Category: Books

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“It was not a great presence but a great absence, a geometric ocean of darkness that seemed to swallow heaven itself.”

Dan Dickinson2 Comments

A quick note on two books I read recently:

  • The Psychopath Test (kobo | amazon) by Jon Ronson was funny, sort of useful, and a little worrying. You might recognize the author’s name — he’s the guy who wrote The Men Who Stare At Goats. This book is just as filled with odd characters and gentle mysteries. Amusing, if a little too light with the subject matter, but still made me snicker out loud a couple of times.
  • And then there was Unbroken (kobo | amazon) by Laura Hillenbrand, the mesmerizing story of Louis Zamperini. I’d link to his Wikipedia page but it gives away too much. I found myself ignoring other important things to go lie in bed and read this book. There was no fiction or elaboration to it…just a story that would be unbelievable if it hadn’t actually happened. I’m not usually one to recommend biographies, but I’d recommend this book to anyone.

.:.

Photo by onebadpenny, used under Creative Commons license

Photo by Anita & Greg, used under Creative Commons license

"A world of disproportion engulfs us, and we live in a universe that is absurd."

Dan Dickinson1 Comment

Not to get all book-snobby here, but I really never thought I’d read something by Stephen King. Given his wide audience I knew his books were accessible, but I never found myself interested in reading one. So I’d never actually cracked the spine on one until I read (on the Kobo, so no actual spine-cracking, I guess) 11/22/63 (kobo | amazon). I have a slight fascination with JFK’s assassination, not to mention the literary toolkit of time travel, so I bought it.

It wasn’t bad, really. Light, certainly, but it kept me entertained. I guess this is what people mean when they describe “summer books”. So on that basis, I guess I’d recommend it.

By the way, if you’ve read other Stephen King novels, then this connection flowchart may be of use:

.:.

Photo by Anita & Greg, used under Creative Commons license

Panem et circenses

Dan Dickinson2 Comments

I’m going to see The Hunger Games (imdb | rotten tomatoes) tomorrow. Yeah, that’s right. Those Hunger Games. I read the books (hey, a fella’s gotta kill the 15-hour flight to Sydney somehow) and I want to see the movie. Let’s be clear: I don’t want to see it even one-tenth as much as Nellie, who bought her tickets last weekend. But if a movie looks entertaining, and stars Jennifer Lawrence, and rates an 86% on Rotten Tomatoes, then I’m going whether or not I’ve read the books.

While the media seems intent on comparing it to Twilight (all the squealing teens don’t help) anyone who’s so much as glanced at the books knows they’re nothing alike. Granted, I didn’t read Twilight, but the brief snippets I’ve caught on TMN suggest that I’d hate the movies (and would probably therefore hate the books) because the characters seemed spectacularly annoying. I was hopeful The Hunger Games screenwriters wouldn’t do that to their central characters and, judging by early reports, they did not. I think Matt Brown summed it up nicely:

“Katniss never swoons for a boy or falls into suicidal fantasies in an effort to annihilate her self for the good of the establishment. I could do with five or ten minutes of her punching Bella Swan in the face.”

Right, then. Let the odds be ever in our favour of not being stuck next to too many spastic teenagers tomorrow.

*** UPDATE ***

So we saw it on Saturday. I thought it was pretty good. Didn’t melt my brain or anything, but I knew what I was going in to, and they did what they were set up to do: make an interesting, entertaining movie without ballsing it up as I’m sure the studio tried to make them do. The actors did very well and made us care. They made me want to see the next…I dunno, seven movies, or whatever they split the final two books into.

Side note: the theatre was the new AVX at the Scotiabank, which had comfier seats which you could reserve online so there was no standing in a queue to fight for a not-shit vantage point. Well worth the extra 3 quid. Oh, and the crowd wasn’t annoying at all…no squealing, no talking, and only one teenage girl on her phone during the movie, which I’ll take as a win.

Side technical note: they did a good job of portraying the violence without making it overly graphic; I still wouldn’t recommend bringing your nine year old (as some people in that theatre did) but if a kid read the book and has played a FPS or too then I don’t think the movie will freak them out.

Side asshole note: apparently some people are upset that they made the black characters, you know, black.

"There it is."

Dan Dickinson1 Comment

Just before Christmas (and I do mean just before…it was at about 10PM on Christmas eve) our friends MLK gave Nellie and I a couple of books. I just finished reading mine: Matterhorn (amazon | kobo) by Karl Marlantes. It’s billed as a novel about the Vietnam war, but it’s so obviously a slight-dramatized recounting of Marlantes’ time there. The details are too vivid, the people too real, for it to be fiction. I was a little slow getting into it, but after about 100 pages I was desperate to return to it each time I put it down. The characters stick indelibly…I would fall asleep thinking of Vancouver, or Hawke, or Hamilton, or Parker. I would flip each page terrified something would happen to Pat. I would get angry at Big John and Big John Three just like I got angry at Sobel when we watched Band Of Brothers. But mostly I would be Mellas each time I opened the book.

Note to self: buy "iPus" trademark

Dan Dickinson2 Comments

I should be on a plane right now. I should be flying home to my family’s farm, to join my parents and my two brothers (one of whom flew in from Sydney on Saturday night) and their families. But I’m not. I’m still in Toronto. I changed my flight from this morning to Wednesday because I’ve been sick since last Monday, and showed no signs of being able to fly today. My head, she would have asploded.

This is, without a doubt, the sickest I have ever been. I had strep throat (wtf?) and a sinus infection at the same time. Sneezing, coughing, dry throat, severe headaches, dizziness, fever, and — the pièce de résistance — pus coming out of my eyes. For serious, people, eye pus. Oy.

Anyway, last night — for the first time in a week — I slept for more than a couple of hours, and today I feel a lot better than I have. Still not 100%, and certainly my sinuses would not have tolerated a 3-hour flight involving two descents, but it’s improvement. At this point I just want to feel normal again, and then go see my family.

On the plus side, being at home this much has allowed me to read the first two Game Of Thrones books, and I’ve just started the third. I don’t think I could have done that on a backlit screen, what with the headaches, but Nellie got me a super-awesome early birthday gift: a Kobo eReader touch. Thank the gods, I’d have gone mental otherwise.

"But what is so outrageous is that this isn't about Pat. This is about what they did to a nation."

Dan Dickinson1 Comment

I don’t know why, exactly, but I’ve/we’ve watched a lot of movies this month. Being on a plane for ten hours doesn’t hurt, and I did just get a new digital media player, but given how busy we’ve been at work (and how much good TV is on right now) I was surprised to see that I’ve gone through 14 movies this month. One more and it’ll be the busiest movie month for me since September 2008, when I took a week of vacation and watched 30 movies in 10 days at TIFF.

The five most recent have been:

Restrepo (imdb | rotten tomatoes) was the companion documentary to a book I just read (War by Sebastien Junger) about soldiers deep in Pakistan’s Korengal valley. While I appreciate putting faces to names and seeing the actual ground described in the book, the book was far more compelling. However, it was difficult to watch the documentary knowing that photographer and cameraman Tim Hetherington died last month in Libya.

The Tillman Story (imdb | rotten tomatoes) was another documentary about war, but with a very different twist. Many people knew about Pat Tillman, who played football for the Arizona Cardinals and turned down a multi-million dollar contract so that he could enlist and go to Afghanistan, along with his brother, following the attacks of September 11 2001. Tillman was killed in Afghanistan and immediately celebrated as a war hero — even being awarded a posthumous Silver Star — but his family wanted to understand more about how Tillman was killed. The star of the documentary is kind of Pat Tillman, and kind of his mother, but really is just this entire extraordinary family who display more character than most of us would be capable of.

The Last Exorcism (imdb | rotten tomatoes) had all kinds of promise, and despite being a Blair Witch knockoff in a lot of ways was actually an effectively creepy little genre film, but just lost it badly in the final act. Like, BADLY badly.

Manhunter (imdb | rotten tomatoes) was weird for me. It was the first Hannibal Lecter movie (it was actually spelled “Lecktor” in this movie) before Anthony Hopkins was Lecter and before Scott Glenn was Jack Crawford and when Will Graham was the protagonist, not Clarice Starling. It was, of course, remade with the proper title Red Dragon (imdb | rotten tomatoes) years later, but that remake wasn’t very good. So when I saw that Manhunter had a historical rating of 94% on Rotten Tomatoes, I thought it would be better. And it might have been…it was, after all, directed by Michael Mann, one of my all-time favourites. But it’s hard to get past the fact that it was made in 1986, with all the cheesiness you’d expect from a director who was also producer of Miami Vice at the time. The bad music, the absurd clothes, the bad slo-mo…it’s hard to believe Silence Of The Lambs came just five years later. I guess it played better in 1986.

How To Train Your Dragon (imdb | rotten tomatoes) holds a 98% rating on RT, which I couldn’t quite figure out. Upon seeing the ads I had written it off as another animated kids movie, but…yeah, it’s not. It’s really quite good. The animation is ridiculously strong, the story is sweet (and has more meat to it than you might expect) and it doesn’t try too hard for laughs. Kids will obviously like it, but much to my surprise, so might mostly-jaded movie snobs.

***UPDATE!*** We watched Inside Job (imdb | rotten tomatoes) this afternoon — really good, highly recommended — which puts me at 15 for the month…like I said earlier, the most since TIFFapalooza ’08.

"Being able to save their life so they can live, I think is rewarding. Any of them would do it for me."

Dan Dickinson4 Comments

Two days ago I finished reading Sebastien Junger‘s War (amazon | kobo), his recounting of the time he spent in the mountains of eastern Afghanistan embedded with a single platoon. For those two days I have not been able to stop thinking about the book, and the men.

Second platoon are described in the book as “the tip of the spear. They’re the main effort for the company, and the company is the main effort for the battalion, and the battalion is the main effort for the brigade.” They occupy serious, dangerous ground, with soldiers living rough in little more than sandbags and temporary walls dug into hillsides, constantly fighting the Taliban for control of a remote valley.

I won’t get into much more detail than that. But the fact that I burned through 268 pages in a week (and it’s not like I can usually find much time to read for fun) and can’t stop imagining this place I’ve never seen should tell you how compelling it is. I’m desperate to watch Restrepo (imdb | rotten tomatoes), a documentary by Junger and photographer Tim Heatherington about their time with second platoon and one of the top-rated movies of last year, so that I can put faces to names.

"Few would have predicted it sixty years before, but the twenty-first century might yet belong to Europe."

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I’ve done it.

I have finally, finally, finally finished Postwar (amazon | kobo) by Tony Judt, having started it…I don’t know, like a year ago. I must have read north of a half dozen other books during breaks from this one…not because it was bad — it’s actually an incredible book when you consider what it does — but because it was 831 pages of relatively dense historical perspective.

Length aside, there’s another reason why this feels like an accomplishment: in finishing it I also conclude my self-made 8-book series about WWI and WWII. I wanted to know more about the buildup and aftermath of each war, and having read these I feel like I do. These books, read (amongst many others) over the past four years, were:

  • The Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman
  • A Short History of WWI by James Stokesbury
  • Paris 1919 by Margaret MacMillan
  • The Coming Of The Third Reich by Richard Evans
  • The Dark Valley: A Panorama of the 1930s by Piers Brendon
  • A Short History of WWII by James Stokesbury
  • A Writer At War: A Soviet Journalist with the Red Army, 1941-1945 by Vasily Grossman
  • Postwar by Tony Judt

If you find yourself curious about how exactly the Nazis were able to come to power, or why Europe and the Middle East were divided up as they were, or which army truly beat back Hitler’s armies, or any other aspect (at a high level, anyway) of the wars, I’d highly recommend any and all of these.