The Orphanage

Street Kings

Best in Show--DVD

LOTR: ROTK--DVD

Funny Games U.S.

The Prestige--DVD

Michael Clayton--DVD

No Country for Old Men--Plane

Sex, Lies and Videotape--DVD

Raiders of the Lost Ark--DVD

All About Eve--DVD

Un Secret

Alfie--DVD

Double Indemnity--DVD

In Search of a Midnight Kiss

High Fidelity--DVD

The Visitor

Female Agents

Casablanca--DVD

Silent Running--DVD

The Dark Knight

WALL-E

Thelma & Louise--DVD

Jules et Jim--DVD

The Bridges of Madison County

The Pianist--DVD

The Duchess

The Edge of Love--Plane

Almost Famous--Plane

Vicky Cristina Barcelona

Burn After Reading

W.

Body of Lies

Junebug--DVD

Happy Go-Lucky

Changeling

Zodiac--DVD

The Big Lebowski--DVD

Strangers on a Train--DVD

Out of Africa--DVD

Hamlet--DVD

Easy Virtue

In a Lonely Place

I've Loved You So Long

Kramer vs Kramer--DVD

Kingdom of Heaven--DVD

It's a Wonderful Life

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof--DVD

633 Squadron--TV

Australia

2008 Pop Music Redux

I'd probably find it difficult even naming 25 songs that were in the top 40 this year, let alone finding 25 that I liked. However, I rather like DJ Earworm's mashup of the top 25 hits of 2008, even though I don't really like any of the individual songs sampled therein (well, Apologize by Timbaland and OneRepublic (a Gossip Girl acquisition) and that ubiquitous Coldplay song (which serves as the background for the whole mashup) are both OK). Maybe I just like the cleverness of blending all the songs together so seamlessly or that this pop music digest is a far more palatable way of sampling the biggest hits of 2008 than, say, listening to the radio on a regular basis. Or something.

As I said, I can't list five songs I like that were released this year but I did add 210 new songs to my iTunes library this year so in the interests of finis anni list-making, these are the top five songs I discovered in 2008 (of which only the first was originally released this year):

1. Wishful Thinking -- Rupa and the April Fishes

2. Tip of the Tongue -- The Donnis Trio

3. Fake Empire -- The National

4. When I'm Up (I Can't Get Down) -- Great Big Sea

5. Samson -- Regina Spektor

Whaddya know? They aren't all by whiny females and I didn't discover any of them via Gossip Girl, The O.C., Dawson's Creek or any other embarrassing TV show...

Out of Australia

So, I saw Australia--it may even be the last film I see this year and despite some of the dire to mediocre reviews I quite enjoyed it. Yes, cliches abound and yes, Baz seems to think it's Gone with the Wind meets Out of Africa (though it doesn't quite end up like Pearl Harbor, not least because the Yanks don't rewrite history), and yes, it's really long--almost unnecessarily so given that it's really at least two films in one. 

I still liked it, though, and not just because of the amount of time Hugh Jackman has his top off, gets into fights and droves, even if he acts in that really toolly "I am free; I need no one" Robert Redford kind of way for at least part of the film. The music was good, there was some cute dialogue (even if Nicole Kidman and/or her character often irritated me), the actor who played the kid at the centre of the plot was really good and even though it was a long film and the pacing seemed to be a little screwy, I wasn't bored and nor did either of my parents fall asleep (which is usually a sign of a decent movie). It was also pretty handy having French subtitles because these big, manly Aussie drovers do tend to mumble.

This doesn't mean I'm going to be renting Moulin Rouge, by any means--I still haven't seen that and don't intend to (I was too young to know better when Romeo and Juliet came out).

Nippy Noel

What's the point of going to Cannes for Christmas if the weather is only going to be so crappy that one feels like one has never left Angleterre? The Riviera was gorgeous and sunny when I arrived on Christmas Eve before the weather rapidly deteriorated. Combined with a brief but very debilitating one-day cold, the pouring, freezing rain that engulfed the Croisette all of yesterday meant that our Christmas Day tradition of swimming in the sea was not upheld. In fact, we barely even got out the house at all apart from a very sodden walk along the Croisette where all the locals were wrapped up so much that they resembled the man in the iron mask (imprisoned in one of the islands just off the Cannes coast). Instead, we had an extended game of Monopoly that I won but because I didn't get the reds, I didn't care.

Despite the fact that I was feeling pretty crappy and that my eyes were constantly leaking water, we did still have dinner en dehors, in the space heater. At least this year, it consisted of hot food (very fine, medium rare beef, potatoes and even some almost Yorkshire puddings, followed by artisanal ice cream). I only needed to wear a coat, scarf and gloves, and sit under two blankets, including one which feels like half a sleeping bag.

I wasn't quite feeling better enough to go running this morning but the weather did improve slightly so that we could go to Antibes for the day. The wind was ridiculously strong though--I've never seen the waves so high on the Mediterranean and I was worried that the sea spray would attack my new bag. 

Surprisingly, given the gaudiness of the film posters and adverts up during the film festival, the festive decorations in Cannes are reasonably low-key--a few little lights along the rue d'Antibes and then a tapis rouge of red lights along the Croisette. I've yet to leap on it, which will be my default if the weather really doesn't get back into double figures, preventing me from doing a marine leap. The whole town felt rather deserted today, even though all the shops were open. It isn't really the most festive place to spend Christmas but then...I'm not really the most festive of people.

Déjà Adieu

"There's an opposite to déjà vu," opines the narrator of the narrator of Chuck Palahniuk's Choke. "They call it jamais vu. It's when you meet the same people or visit places, again and again, but each time is the first. Everybody is always a stranger. Nothing is ever familiar."

There is no danger of jamais vu in Gossip Girl, especially not if you have also seen The O.C. It was bad enough last season when I kept getting confused because the GG characters of Bart Bass and Lily van der Woodsen (yes, really), reminded me an awful lot of Kirsten and Caleb in The O.C. Only, while Bart and Lily are husband and wife, Caleb and Kirsten are father and daughter. Bart and Caleb are both rich, important property developers who are the kings of their respective empires (well, Caleb owned most of Newport Beach and Bart's domain seemed to cover a lot of Manhattan). They're both often antagonistic to the other characters (and hence the viewers, who didn't really mind too much about the deaths). They also both get killed off in the big death of season two, having not first taken the trouble to resolve feuds with Lily and Kirsten. The only difference is that because Caleb was really Jim from Neighbours (from the brief period when even I watched it), I found it hard to take him seriously as a sometimes-baddie.

Anyway, this death has been foretold since the start of the season when the clues revealed in the spoilers basically meant that unless the network was being really sneaky, it had to be Bart that died. His death was supposed to clear the way for another couple but, of course, on network television, the course of true love never did run smoothly--especially not when there's still half a season to go. This week, many hearts were broken (good choice of Slow Show by The National as the background choon for the Montage of Much Misery), even Blair's after finally saying those words Chuck had been waiting to hear (of course, Bart was his father and so he was way too busy getting wasted, getting angry and getting even to appreciate them), and there are still all sorts of messy relationships involving a mother (Lily) and her daughter (Serena) in one family loving the father (Rufus) and his son (Dan), respectively, in another (it's not like it's illegal given that no one is blood related--right?).

Now that the show is on hiatus until after Christmas, the writers had to leave a fat, juicy cliffhanger: Lily and Rufus meet at Grand Central in a most-cliched manner so that they can finally run away somewhere and be happy together (they said Cornwall but I assume they mean Cornwall, Connecticut, rather than say, Cornwall, Texas, or, maybe, Cornwall, England, though you never can tell in GG Land). Except Lily's conniving mother picks this moment to reveal something to Rufus about Lily that he never found out all those years ago when they were a couple and he's not happy. 

"I just have one question," he sneers. "Was it a boy or a girl?" Fade to black, cue the lights. Find out more in 2009. As long as Rufus doesn't end up being Serena's father (I know GG likes to push the boundaries on complicated love entanglements, but that's probably going a tad too far given that Serena's mother was therefore encouraging her to sleep with her half-brother), it seems like it's going to be an interesting twist. Only, all those shots of walks in Central Park and SoHo, just make me crave NYC again--not that that takes very much.

Mac, Cheese and the Milk Bar, Revisited

My friend and I went to Canteen on Baker Street for brunch, and I'm pleased to report that the macaroni cheese was excellent with enough crispy bits on top to keep me happy. He had also acquired two free tickets to special exhibitions at the Natural History Museum and the Science Museum and IMAX movies at the Science Museum, so I suggested we check out the Darwin exhibition, which is on at the NHM at the moment.

The exhibition was pretty good, although I'm not sure I would have paid £9 for it, even though they did have a real life green iguana called Charlie and a "pillow toad". Also, why do they use American and not British spellings throughout the exhibition? Would Darwin really have written about "neighboring" islands? I hope not but maybe they just didn't "realize." Also, some of the video clips in the evolution/ID debate section of the exhibition are identical to those in the Hall of Human Evolution at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.

As South Ken isn't really my neighbourhood, we caught the tube back into the centre of town and checked out another of the coffee shops featured in Time Out's recent article on indie coffee shops--Milk Bar, which had been on my coffee to-do list anyway. Although I will never be able to shake the image of the Milk Bar in Dolgellau, the Welsh town where my parents celebrated their honeymoon and used to take us there on family several times a year. Dolgellau consisted of: a small restaurant called Y Sospan (yes, The Saucepan), a burned-down hotel, a walking/climbing shop (for those--usually us--climbing Cader Idris), a second-hand bookshop and a milk bar. I can't quite remember what a milk bar was (perhaps like the American Dairy Queen?) but I seem to remember thinking milk was obligatory and so always ordered a milkshake.

Milk Bar in Bateman Street has nothing in common with the milk bars of my youth. Aussie-run (as is standard in the majority of decent coffee shops in this city) and funky, with the art on the walls for sale, with ultra-friendly staff. I had an excellent macchiato and a tasty chocolate-orange brownie (I don't usually like fruit-flavoured chocolate but I made an exception as the brownies looked good). My friend's hot choc, served with a cocoa heart on top of the foam and mini-marshmallows for seasoning, also looked good. The cafe is also close enough to Leicester Square to prove very useful when good coffee and respite from the touristy hoards of the quartier are needed. In fact, the five parallel streets in the neighbourhood--Greek, Frith, Dean, Wardour and Berwick--along with Bateman Street running between them hold some of my new favourite coffee shops, cafes, bars and restaurants, which is quite impressive given their proximity to Leicester Square.

Not Letting the Book Go Just Yet

Never Let Me Go is Les Jeux Sont Faits meets The Handmaid's Tale meets Dawson's Creek Season 3 (I am sure there is a better example than the latter of a love triangle between two female friends and the guy who comes between them but nothing seems to spring to mind).

Parts of Never Let Me Go really reminded me of various quotations from the last scene of Les Jeux Sont Faits. The books are, superficially, very different and yet share a number of underlying themes, as well as elements of "science fiction" (the inverted commas because the dystopian vision of 1990s England presented in Never Let Me Go is horrific but the focus is really on the fiction and not on coming up with any plausible scientific explanations for anything). The idea that on ne reprend pas son coup is present in both, as is the initial excitement that there might be some way around it (true love, in both cases, as a loophole--article 140 in LJSF).

- Tout n'est pas perdu, Pierre. Il en viendra d'autres qui reprendront votre oeuvre...

(- All is not lost, Pierre. There will be others who will take on your mission...)

Cependant, pour la première fois, il semble que la jeune femme soit gagnée par l'indifférence de la mort.

(However, for the first time, it seems that the young woman has been defeated by the indifference of death.)

- Et vous deux... Vous n'avez pas...? fait le vieillard.

- Non, réplique Eve, non, nous n'avons pas... Les jeux sont faits, voyez-vous. On ne reprend pas son coup.

(- And you two... You didn't...

- No, replies Eve, no, we didn't... The die is cast, you see. You can't change your bet.)

- Allez danser ensemble. Et si vous ne vous  êtes pas trompés, tout d'un coup, elle sera là...

- On peut essayer de recommencer sa vie? insiste le jeune homme.

Pierre et Eve se regardent, hésitants.

- Essayez, conseille Pierre.

- Essayez tout de même, murmure Eve.

(- Go and dance together. And if you aren't mistaken, all of a sudden, it will be there.

- Can we really try to start life afresh? insists the young man.

- Try, advises Pierre.

- Try anyway, murmurs Eve.)

My favourite part of Never Let Me Go, though, was the way that the three main characters in the book came to see of Norfolk as a sort of magical lost property office--a place where all lost objects turn up sooner or later (including the protagonist's missing tape (bearing the song Never Let Me Go), which turns up in a second-hand music store in Cromer, of all places). Of course, the sad implications of this, as with many other elements of the exquisitely structured plot only become truly clear towards the end. 

I think I need to read something a little less existential and a little more frivolous next.

Cheating on Joyce

I was, quite honestly, all set to get underway with Ulysses this weekend because it seems unfair to condemn it so soon after its purchase to merely fulfilling all of the uses once fulfilled by Against the Day and Gravity's Rainbow. Also, when it comes to reading lists, I hate subverting the natural order and everything should really wait its turn.

However, the OUP Blog's weekly Friday Procrastination: Link Love post (along with the Daily Intel's GG Reality Index and Jezebel's Midweek Madness, one of my favourite regular blog posts), made me skip to an entirely different book not previously on my radar: Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go (messing with the natural order of books to be read always makes me think of Final Destination and that even though the characters cheated death initially in getting off the doomed plane, death still gets them all eventually (even if only in the sequel), although I'm hoping that reading Ulysses won't be a fate worse than death).

I never read The Remains of the Day. At school, half of my year were assigned that and Pride and Prej as their GCSE set prose texts, and the rest of us read Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Lady Chatterley. I still think we got the better deal and maybe it was the fact that The Remains of the Day was paired with P&P that put me off from ever reading it or finding out anything more about it. 

Still, last night in Selfridges, trying desperately to do some Christmas shopping, I stumbled into the Foyles concession and made by way to the I section in the fiction department and picked up a copy of Never Let Me Go. I think I'd also been put off before by the title--while I rarely judge a book by its cover, as with music and movies, I am massively influenced by the title. Never Let Me Go sounds to me like some dire, interchangeable chick lit dross. Employing the useful technique I picked up from somewhere, earlier in the year (possibly the Grauniad), I flicked to page 69 and read it to see whether it was my kind of novel. It was, and coincidentally, this was the page where the meaning of the title starts to be revealed (the protagonist, Kathy, has a treasured cassette on which her favourite track is called Never Let Me Go). If the novel is well titled, I suspect the relevance of this will only be fully explained later on in the novel (I'm only halfway through now), although even the page 69 explanation is quite powerful.

So far, NLMG has been really enjoyable: troubling, sad, reflective and very, very dark. I really wanted to linger in bed this morning finishing it but I had breakfast plans and so I had to abandon it in favour of a cappuccino and a delicious bacon sandwich (among the few things that can draw me out of bed on a cold Saturday, even when I don't have a good book to read). Thus far, the main emotion has been uneasiness and I suspect that this will only become increasingly horrific as the remainder of the plot unravels--in some ways (the mood and tone, mainly), it reminds me of Margaret Atwood's Cat's Eye, which is an excellent book for 13-year-old girls to study for their end of third-form English exam. I suspect I won't be able to let Never Let Me Go go from my mind for some time, even after I have finished it.