Books, 2010

December 26, 2010February 15, 2011 / Jared / 2 Comments

There were quite a few books that I liked a lot this year, and I actually still have a stack that I haven’t gotten around to yet, including At Home by Bill Bryson, Salvation City by Sigred Nunez, and Bound by Antonya Nelson, that I suspect would have been nice additions to this list had I read them.

A few notes: This is, as always, not a list of the best books of the year, but of my favorites. Obviously I haven’t read enough of the books published this year for this list to be anything approaching authoritative. Also, the list only includes new books, although I believe two of them were published originally in 2009. But whatever, I didn’t stumble across them until the paperbacks came out this year, and it’s my list. Here we go:

8 ) Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins

I swear, when I first heard about the Hunger Games trilogy, all I knew about it was that it was a series of young adult novels aimed primarily at girls, and I thought it had something to do with eating disorders. I’m not even kidding. It turns out I was wrong.

My wife read these all at once when the third volume was released in August and enjoyed them enough to encourage me to give them a chance when I felt like reading something a bit escapist, assuming novels set in a future dystopia can be used as an escape. I really enjoyed the first novel, The Hunger Games, but hesitated about continuing the series; it seemed like the aspects of the first book that made it thrilling and hard to put down would be difficult to replicate. Those of you who have read it will likely know what I mean. The story did lose a bit of momentum in the second book, Catching Fire, but things pick up again nicely in Mockingjay.

The books are of course being adapted into movies, supposedly with a PG-13 rating. If the movies hew closely to the books, that will be a pretty hard PG-13. This story is almost surprisingly violent at times and relatively dark throughout.

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Polls, Best of the Decade, 2000-2009

February 12, 2010April 8, 2010 / Jared / 1 Comment

So, now that I’ve figured out how to use polls, I thought it might be fun to post a poll for each of my categories thus far. To keep them from being too unwieldy, I’ve only included my top ten as choices, but if you think one of my other choices (or something completely different) is the best of the decade, there is a write-in option. Feel free to finally voice publicly your disagreement with me!




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Characters, 2000-2009

February 7, 2010January 30, 2011 / Jared / 4 Comments

This is sort of a vague list. I’m not really sure what the qualifications were. And it seems wrong that 19 of my 25 favorite characters of the decade are from television shows. I obviously need to read more. But, for whatever reason, these are the ones that really stuck with me. Here are my 25 favorite characters of the decade:

25) Borat Sagdiyev (Da Ali G Show)

Frat guys turned Borat into this decade’s Austin Powers, and no one is really clamoring for Borat II at this point. But the character is brilliantly conceived and led Sacha Baron Cohen into comedic territory that he never could have reached as Ali G.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NvQScRuZj9s

24) Brian Griffin (Family Guy)

Even I am sitting here thinking this is a strange, possibly unworthy, choice for this list. But I can’t stop laughing when they have Brian actually, you know, behave like a dog. Like when he is afraid of the vacuum cleaner, or uncontrollably wags his tail. A rare talking animal character that still, albeit rarely, acts like an animal.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3PMk4p-LYvI

23) Coach Eric Taylor (Friday Night Lights)

This character’s appeal is helped quite a bit by his relationship with his wife, but he’s on the list alone because he does just fine in the football scenes without her. Friday Night Lights seems to have learned from the mistakes of past shows (I’m thinking specifically of The O.C.): when you have a married couple that serves as a solid foundation upon which to build everything else, do not screw with it.

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Books, 2000-2009

January 8, 2010September 19, 2010 / Jared / 3 Comments

This list is sort of paradoxical, in that I don’t feel at all qualified to write it, considering how many great books I haven’t read this decade. At the same time, I feel extremely passionate about my choices near the top here, even more so than in my other lists. Here it is, completely subjective, and knowingly ignorant, the list of my thirty favorite books of the decade (as a side note, I’m still unsure about the legality of taking photos from other places on the internet for these entries, so I’ve elaborately staged my copies of these books for photos; this was fun for me, because I got to think about how to stage them, and fun for Johanna, because she got to laugh at me every time she walked into a room and caught me staging a photo of a book):

30) The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz (2007)

I expected to like this book more. It seemed to have everything I usually love in novels, and received overwhelmingly great reviews. I ended up feeling a little bit disappointed; it didn’t totally click with me. It reminds me a bit of Everything is Illuminated: a relatively unknown author, interwoven storylines with different settings and time-periods, a main character with an unorthodox way of speaking, an underwhelming movie adaptation (the Oscar Wao movie isn’t out yet, so I’m just guessing). There are actually almost certainly other books that I enjoyed more than this one from this decade, but like the next entry, the list would have felt odd if I had excluded it. It sits on my bookshelf next to Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem in the “Disappointing books about comic book nerds that I should probably give a second chance” section.

29) The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown (2003)

Obviously this doesn’t make the list on merit alone. The writing is pretty excruciating at times; I remember being particularly taken aback by the part where Langdon is teaching some inmates about the Mona Lisa:

“I heard he was a fag,” said a small man with a goatee.

Langdon winced. “Historians don’t generally put it quite that way, but yes, Da Vinci, was a homosexual.”

“Is that why he was into that whole feminine thing?”

Actually, Da Vinci was in tune with the balance between male and female. He believed that a human soul could not be enlightened unless it had both male and female elements.”

“You mean like chicks with dicks?” someone called.

This elicited a hearty round of laughs. Langdon considered offering an etymological sidebar about the word hermaphrodite and its ties to Hermes and Aphrodite, but something told him it would be lost on this crowd.

“Hey, Mr. Langford,” a muscle-bound man said. “Is it true that the Mona Lisa is a picture of Da Vinci in drag? I heard that was true.”

[skipping down a bit…]

“You sure that’s not some Harvard bullshit way of saying Mona Lisa is one ugly chick.”

[a bit more…]

“Has anyone heard of an Egyptian god named Amon?”

“Hell yes!” the big guy said. “God of masculine fertility!”

Langdon was stunned.

“It says so on every box of Amon condoms.”

Yikes, Mr. Brown. As a reader, I’m insulted, and sort of offended. I love the fact that he goes out of his way to make the prisoners seems like the world’s biggest lummoxes, yet they’re still engaged enough in Langdon’s lecture to participate, and even seem to spend their time in the yard discussing whether the Mona Lisa is actually a drag self-portrait of Leonardo. I enjoy picturing someone checking this book out from the prison library and then shaking their head in disbelief as they read this chapter.

Anyway, the book is still here at number 29 because when I stop to think of the books from this decade that almost everyone I know is at least aware of, it’s basically this and Harry Potter. And that should count for something. Plus, it’s fast-paced, fun, and considerably better than most of its ilk.

The real Dan Brown mystery is why it took him so long to capitalize on this book’s success. He took six and a half years to release The Lost Symbol, which has, predictably, sold like hotcakes, but no one cares as far as I can tell.

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