Hit (or Miss) List, September ’09
Hit (or Miss) List, September ’09
Saturday, October 3, 2009
I finally had a little more time for some reading and movie-watching. I made a little headway on my Fill in the Gaps list in September, which was fun, and also got to catch up on some other reading/viewing I’d left hanging for a while. And I had a lot of fun catching a few old movies on the MGM channel while I was unexpectedly back in Singapore for a week to settle matters for my China visa.
Here’s what I’ve been reading and watching for the past month:
Hit List
•Quantum Lyrics (A Van Jordan) — see my review at Sloth Jockey
•Velocity (Dean Koontz) — see my response at Fill in the Gaps
this was on my “Fill in the Gaps” list because I’d heard good things about Koontz’s writing; it was better than I thought
•Macbeth (movie) — 2006 Australian version
•Slipstream (movie)
this was something I’d picked up on DVD some time back, and finally got to watch; very, very good
•Zen in the Art of Writing (Ray Bradbury)
•Dark Nebulae (John J. Dunphy)
•The Mouths that Remain (Gavin Salisbury)
•The Princess of Mars (Edgar Rice Burroughs) — see my response at Fill in the Gaps
•The Fountainhead (movie)
•Clean Slate (movie)
•A Fish Called Wanda (movie)
•Transformers 2 (movie)
•Rip Van Winkle (Washington Irving) — see my response at Fill in the Gaps
Miss List
•Training Day (movie)
I’m not sure it was exactly a miss, but I really didn’t like it as much as I thought I would – too cliche, I guess
•The Aeneid (Vergil, a Librivox recording)
it’s not the text that was the problem, as I’ve always loved The Aeneid, but the recording; some of the readers just don’t read poetry well, especially Dryden’s rhyme and meter
Neither Hit nor Miss
•The World is Flat (Thomas Friedman) — read my thoughts at Tai Shan
there were some good thoughts, for sure, but I probably waited to long to read it; it’s rather dated already
•Director’s Cut (Alton Gansky)
So, what have you been reading and watching this past month?
My Fill in the Gaps Watch
Completed
1.Siddhartha (Hermann Hesse)
2.Woman to Woman and other poems (Agnes Lam)
3.The 8th Habit (Stephen Covey)
4.Mortician’s Tea (G. O. Clark)
5.Poemcrazy (Susan Wooldridge)
6. Infinite Jest (David Foster Wallace)
7. Velocity (Dean Koontz)
8. The World is Flat (Thomas L. Friedman)
9. A Princess of Mars - Edgar Rice Burroughs
10. Rip Van Winkle - Washington Irving
In Progress
➡Night and Day - Virginia Woolf
The Rest
The Illustrated Man - Ray Bradbury
The Kite Runner – Khalad Hosseini
The Lake of Dead Languages - Carol Goodman
The Sayings of Jesus - Anna Wierzbicka
A Walk in the Woods - Bill Bryson
Special Topics in Calamity Physics - Marisha Pessl
Catch – 22 – Joseph Heller
The Plague, Albert Camus
Anansi Boys – Neil Gaiman
Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
A Thousand Acres, Jane Smiley
Candide – Voltaire
Ben Hur – Lew Wallace
Toilers of the Sea – Victor Hugo
Journey to the Center of the Earth – Jules Verne
Finnegan’s Wake – James Joyce
Brighton Rock - Graham Greene
Sweeney Todd and the String of Pearls
Relativity - Albert Einstein
The Romance of Tristan and Iseult - Joseph Bedier
The Consolation of Philosophy - Boethius
Paul - Walter Wangerin, Jr.
Inkheart – Cornelia Funke
A History of the Middle Ages - Crane Brinton, John Christopher, Robert Wolff
Catch Me if You Can - Frank Abagnale
The Castle - Franz Kafka
Le Morte D’Arthur – Sir Thomas Malory
Life of Pi – Yann Martel
Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Commentaries - Julius Caesar
Walden - Henry David Thoreau
Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
Our Mutual Friend - Charles Dickens
The Twelve Caesars - Seutonius
Benjamin Franklin: An American Life - Walter Isaacson
Bush at War - Bob Woodward
The Truth About Jesus - M. M. Mangasarian
The Mark of the Christian - Francis Shaeffer
Prisoner of Zenda - Anthony Hope
Paradise – Toni Morrison
Tarzan of the Apes - Edgar Rice Burroughs
Neverwhere - Neil Gaiman
The Decameron - Boccaccio
Slaughterhouse Five – Kurt Vonnegut
The Human Comedy - William Saroyan
Six Characters in Search of an Author - Luigi Pirandello
The Beautiful and the Damned – F. Scott Fitzgerald
Startling Moon - Liu Hong
Scenes of a Clerical Life - George Eliot
Looking Backward - Edward Bellamy
A Tale of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
Ragged Dick - Horatio Alger, Jr.
Streamers - David Rabe
The Graveyard Book – Neil Gaiman
Marco Polo Sings a Solo - John Guare
Nanjing 1937 - Ye Zhaoyan
Lucky Jim - Kingsley Amis
The House of the Seven Gables – Nathaniel Hawthorne
Wings - Arthur Kopit
Bedknobs and Broomsticks - Mary Norton
The Dragons of Eden - Carl Sagan
The Stolen White Elephant - Mark Twain
Sister Mary Ignatius Explains it All for You - C. Durang
Deltora Quest - Emily Rodda
Crimes of the Heart - Beth Henley
When the Gods are Silent - Jane Lindskold
The Thorn of Lion City - Lucy Lum
The Dining Room - A. R. Gurney
The Pickwick Paper – Charles Dickens
Brazil - Annette Haddad, ed.
The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
Painting Churches - Tina Howe
Daughter of the River - Hong Ying
The Orthodox Way - Father Kallistos Ware
The Sound and the Fury – William Faulkner
The Sun Also Rises – Ernest Hemingway
Tomorrow When the World Began - John Marsden
Atlantis - Greg Donegan
Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom - August Wilson
A Descent into the Maelstrom - Edgar Allan Poe
Holy Ghosts - Romulus Linney
The $30,000 Bequest - Mark Twain
Far from the Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
An Ideal Husband - Oscar Wilde
Zhao the Orphan - Ji Junxiang
House of Many Ways - Diana Wynne Jones
The Waters of Babylon - John Arden
Ancient Skies - oino sakai
Attack of the Two-Headed Poetry Monster - Mark McLaughlin and Michael McCarty