Excited to recommend
Milk! Wow, was it great. All those rhapsodic reviews? They're true. Milk was a fantastic film--it felt like life, not a movie (I mean, I know it was based on life, but the movie also managed to evoke the texture of life, of real people interacting, and some biopics don't), and it flew by all too quickly, and ended (even though we knew what was coming) all too wrenchingly. Sean Penn's a miracle, too. Thanks, Gus Van Sant! A terrific job of bringing this pivotal historical struggle to the screen.
And if you want to avoid lining the pockets of Alan Stock, CEO of Cinemark, who donated $9,999 to the Yes on 8 campaign (oh, irony) with your movie ticket fee, you can go to No Milk for Cinemark to find a theater alternative.
Friend of the blog Tayari Jones is busy teaching women in Uganda, and if you haven't read Doreen Baingana's
lovely collection of short stories, Tropical Fish (which Tayari's using excerpts from), definitely check it out. The title story's a particular knockout, and you can hear Baingana talking with NPR here. She's a terrific reader, so if she's ever giving a reading near your town, go.
I'm also very psyched about Kate Atkinson. I was hunting for literary thrillers, as you may remember, and alas, Paul Auster and Orhan Pamuk did me no good. No good whatsoever. Good reads, yeah (and I've now been officially removed from the last-would-be-literata-in-the-world-who-hasn't-read-Paul-Auster list, where I resided, to my shame, for decades), but they weren't any help.
But Kate Atkinson--well, now, she's a different story. I'm crazy about the two novels I've read so far, Case Histories and When Will There Be Good News?, and I'll blog more in the future about them. Let me just say briefly that, while sheer entertainment, they're also so intelligent. The characters and the narrator are as rich and full and rounded and prickly and surprising as characters and narrators in any good literary novel (though they're also diversity lite: the two I read were set in the U.K.--Cambridge and Edinburgh--and all the central characters were white--just a heads-up). The plots are pleasingly complex, but I guess the thing that delighted me the most was the way particular leitmotifs developed, cropping up at the most unexpected times and moving the plot along. So elegant, so satisfying. And no punches are pulled, no prisoners are taken. It's as delightfully bleak and grim as my own internal monologue about the world. She's writing for grown-ups.
The palpable intelligence of the prose is the thing that educated and helped me regarding my own work; I realized I'd been trying (excuse me for saying it in this shorthand, untactful way) to dumb it down a bit in order to make my fiction (which has been accurately accused of being obtuse--"too Virginia Woolf," one editor said, and not as a compliment) more commercially accessible. Kate Atkinson's work (um, and her Whitbread) demonstrates that dumbing it down's not necessary.
Plus, Atkinson's author photo kind of reminds me of my Aunt Barb, which makes me feel all affectionate--particularly that level gaze, like, Go ahead, just try it.
You gotta love that in a woman.
And if you want to avoid lining the pockets of Alan Stock, CEO of Cinemark, who donated $9,999 to the Yes on 8 campaign (oh, irony) with your movie ticket fee, you can go to No Milk for Cinemark to find a theater alternative. Friend of the blog Tayari Jones is busy teaching women in Uganda, and if you haven't read Doreen Baingana's
lovely collection of short stories, Tropical Fish (which Tayari's using excerpts from), definitely check it out. The title story's a particular knockout, and you can hear Baingana talking with NPR here. She's a terrific reader, so if she's ever giving a reading near your town, go.I'm also very psyched about Kate Atkinson. I was hunting for literary thrillers, as you may remember, and alas, Paul Auster and Orhan Pamuk did me no good. No good whatsoever. Good reads, yeah (and I've now been officially removed from the last-would-be-literata-in-the-world-who-hasn't-read-Paul-Auster list, where I resided, to my shame, for decades), but they weren't any help.
But Kate Atkinson--well, now, she's a different story. I'm crazy about the two novels I've read so far, Case Histories and When Will There Be Good News?, and I'll blog more in the future about them. Let me just say briefly that, while sheer entertainment, they're also so intelligent. The characters and the narrator are as rich and full and rounded and prickly and surprising as characters and narrators in any good literary novel (though they're also diversity lite: the two I read were set in the U.K.--Cambridge and Edinburgh--and all the central characters were white--just a heads-up). The plots are pleasingly complex, but I guess the thing that delighted me the most was the way particular leitmotifs developed, cropping up at the most unexpected times and moving the plot along. So elegant, so satisfying. And no punches are pulled, no prisoners are taken. It's as delightfully bleak and grim as my own internal monologue about the world. She's writing for grown-ups.
The palpable intelligence of the prose is the thing that educated and helped me regarding my own work; I realized I'd been trying (excuse me for saying it in this shorthand, untactful way) to dumb it down a bit in order to make my fiction (which has been accurately accused of being obtuse--"too Virginia Woolf," one editor said, and not as a compliment) more commercially accessible. Kate Atkinson's work (um, and her Whitbread) demonstrates that dumbing it down's not necessary.
Plus, Atkinson's author photo kind of reminds me of my Aunt Barb, which makes me feel all affectionate--particularly that level gaze, like, Go ahead, just try it.
You gotta love that in a woman.
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