Book-Blogger Hop

Crazy-for-Books is holding a Book-Blogger Hop to forge new connections in the blogging community.  This made me reflect on the extent to which my blog can still be called a "book blog," since it covers so many other subjects (film, theatre, ice dancing...).

But what can I say, I defy categorization.  It is a book blog, among other things. So on go the bobby socks and off I go to the Hop.

Here's what Crazy-for-Books has to say about the Hop:

Hey book bloggers!  Every day I seem to find another book blog that I start following.  In the spirit of the Friday Follow, I thought it would be cool to do a Book Blog Hop to give us all bookies a chance to connect and find new blogs that we may be missing out on!

Now, I follow a lot of blogs and I haven't seen this feature yet, so if someone else is doing a Book Blog Hop, please let me know!!  I don't want to step on any toes or anything!

So, if you'd like to participate, just repost this, sign MckLinky below, and check out other blogs in MckLinky!  Let's connect and make new book bloggy friends!!


Follow this link to join.

Desert Island Books

Back from Los Angeles am I, and into the frantic (and not blogging friendly) swing of teaching.  So just a quick note to say this:

I adore LOST.  It is, in fact, a major source of discontent in my relationship: D, who started out as a LOST fan, has utterly lost faith.  He finds the set of conventions that the show has established and now mercilessly, endlessly exploits to be cheesy, manipulative and tiresome, and (worse yet) he thinks the writers are making everything up as they go along.

I, on the other hand, think that they have had a rough outline of the whole show all along, a foundation from which they have improvised a complex and enthralling moral universe.

We had a similar "difference of opinion" about the last season of Battlestar Galactica, which vaguely pleased him while it made me increasingly enraged.  Eventually we had to agree not to discuss it at all.  Otherwise our every conversation went something like this:
D:     "So... did you see the episode last night?"
SP:    "Mm."
D:     "And?"
SP:    "I don't know.  I didn't love it.  What ever happened to character consistency? I mean..."
D:      "WELL IF YOU HATE IT SO MUCH WHY DON'T YOU JUST STOP WATCHING IT???"
Come to think of it, most of our worst arguments have been about television.  Don't even get me started on the time we fought for hours at the top of our lungs about the definition of the word "procedural." Tensions run high around the small screen in our homes.

All this is just to introduce this brilliant list of the Books of Lost.  It is a show that wears its bibliophilia on its sleeve.  I like that.

So much so that I am going to fire up the Tivo and watch it right now.

Sunday Salon: Two Views from the Watchtower

This week: a pair of bookend images from the inside of a colonial Puerto Rican guard tower.  The one above looks in one verdant direction; the one that ends this post shows the view when you turn your head 180 degrees to the right.  You can imagine what it must have been like to be the lone sentry in this tiny, fairy-tale tower of an outlook.

This week was "Winter Break" at my Nova Scotian university (the second semester is called "Winter Term," because - strictly speaking - Spring never occurs during the January to April months), so I was in Los Angeles catching up on movies, doing some reading, watching endless Olympics coverage, and soaking up some warm(er) weather.  In fact, it has hardly been the sunny beach weather I had hoped for: it has been more humid here this week than it was in Nova Scotia for months before. 

Not a lot of reading got done today, since it is my last day in California with my beloved.  I am in the midst of Sabriel by Garth Nix and The Slightest Provocation by Pam Rosenthal, neither of which has really grabbed me yet.  In both cases I feel ... I am not sure ... unengaged by the core characters.  What so you, ye who have read either of these books?  Do they become more gripping as they progress?  Am I just coming to them at a somewhat distracted time?

We spent much of today at the IMAX, seeing Avatar in 3D.  Now, after Titanic, which I found irritating in the extreme on its initial release, I swore I would never see another James Cameron film.  And I wasn't really intrigued by the whispers and tidbits I heard about this one.  But D and I finally decided that if we were going to see it at all, we should really see it in all its big-screen, bells-and-whistles, special-effects glory.  And the truth is that it was making enough noise for its innovations that we were going to want to see it eventually.

So off we went, and to be perfectly honest ... I didn't hate it.  I really, really expected to hate it.  It comes down to this: the plot was ham-handed and creakily simplistic, the villains were too wooden and obvious to be satisfyingly villainous, and some of the performances were disappointingly weak.  But the special effects were not among these weaknesses.  The Na'vi (the lanky, enormous, Disney-eyed and cobalt-skinned indigenous peoples of Pandora, the film's colonized world) are so beautifully rendered that it is almost a disappointment for us (like the hero of the film) to return to human society.  This is largely because of the incredibly expressive eyes of the Na'vi; some of their limbs are still rather awkward in slower motions.   As for the 3D - it was an intriguing first experience, but I could honestly do without it.  It had a tendency to slip in and out of focus whenever I changed the angle of my head slightly or turned my gaze to look directly at the extreme corners of the screen.  And I would rather have true depth of field and precision of focus than ferns that reach out to grab me from the screen.

While in LA, I also caught up on some of my blogging.  I will leave you with a list of the week's posts.  Happy March, everyone! Here's hoping that my return to Canada tomorrow is uneventful....