B&N considering spinning off Nook

Posted on January 6, 2012 by Jenn

This sounds like a terrible idea:

Barnes & Noble’s Nook is selling exceptionally well, by the company’s reckoning. So the bookseller is considering spinning off the e-reader unit.

The company said on Thursday that it was beginning “strategic exploratory work” to separate the Nook division, in an effort to help the nascent business grow.

Dollar for dollar and pound for pound, the one advantage that the Nook line has over the Kindle is that many of its users can walk right into a Barnes and Noble store and get immediate help. I don’t know that many people do this, but the possibility of it must be a selling point, particularly for kids who want to buy some new technology for their less-computer savvy parents.

As a Nook owner, I’m already mildly nervous over the fate of Barnes and Noble as a bookseller (though the Nook can read a host of formats, so even a complete death of BN wouldn’t make it a bad e-Reader). If the Nook boutiques disappeared from the main stores, I’d be even more nervous — and much less likely to invest in future versions or to recommend the product to others.

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Please imagine Clair Huxtable watching “Keeping up with the Kardashians.”

Posted on January 5, 2012 by Jenn

Yep. That’s the brain fracture I want you to have. Here’s the quote for the day, from an article on the breakout performance of Condola Rashad, Phylicia Rashad’s daughter:

“She knows it’s the work that matters,” Phylicia Rashad said. “If not for the work, no one would be a celebrity, except for the Kardashians.”

So true. And so sad.

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New Year, new book: Madeline Dare #1

Posted on January 4, 2012 by Jenn

Yesterday, I saw A Field of Darkness recommended on Wormbook as a “creepy grown-up Nancy-Drew suspense novel.” It was on sale at Amazon (e-book) for $1.99, so I decided to try it.

I’m only 45 pages through the book, which involves a former down-state-New York society family girl investigating a twenty-year-old murder in upstate that might involve her family, and already I’ve gone through three stages:

  1. Uh, this is nothing like Nancy Drew. She was from California, wasn’t she? Or New York. I should know this. Anyway, not like Nancy Drew. Nancy Drew wasn’t in first person. Was it? And her father wasn’t an absentee hippie weirdo. Oh, Carson.

  2. There are SO MANY ADJECTIVES. Is that why it’s Drew-like?
  3. I wish Nancy Drew had grown up to think things like this:

    It was another genealogical trip on my part, to be honest. I mean, in addition to the Indian killers and the nuke-the-commies-back-to-the-Stone-Age types, we were prone to delusion. Dad’s whole elaborate deal with the KGB agents sneaking around his camper, that Winthrop guy his wife had to keep in a cage, my paternal grandmother’s predictions of snowballing disaster, always taglined, “and then you’ll get to the hospital and the anesthesia won’t work.”

People around me, please expect me to quote that anesthesia line a lot from now on. Back to reading.

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Review: Half Broke Horses by Jeannette Walls

Posted on December 24, 2011 by Jenn

Half Broke HorsesHalf Broke Horses by Jeannette Walls

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This follow-up to Jeannette Walls’s popular autobiography, The Glass Castle, moves backward in time and adopts a creative tack in telling the story of Walls’s grandmother, Lily Casey Smith. Walls begins with Lily’s childhood, working on a dusty ranch in west Texas — but that’s not the creative part. What’s interesting in the form of this book is that the entire story is told in the first person, from the view of Walls’s long-dead grandmother (hence the book’s dual classification by Walls as fiction and non-fiction).



The book follows the form of Walls’s earlier book, too, in that the chapters are often very short and seem to impart large lessons with small (but often thrilling) examples. Through a number of quick chapters, readers see Lily age from a plucky 10 year old with the wherewithal to save her siblings from a flash flood to a practical pre-teen in charge of all hiring on the family ranch. Lily progresses rapidly through boarding school, her first teaching jobs, her first time away from home, her first romance, and before a reader knows it, half the book is gone and an indelible image of Lily Casey has formed in your mind: tough-talking and living, rambunctious but never without purpose, wild but not free-spirited, selfish but somehow, also, always looking out for her family.



This book needs an introduction: namely, it needs the reader to have torn through The Glass Castle with interest and abandon. No, you don’t need to know everything that happens in that book to understand the story of this book — the people are introduced independently, and the story starts long before Jeannette Walls’s earlier autobiography — but you will need to have read The Glass Castle in order to understand the suspense the author embeds in the second half of the book. Once Lily’s children are introduced, the tension that exists between mother and daughter — Rose Mary Smith Walls — is much less interesting if the reader doesn’t understand that all of Lily’s fears about Rose Mary come true. In fact, if I hadn’t read The Glass Castle first, Lily might have seemed even crueler — and I’d be interested to hear if others had this reaction, or if it’s a trick of the light, so to speak. Does Lily’s abusive desperation to keep her daughter grounded seem even worse if you don’t know how spectacularly wrong Rose Mary’s life went? Is that the point?



Walls’s portrait is at once tender and rough. She paints her grandmother as a nearly merciless business woman and an often cold-hearted mother, but she goes to great lengths to show (and to understand) the roots of her distance. The final chapter — written by Walls in the voice of her grandmother about Walls as a baby — goes a long way to explaining what may have been the driving force for this project. How could a woman who Jeannette Walls had loved, feared, and been told by multiple sources that she resembled have been both such a force for good and bad? What made Lily Casey Smith tick?



The answer, or at least a version of the answer, lies here. It’s a quick, interesting read, as much an exercise in family history revelation as story-telling.



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Review: A Lesson in Secrets by Jacqueline Winspear (Maisie Dobbs #8)

Posted on December 23, 2011 by Jenn

A Lesson in Secrets (Maisie Dobbs, #8)A Lesson in Secrets by Jacqueline Winspear

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In the eighth entry in the Maisie Dobbs series, Maisie is drawn into the British Secret Service again as fascism begins to flash in Germany and even England. When she’s asked to take a position as a philosophy instructor at a controversial, peace-loving college in Cambridge, she runs into not only possible threats to the state but a murder — all in her first week.



The mystery mostly concerns the comings, goings, and politics of the professors at the College of St. Francis. Founded by Greville Liddicotte (yes, all the names are this rough this time), the college was founded on the idea that peaceful negotiation is always better than war. It’s facing an interesting challenge, as Nazism begins its rise in Germany and even England, and this makes for a fascinating philosophical background (if, at times, a very loose thread for the story to follow). When Liddicotte is murdered, his own motives for founding the school become as mysterious as the identity of the killer, and Maisie Dobbs is determined to sort it all out.



Behind all of this are the storylines continuing from the last two books: Maisie’s budding romance with Viscount James Compton; the challenges that Maisie’s assistent Billy Beale and his family face as a new baby comes to their overcrowded home; and a surprise visitor from her old service days who once again needs Maisie’s help and understanding.



It’s those last stories that make this book better than just average. The ongoing growth of Maisie’s character was actually a pleasant surprise, and the best tension, in this book. The mystery itself is secondary; the state secrets part of the story was woefully underdeveloped and seems to exist only to allow the author to show that Maisie is ahead of her time in worrying about Nazis and fascism. The suspense of whether Maisie will torpedo her own relationship or navigate the tightrope between well-meaning over-involvement with her assistant’s trouble and actually being helpful, however, is engaging. Not all of these loose ends are tied up completely at the end of the book, but the epilogue provides enough answers that I’m satisfied for a while.



It’s a sign of how much I enjoy this series that I put off reading this book for several months because I knew that once I read it, there were no more books in the series to read. Now, though, the #9 book has been announced for release in March 2012: Elegy for Eddie, here I come!



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Holy crap: Rudy Ruettiger Charged with Fraud

Posted on December 18, 2011 by Jenn

Rudy movie posterI did not see this ending coming:

The Securities and Exchange Commission today charged Daniel Ruettiger and 12 other participants in a scheme to deceive investors into buying stock in his sports drink company. Ruettiger is widely known for having inspired the 1993 motion picture “Rudy.”

According to the SEC’s complaint filed in federal court in Las Vegas, Ruettiger founded Rudy Nutrition to compete with Gatorade in the sports drink market. Rudy Nutrition produced and sold modest amounts of a sports drink called “Rudy” with the tagline “Dream Big! Never Quit!” However, the company primarily served as a vehicle for a pump-and-dump scheme that occurred in 2008 and generated more than $11 million in illicit profits.

I guess in my heart of hearts, I always figured something terrible happened to Rudy after that one awesome game, but I had hoped it was simply a life of traveling the inspirational speaking circuit, the crowds dwindling, the pay falling, until finally he’s talking to a group of five half-drunk Vet’s club members and competing with the low-volume ESPN behind the bar. I didn’t really think he’d go the corporate mess-up route, but hey. You just never know.

Maybe they can get Sean Astin for the sequel when Rudy leads the prison-yard touch football league in… no. (He’s actually already paid a fine, so this movie would be a complete fabrication).

Via Lazy Self-Indulgent Book Reviews.

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Stanley Tucci and Steve Buscemi, Together… At Last?

Posted on December 18, 2011 by Jenn

I’m fascinated and surprised to learn that Stanley Tucci and Steve Buscemi share a production company, Olive Productions. I don’t know why — it makes a certain amount of sense to see two dedicated character actors working together. Still, when I think Tucci, I think Devil Wears Prada or Julie and Julia (or creepy neighbor from The Lovely Bones); Buscemi’s most mainstream roles have been much, much crazier than Tucci’s (“Boardwalk Empire,” for example).

Anyway, you just never know what you’ll learn from the New York Times. Has anyone see “Vine Talk”? I think I’d enjoy a Stanley Tucci cooking-and-chatting show quite a bit.

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Better Christopher Hitchens obit: Ian McEwan on Hitch’s last days

Posted on December 17, 2011 by Jenn

The man died surrounded by books, talk of books, and love. Here’s a fitting tribute from a close friend (well worth a read just because, God, Ian McEwan. Must he nearly make me weep with everything he writes?):

Consider the mix. Constant pain, weak as a kitten, morphine dragging him down, then the tangle of Reformation theology and politics, Chesterton’s romantic, imagined England suffused with the kind of Catholicism that mediated his brush with fascism and his taste for paradox, which Christopher wanted to debunk. At intervals, Christopher’s head would droop, his eyes close, then with superhuman effort he would drag himself awake to type another line. His long memory served him well, for he didn’t have the usual books on hand for this kind of thing. When it’s available, read the review. His unworldly fluency never deserted him, his commitment was passionate, and he never deserted his trade. He was the consummate writer, the brilliant friend. In Walter Pater’s famous phrase, he burned “with this hard gem-like flame.” Right to the end.

And thus pales every excuse I have for not writing more, you know?

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Golden Globes Movie nominations list, with many uneducated guesses and wisecracks

Posted on December 16, 2011 by Jenn

The nominees (honored, I’m sure):

Picture, drama:

The Descendants **
The Help
Hugo *
The Ides of March
Moneyball *
War Horse **

Notes: I will be stunned if Hugo, which is a love letter about the power of film in a particularly foreign vein, doesn’t win this, but I suppose it’s possible it will divide votes with War Horse. Yet the lack of a nomination for Spielberg or any of his ensemble cast makes me think this is more of a rote nomination than an actual award. (Possibly not everyone has seen it yet?) The trailers do sometimes seem to be “just about a stupid horse,” as the kids behind us said at a recent movie, though Sherlock Holmes yelling “Be Brave!” does get me every time.

Picture, musical or comedy:

50/50
The Artist ***
Bridesmaids
Midnight in Paris
My Week with Marilyn

Notes: I’m seriously reconsidering how I spent my summer break, looking at this list. I blew off 50/50 despite thoroughly enjoying most of Joseph Gordon Levitt’s work (ahem, G.I. Joe). I missed Bridesmaids. Midnight in Paris, which is my unknowing prediction to win, has been on my to-do list for months, and we almost made it to a 7:00 show the other week before a need for dinner waylaid us. I have high hopes of seeing The Artist and My Week With Marilyn if either ever comes to town, though I’m surprised a bit to see the last one listed in the comedy/musical category. I’m not sure why. What else would it be? Also: WHERE ARE THE MUPPETS?

Actor, drama:

George Clooney, The Descendants

Leonardo DiCaprio, J. Edgar *

Michael Fassbender, Shame ***

Ryan Gosling, The Ides of March

Brad Pitt, Moneyball *

Notes: I’m not the only one who calls Shame “the Magneto sex movie,” right? DiCaprio was good as J. Edgar, but this seems like Fassbender’s award to lose, as the others all seem to be playing versions of themselves or at least of their expected characters.

Actress, drama:

Glenn Close, Albert Nobbs

Viola Davis, The Help
Rooney Mara, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo **

Meryl Streep, The Iron Lady **

Tilda Swinton, We Need to Talk About Kevin

Notes: I’ve seen none of these and I’m still reasonably certain that Tilda Swinton was the best. If Albert Nobbs had been in wider circulation, this might be Glenn Close’s year; I think Meryl Streep may have worn out her take-on-a-well-known-woman honors with Julie and Julia, which was great but not her best; I think The Help is too controversial (despite many accolades for Davis) and, likewise, Dragon isn’t very friendly viewing; so I’m still voting Swinton. I’ll probably be wrong. I’d cheer for anyone in this category. It’s nice to have many rich and different roles.

Director:

Woody Allen, Midnight in Paris
George Clooney, The Ides of March
Michel Hazanavicius, The Artist
Alexander Payne, The Descendants
Martin Scorsese, Hugo

Notes: Rather stark, isn’t it, the sudden dearth of women in the list? Hazanavicius for the win.

Actor, musical or comedy:

Jean Dujardin, The Artist

Brendan Gleeson, The Guard

Joseph Gordon-Levitt, 50/50
Ryan Gosling, Crazy, Stupid, Love

Owen Wilson, Midnight in Paris

Notes: Tumblr fans aside, I don’t think Ryan Gosling’s going to win because I don’t think anyone expected this to be the role he’d be nominated for. (Same question in drama noms: Drive?). If The Artist is even half as good — and half as dedicated to the craft and art of movies — as it seems, I bet Dujardin.

Actress, musical or comedy:

Jodie Foster, Carnage
Charlize Theron, Young Adult
Kristen Wiig, Bridesmaids
Michelle Williams, My Week With Marilyn

Kate Winslet, Carnage

Notes: I kind of assume this is Charlize Theron, only because Foster v. Winslet leaves no winner from a movie that probably will deserve both awards. I’d love to see Wiig win just for the statement of it — a real comedy getting a big award — but I don’t think this is the year.

Supporting actor:

Kenneth Branagh, My Week with Marilyn
Albert Brooks, Drive
Jonah Hill, Moneyball
Viggo Mortensen, A Dangerous Method
Christopher Plummer, Beginners

Notes: I hear Plummer is wonderful. I expect Mortensen is, too. It’s got to be between them — and it’s interesting that neither movie got any other nods in acting. I would have expected Knightley for Dangerous (or Fassbender) and MacGregor for Beginners (over Gosling for Ides of March).

Supporting actress:

Berenice Bejo, The Artist
Jessica Chastain, The Help
Janet McTeer, Albert Nobbs
Octavia Spencer, The Help
Shailene Woodley, The Descendants

Notes: Why can’t Jessica Chastain win all the things? (Why isn’t The Debt listed here?)

Foreign language:

The Flowers of War
In the Land of Blood and Honey
The Kid with a Bike
A Separation
The Skin I Live In

Notes: When in doubt, vote Almódovar: Skin.

Animated film:

The Adventures of Tintin
Arthur Christmas *
Cars 2
Puss in Boots*
Rango

Notes: Tintin. Though I still say Arthur Christmas was deliciously funny. James McAvoy! Hugh Laurie! C’mon. Also, I’d forgotten Rango was a movie this year.

Screenplay:

Woody Allen, Midnight in Paris

George Clooney, Grant Heslov, Beau Willimon, The Ides of March

Michel Hazanavicius, The Artist

Alexander Payne, Nat Faxon, Jim Rash, The Descendants

Steven Zaillian, Aaron Sorkin, Moneyball

Notes: My guess? Between Hazanavicius and Payne et al.

Original score:

Ludovic Bource, The Artist

Abel Korzeniowski, W.E.

Trent Reznor, Atticus Ross, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo
Howard Shore, Hugo

John Williams, War Horse

Notes: Wild guess: Reznor and Ross.

Original song:

“Hello Hello” (music by Elton John, lyrics by Bernie Taupin), Gnomeo & Juliet *
“The Keeper” (music and lyrics by Chris Cornell), Machine Gun Preacher
“Lay Your Head Down” (music by Brian Byrne, lyrics by Glenn Close), Albert Nobbs
“The Living Proof” (music by Mary J. Blige, Thomas Newman, Harvey Mason Jr., lyrics by Mary J. Blige, Harvey Mason Jr., Damon Thomas), The Help
“Masterpiece” (music and lyrics by Madonna, Julie Frost, Jimmy Harry), W.E.

Notes: So, I’ve seen Gnomeo & Juliet, and it’s not a score to write home about.

TV later.

* = saw this

** = will see this likely in the next two weeks

*** = still holding out hope this will come to a theater near me

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Review: Death Comes to Pemberley by P.D. James

Posted on December 14, 2011 by Jenn

Death Comes to PemberleyDeath Comes to Pemberley by P.D. James

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I have been looking forward to this book from the very moment I heard about it. P.D. James! Murder mystery set at Pemberley! A return to Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy! Woo! The trouble is (and there will be spoilers from this point on, so go away if you haven’t yet read the book but plan to), this book is enjoyable in exactly that order: It’s P.D. James; it’s a murder mystery; and after that, there’s Darcy and Elizabeth. Don’t worry, I’ll explain.

The plot of the book is this: While preparing for an annual ball, Elizabeth Darcy’s sister, Lydia Wickham, appears as a surprise, screaming that her husband, the villain of Pride and Prejudice, has been murdered in the woods. Darcy forms a search party, and they find that, no, Wickham isn’t dead — he’s just kneeling over the bloody, murdered corpse of his close friend, Captain Denny. From this point forward, no one — seriously, no one — in the family ever questions whether Wickham is guilty. That may not seem surprising until you realize they all, instantly, believe he’s innocent. The driving question becomes, then, Who killed Denny?

I think what I had expected from this book was for smart, capable Elizabeth Bennett to reappear and, perhaps, begin working out exactly what had happened, with the help of smart, capable, influential Darcy. Instead, and probably to its credit, the book takes a much more realistic path. Neither Elizabeth nor Darcy become private investigators. Elizabeth manages the household while Darcy recuses himself from magistrate duties and sets up a legal fund for Wickham. They both try not to wilt under the social pressure of having been associated with a murder and a murderer. Darcy goes, twice, to court. This is not the stuff of riveting social comedy, and it’s also not the stuff of action-packed mystery. In short, the middle 50 percent of the book is kind of dull — not helped by the fact that it often repeats itself.

The end moves more swiftly and provides many of the social twists and turns that Austen’s own novels often did, and it’s a satisfying ending. I did leave the book feeling wistful and full of want for more time to spend with Elizabeth and Darcy and their world, but the characters I was longing for weren’t, really, James’s extensions. I wanted the originals.

The book goes in and out of many, many different characters’ perspectives; sometimes it’s Elizabeth or Jane, sometimes it’s Darcy, sometimes — more often — it’s an invented character like the crochety overseeing magistrate or the old coachman at Pemberley. That’s a fine way to put together a typical mystery, introducing villains or bystanders without explanation so that the audience wonders how things will fit together. Here, it made me impatient. I wanted more of the people I knew and much, much less of everyone else. Beyond that, nearly every character is, at some point, asked to do a lot of heavy exposition lifting out loud. The book is filled, as well, with run-on sentences. I’ve read James’s work before, though not extensively, and I don’t remember this being a particular problem of hers; I suspect it’s supposed to be an imitation of Austen’s style. I don’t remember being lost in and by Austen’s syntax, though, and here, I am lost and exhausted frequently.

This is a harsh review, perhaps, for a book that’s actually meant very lightly. It’s fanfiction, and it’s not a bad sample of its kind. It completes exactly the path that I’d expect early fan fiction to take: James is eager, and indeed dedicates an entire chapter, to fix what she must have seen as flaws or loose ends in the original series. (She answers the question of how Lady Catherine found out about Darcy’s proposal very, very unsatisfactorily, I feel). She clearly cares about these characters and has spent a good deal of time considering the realities of their world instead of a romantic vision (they have only just installed indoor toilets at Pemberley, for instance).

I came away from this realizing again that the wonder of Austen’s masterpiece is that everyone has a different experience of it. Everyone draws slightly different lessons, and everyone experiences a slightly different world. Seeing someone else’s recreation of Pemberley wasn’t nearly as satisfying as I’d expected, even if it was mostly expertly done, because it did not align well with my own.



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