Book TV & More

I watch Book TV.

There, I've admitted it. Book TV bores the pants off most people I know, but I still have a fondness for it. I like listening to some author talk about his book on the Nerve Center . It's interesting to get some of the story from the author's mouth. It's great when the author is Maya Angelou or Chinua Achebe. On January 18th & 19th Barack Obama (taped in 2004) will be featured on Book TV talking about his memoir "Dreams from My Father."


Another stack of cookbooks, and The Wine Bible.

The Wine Bible is mine, and the cookbooks are my S.O's. From this stack, He recommends Land of Plenty by Fuchsia Dunlop, The Middle Eastern cookbook, and any of Keith Floyd's cookbooks.
( Keith Floyd on chip pan fires.)

The Wine Bible is a fun and informative read.




Button Update: (Saw the movie Benjamin Button yesterday) Not much like the short story, but we gave it 4 stars.

When the movie began the teenagers sitting next to me were texting and giggling. They were pretty quiet about it though, so it wasn't very distracting. After fifteen minutes or so they appeared to be mesmerised and had put their cell phones away. At the end, one of them whispered "Wow."





We all enjoyed it a lot, and agreed that time itself was like a character in the film. And speaking of time, no one thought it was too long, which is usually a complaint when a movie runs over two and half hours. It didn't remind any of us of Forest Gump at all even though it is compared to Gump since it was created by the same screenwriter (Eric Roth) and there are a few superficial similarities ( A man's life story, southern accents, a mother who reminds her son that surprises in life are unavoidable. )
It was a very different story, though.

Julia Ormond helps narrate the story of Benjamin's life while sitting in a hospital in New Orleans. Outside, Hurricane Katrina is just getting started.

Cate Blanchette plays Daisy
( a wonderful young lady, later to go through a sort of diva phase, raving about sexual freedom and banned D.H. Lawrence novels to a very reserved Benjamin. Benjamin is not naive or innocent, but has a definite set of values.)

Benjamin is elegant from beginning to end, he's a gentleman even as a little old child sitting and reading Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe. Benjamin is a perceptive, soulful and serious person who is accepted by those around him, no matter what age he is or what he looks like.

Daisy and Benjamin first meet when they are both 7 years old. They read Kipling's Just So Stories together (a book that they'll return to a few more times as they age in opposite directions.) *Jared Harris as Mike, had a great style that reminded me a bit of the late Robert Shaw.

Impeccable art direction and casting, a great fantasy with interesting special effects. I've never been a fan of Brad Pitt until now. Elegance.



Eric Roth on how he felt about adapting an F. Scott Fitzgerald story:

"It was a little daunting because he’s 100 times the writer I could ever be. On the other hand, I did some research on sort of what the story was to him because I didn’t want in any way to mess with his legacy. The best I could tell from talking to his biographers of him is that this was kind of a whimsical piece for him. He just needed some money. It wasn’t something that he took deadly serious. He took the effort to write it up in a magazine. It wasn’t even a short story, it was a magazine article really. A number of other writers had tried to do this in various ways. They had all taken different approaches within the story itself. And so, I felt the freedom to take off with my own imagination. And what was left was still the most important thing, which was his idea through actually Mark Twain."

*Roth was thinking of Jack London's writing when he worked on the scenes that included Jared Harris as Mike.