retsuko | Mad Diving Bell, Sorcery & Looking Glass

Dear Universe:

Please let there be more movies with Queen Latifah in them. She is made of awesome and funny and instantly improves any picture she appears in. "Mad Money", while not particularly deep or meaningful, was rendered a million times more interesting and entertaining because of her presence. I didn't go in expecting much in the way of cerebral, but then there was a joke about a lack of jobs for comp. lit. majors, and I felt entirely better. In summary, thank you for a funny movie, and the more Queen Latifah, the better!

Sincerely,
A Happy Movie-Goer

In the book recs department,

After seeing "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" as a film, I felt strongly that I should seek out the book this man blinked out to his speech therapist. The fact that anyone could escape a mental/physical prison like the one he was trapped in is something truly amazing and when I read about the way he had to complete the book, I shuddered at the realization of the simply luxury I have to go back and change a word in the text I'm writing whenever I feel like it:

"In my head I churn over every sentence ten times, delete a word, add an adjective, and learn my text by heart, paragraph by paragraph." (6)

Having seen the movie, it was easy for me to imagine blinking out a word to someone with my one good eye, but the actual act still frightens me to think about. The movie is largely faithful to the book, although it chooses to emphasize certain elements over others, the logic for which is fairly clear. The book is short and flows quickly; I read the entire volume in one go on the train to L.A.. Then, I sat back and watched the sea, the tracks, the buildings, and the people fly by me and I thought how incredibly lucky I was to be able to be on that train of my own volition and to have my manuscript at the ready, my favorite ink pens within reach, and to be able to reach them.

"...Claude is reading out the pages we have patiently extracted from the void every afternoon for the last two months. Some pages I am pleased to see again. Others are disappointing. Do they add up to a book? As I listen to Claude, I study her dark hair, her very pale cheeks, which sun and wind have scarcely touched with pink, the long bluish veins on her hands, and the articles scattered about the room. I will put them in my mind's scrapbook as reminders of a summer of hard work." (131)

In summary: highly worth reading, and highly readable. Read it to remember how much you have, simply being able to move around from day to day.

And, something completely different, but very entertaining in its own way: Sorcery & Cecelia, a Christmas gift from

orichalcum, which turned out to be a sweet little bit of fluff that was a welcome diversion from the dour turn of events lately. I liked the "Jane Austen meets Magic" vibe, and the fannish part of me secretly longs for a Jonathan Strange crossover, although the time periods are somewhat incongruous. I also loved the fact that the two authors had written the novel to each other as IC letters, exchanged over a period of several months. Highly worth reading when it seems like other books are simply too heavy to deal with.

And, finally, for Reading Group next Wednesday, The Looking Glass Wars is a book that takes the traditional Alice in Wonderland story and flips it on its head in order to tell a more adult and dystopian version of the tale that has more in common with Orwell and Dickens than with Lewis Carroll. 7-year-old Alyss Heart is the heir to throne when her villainous, jealous Aunt Redd attacks the palace and murders Alyss's mother; in order to escape execution herself, Alyss and Hatter Madigan, her bodyguard, dive through the Pool of Tears and find themselves separated and lost in Victorian Europe. Alyss survives on the streets of London until she is arrested stealing food and eventually adopted by the kindly Liddells, who are bemused and disturbed by the scary stories Alyss tells of the other world the she came from. You can probably guess where this is going, but even where there were times when I guessed where the narrative was headed, there were enough twists on the original story that I didn't mind in the slightest. All in all, very enjoyable, but only for the more mature young adult, as there were some rather violent and gory scenes.