I'm actually going to miss my old place of work

One week left until I start my new job. They want me to come up with a budget before then which is bugging me. First, because I'm eager to please like that but second, because I'm still working elsewhere and I'm not being paid yet. So, we'll see. I'll come up with something but I'm not sure they understand how expensive reference books are.

And it's really muggy right now. I can deal with that though, it's the waiting that I can't stand.

I finished The Shape of Water and I think I've found a new series to enjoy. The writing was easy and the plot was different. The dead man died of natural causes but how he ended up where he was and the background shenanigans were the real mystery. There are cultural notes at the end which help with understanding Italian references.

I'm reading a number of things at the moment because when I get nervous or stressed I surround myself with books. Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller, The Widow Killer by Pavel Kohout, Six Geese A-Slaying by Donna Andrews and others. Donna Andrews Meg Langslow series is very funny. Meg is a blacksmith who lives in Virginia two hours south of D.C. and her family is what one might call 'wacky'. Each member brings their own brand of ridiculousness to the plot and she has to deal with extreme croquet and temperamental birds in order to solve the mystery of the day. For easy fun these books are great.

I've watched several movies as well. Infection, a Japanese horror movie about a dying hospital and a patient with a mysterious illness that begins to spread throughout the building. It's tense and the actors do a good job. The fully infected people are not shown because the directors of this movie understand that our minds are much better at the job of scaring us than make-up or CGI. The infection also seems to bring out the insecurities of the victims, making for some interesting self-reflection. Of course while they're reflecting about their weaknesses they are also often sticking themselves with dirty needles and such. The end had an interesting twist which then managed to subvert itself. The only thing I didn't get was why there were several shots of possessed swings.

Re-Cycle, a Chinese movie, had some amazing imagery. It started out as a typical Asian horror movie and ended up entirely elsewhere. An author is transported to a world where forgotten things end up and must find her way out with the help of a little girl. The settings are fantastical and dreamy and the people who inhabit them are bent and horrifying. The ending was bittersweet and then kind of confusing/scary. It was a journey movie, almost a fairytale. With zombies.

I saw John Carpenter's In the Mouth of Madness. That was all right. Disturbing, freaky, okay plot. A writer's fiction coming to life in an attempt to what? I wasn't quite sure of that. To be God? To destroy. Eh. This movie makes the mistake Infection didn't. It shows the ultimate horror allowing you to laugh a the '90s special effects. Oh well.

Mad Detective, a Chinese movie. A detective goes to a retired colleague for help on a case. This colleague seems to have the ability to see people's inner selves. This is somewhat marred by the fact that he is insane. The inner selves concept was fascinating (and confusing) to watch play out although in the end it didn't really go anywhere. The ending was a bit odd but the ride as a whole was satisfying.

And now I'm playing Resident Evil 4 on my wii. The dialogue says the village Leon goes to is "somewhere in Europe" but it's totally Spain. Right? The villagers speak Spanish. To my great amusement the infected villagers seemed to be just repeatedly saying "cabron" and "mierda" in the background. The woman droning "mierda" does appear to be cleaning out a cow shed so maybe she's just commenting on her work. Also, the village is apparently named "pueblo." The controls are a little iffy. Turning is not easy and you can't walk around with your knife out. I am enjoying shooting the crap out of anything that moves and exploring the village. We'll see where this goes.

I've had beer and now I'm having tea

They haven't sent me the terms of employment yet and I'm getting antsy.

Today was filled with annoying tourists and rooms of god awful, pink paintings. I hyperbolize; they're not horrible but they're not very good. They kind of look like something you might find on some wannabe artist's DeviantArt account. They look like concept art for a Super Mario Brothers game. In shades of pepto-bismal.

I finished Body Count by Martin. Finishing it felt kind of like eating a dessert I don't really like; at the end I feel a little ashamed to have spent time/calories on it that could have been put to better use elsewhere. The villain was not who I thought it was so I'm not smug but nor an I pleasantly surprised. She pulled The Dante Club trick; make the villain an extra, someone you would never have guessed simply because they were entirely unimportant to the story and had no real scenes. It's the way for less than clever authors to pull a fast one to wow less than clever readers. The authors can feel smart for keeping readers from following clues (mainly because there are none) and the readers can feel happy because they put no real effort into reading and are surprised by the "twist". This sort of thing works much better on film where and actor can work to show depth despite having few lines. Also, the thing that really bugged me is that Sophie's prowess as a hand-to-hand fighter is painstakingly shown in the beginning of the book but at the end it's like she's completely lost all that and all she can do is run, while hoping the big, bad man (with, as far as we can tell, no combat experience) doesn't find her. Ew. Seriously woman, if you want a strong female lead actually let her do her thing.

As a side note, I have just finished Herta Muller's The Passport. Muller won the Nobel prize for literature in 2009 and it caused a minor stir because few people outside Germany had heard of her. Well, my library now has a few of her books and I thought I'd give her a try. A German family in Romania is trying to get a passport to go to Berlin. That's it basically. Windisch wants to be honest about obtaining it and tries to bribe with flour but eventually has to send his daughter around to have sex with the officials.

Okay, I don't know what the hell kind of standards the Nobel prize committee has but it certainly doesn't include awarding this thing based on readability or an interesting story. Muller writes exactly the way countless generations are taught not to write, not because it hampers creativity but because it makes you sound like a retarded child. Half the sentences begin with "The". Each sentence contains one thought, one solid thing. Each description is broken down into its component parts, creating a disconnected picture, forcing you to carefully string everything together yourself in order to picture what's going on. It's tedious. Like Saramago's style, it makes reading artificially difficult for no good reason.

The dress was long. It was blue like the soft fuzzy stuff inside your jeans pockets. They nested in the dress. The dress billowed as she walked. She walked along the path. The path was a duck's sigh in the night.

Shit like that. The surrealism is less so and more like non-sequiturs. And she commits the cardinal sin of writing; if your characters aren't likable at least make them interesting. She does neither.

On the plus side I'm reading The Shape of Water by Andrea Camilleri and that's going pretty well. His main character, Inspector Montalbano, is kind of laid back, a little grumpy, and clever. And I, Claudius still pleases. That one is going to take a while though.

In a shocking turn of events somebody wants to employ me

So I've been offered the librarian job. The terms will be sent to me next week for my approval and I'm totally terrified. I'm a beta person at heart and while perfectly capable of assuming an alpha role I'd rather not do it my first professional job. However, the project is exciting and much closer to home. I need to come up with a budget and talk to other librarians, find someone to mentor me.

I'm reading Body Count by P.D. Martin, an entirely forgettable detective story featuring an Australian woman working for the FBI in Washington, DC. She has psychic visions and she and her friend Sam and her new FBI boyfriend Josh are trying to find the DC Slasher. The writing is competent, the author did her research on criminal profiling and forensics, the plot generally moves forward, and the characters are at least somewhat engaging. She lays everything to do with the subject of profiling out as it comes up in informative paragraphs without being distracting. There is nothing very challenging or inventive (she does all right on the killer though). This is light reading at its best (as far as rape, torture, and killing go anyway). Also, I totally know who the killer is. The clues are not particularly subtle, unless they're a misdirect. If I'm wrong I'll be pleasantly surprised. If I'm right I'll be smug.

I'm also reading I, Claudius by Robert Graves. I love history and he has created an engaging character to bring this story of Augustus, Livia and their pawns, family, pawns to life. Livia is a manipulative, cunning, mean-spirited, ambitious woman and Augustus is her perfect puppet. I've tried to create a crib sheet to keep track of the Claudian and Julian families but the lines are all over the place. Graves does a pretty good job of keeping everyone and their story lines separate though. Each chapter sets out sets out an intrigue or theme based around Claudius and his kin so that it occasionally jumps backward and forward in time a little so that other family members stories can catch up. I'm going to take my time with this one.

I watched Naked Lunch. Ohhh well. What to say. It is obviously not the book. That's not really possible; the characters would blend one into the other and half the screen time would be nothing but guys have sex. I mean, a lot of people would watch it of course but then it wouldn't have Ian Holm in it and I think we can mainly agree that that would be a shame.

It combines the Interzone country (a fictional place nowhere they've set in Northern Africa filled with drug cabals, agents, and bugs posing as typewriters (that last part wasn't in the book)) with parts of Burroughs' own life, such as the accidental shooting of his wife and the writing of Naked Lunch. His hallucinations seem to mesh well with reality anyway, allowing him to wander through his time in Interzone acting as an agent writing reports and his book. He also gives monologues consisting of passages from the novel. He gains a pretty boy lover named KiKi and there are even more bugs and parrots and the 'black meat'. Then it possibly starts all over again but I'm not sure.

Honestly I think this movie is for people who've read the book and know something about the author. Though if it makes even less sense maybe it's more intriguing? It was good. I'm rambling and tired.

Can not brain today, I have the dumb

Bah. I have to get up for work tomorrow at 5:30 and then leave early to go to an interview. It's a second interview where I get to sell my talents to the director in the hopes that I can somehow gain a regular salary. If that happens I'll actually have to work. Really, really hard. It's an exciting opportunity; I'd be creating a library and I already have a process in mind to do it but wow. From scratch. So yeah.

I'm getting ahead of myself. It's very possible that someone with more experience will get the position. The only thing I can offer (other than my massive intelligence, of course) is my energy and that I'm cheap.

Wait, that doesn't sound right.

So I've finished Night Train by Amis. I don't even know what to think about it. It's difficult to tell exactly what it was supposed to be. Was it a joke? A parody? Noir? It seemed to play the grit straight but it had this attempt at humor running through it and I couldn't tell if it was meant to overturn the street dirt feel or not.

If it was supposed to be a parody he should have set it in a culture he knew well enough to get right. Or made it less rancid. Describing a mindless quiz show the boyfriend is watching, "What do Americans think is America's favorite breakfast? Cereal!... Where do Americans think France is? In Canada!" Ha ha ha. Ha. Ha ha. We get it, Europeans think we're stupid. That's not actually a joke, that's just an insult.

If it was supposed to be noir he should have taken it a bit more seriously; not that noir can't have humor, but his tends to undermine rather than accompany.

The whole thing is very self-conscious. It's like he couldn't forget he was an Englishman trying to write an American story (complete with spelling). You get the distinct feeling of looking at the whole thing with the eyes of an outsider, of watching something foreign. Of the author's unconscious "Those foreigners and their funny ways of doing things" attitude. The slip-ups in dialogue and action become more apparent because of this disconnect between the author's attitude smeared over everything and the story. He uses the slur 'beaners' in reference to Italians, talks about the numerous mafia hits found in rental cars parked in airport lots in what seems to be the Pacific Northwest, and uses the qualifier 'American' in phrases where a native never would. "American juries...American judges..." "Paulie No speaks perfect American..." The main character leaps around from one theory of how and why the victim died to another with no evidence or any hint she should be looking in that direction and goes from speaking like a truck driver to a middle-aged Southern woman.

Put the whole thing together and you get an amateur crime story with bigoted overtones.

Thing is, despite all the (hilarious) badness you can see he's a good author when he isn't pretending to be something he's not. I'll have to try something else by him.

Boy, that was kind of fun. I should read incredibly stupid books more often. It was also interesting. I've read books by American authors set in foreign countries. I should read more books by authors who aren't American that are set in the U.S. just to see what I come across.

My favorites, part dos

I am reading fairly uncomplicated books right now in order to purge my brain of the odyssey that was The Redbreast. So I offer instead several of my starred books from my reading list.

The Alienist by Caleb Carr. This book takes place in late 19th century New York City and Carr does an excellent job of painting an engaging picture of the time and place. It's a psychological thriller; boy prostitutes are being murdered and the alienist, Laszlo Kreizler, joins up with a reporter and twin detectives in order to solve the case. Alienist was the old-fashioned term for psychiatrist. The detectives use new-fangled methods like fingerprints (which weren't accepted as evidence in the U.S. at the time), Kreizler works up a profile on their suspect and the reporter does his own investigating. It's an absorbing read with very evocative descriptions. I found the ending a little disappointing because their wasn't as much resolution to the case as I would have liked but overall it was worth the time.

His second book, Angel of Darkness, featuring the same characters wasn't nearly as good. The first person narrator is a young boy named Stevie, a character from the first book. When the reader's perspective is tied to that of a particular character, we see only what they see. Stevie is not allowed into the grown-up meetings so we spend a lot of time with him missing the first part of the conversation while he finds a way to eavesdrop. Then he's merely a watcher, he doesn't participate in the discussion which means we don't participate. Or he waits until someone comes and tells him what's going on. He does his own thing as well but mainly he is an observer and that's just not as exciting. A lot of the book is courtroom drama which sounds way more interesting than it is.

I would also recommend his Sherlock Holmes book, The Italian Secretary. It's a much shorter read but tightly plotted and well paced.

Two more crime authors I would recommend are Batya Gur and Arnaldur Indridason. Batya Gur wrote six novels featuring her Jerusalem detective Michael Ohayon. He has a very thoughtful approach to his work and there's a very gentle quality in her work. It's more about understanding people than just solving a crime. It's been a while since I read them but each case introduces him to some institution that makes investigation difficult and his people-oriented approach is necessary to get the information and trust he needs.

Arnaldur's work features an Icelandic detective named Detective Erlendur. He's a rather quiet, introspective detective as well but he's also older and more worn down by life. He has problems with his grown children that weave their way throughout the series as well. The crimes that he investigates have generally either taken place in the past or have a connection with something that happened long ago and the chapters set in the present are often interspersed with ones that take place in the past. Arnaldur is absolutely amazing when it comes to creating extremely intense scenes and situations. His works are overlayed with an almost mournful quality; an understanding that even when the murder is solved it won't make anything better, especially when the crime happened forty years in the past. I would tack on a trigger warning for these books however. They deal with heavy issues, rape, domestic abuse, and they describe them well.

My favorite reads tend to focus on character exploration and development as well as setting description and atmosphere. I also enjoy books with inventive or poetic prose. Anything with a truly dreamlike quality appeals to me as well. This isn't for everyone. Fortunately different people like different things which means there's all sorts of things out there. Life would be so boring if we all liked the same stuff.

I bought liquorice altoids today.

I have no idea who this man is but my grandmother must have known and liked him well enough to keep photos of him for sixty plus years.

Okay, now I want to talk about The Redbreast seriously because it consumed me for a week and I need to get it off my chest.

It's not a bad book. It's a perfectly decent thriller with lots of interconnecting parts and interesting history. I learned a side of WWII that I didn't know about. We didn't learn much about Norway's role in the war in school beyond the fact that it was occupied and the government and royal family fled to England. The whole background about the resistance movement and those who fought for the Germans and the trials and executions afterwards was fascinating. The book has this going for it. It should could have been a lot shorter but I acknowledge my lack of an attention span may play into that particular complaint, on this and other works of fiction. The characters are poorly developed and there isn't much in the way of setting description. That's probably my own preferences coming into play.

However.

The main character's leaps of logic and intuition are informed by authorial omniscience and the foreshadowing is as subtle as a brick. Characters who are supposed to be smart turn as dumb as a box of rocks so the author doesn't have to try very hard to bring certain events around. The Prince, a man who supplies guns to neo-nazis and is supposed to be competent and capable, uses the same phone for orders as he does for his girlfriends. And he leaves it turned on, sitting around. This is basic. If you're involved in illegal activities keep it separate from your personal life. The character that discovers what he's up to, after acknowledging that her life is in danger, leaves the safety of her home to walk to her boyfriend's apartment, picking up cigarettes along the way and then takes a deserted shortcut. This is dumb. To go for that extra cliche, she calls the main character before taking her leisurely stroll only to get his answering machine and instead of saying what she found, only leaves a cryptic message to the effect that she found something important.

While a lot made me roll my eyes there was one thing that greatly bothered me. Every woman in the book that had any impact on the story became a victim. Two were blackmailed into sex and the other two were murdered. This would be less disturbing if there was at least one female character that related to the plot in some way that was not reduced to victim status.

As I said, the book is interesting and I would read more of this author's work if his books weren't all around 500 pages long.

Now I'm reading Night Train by Martin Amis because...I'm not sure. He's supposed to be a good author and I wanted a quick read so I chose the shortest book by him on the shelf. Well, it's apparently his attempt at an American detective story with a modernist twist. I read the first paragraph (which reads like something aimed at 12 year olds) and decided to read the rest as though it's comedy. And it is funny. His American, female cop voice is horrible. The narrative is first person and it's so bad that it is hard to believe this wasn't written as a parody. His main character is the stereotypical American as imagined by a European who's only source of information is bad cop shows. There is moronic philosophical inner monologues on the nature of crime and gender roles, misuse of Yiddish words, weird grammatical constructions, misused speech patterns, and a heavy layer of the word 'fuck'. No matter what the relationship, job, or professional level of attainment, everyone curses a blue streak and uses the word 'ain't'. So this is going to be entertaining.

Okay wow this is going to be long and also The Redbreast spoilers!

Omphalos: The centre, heart, or hub of a place, organization, sphere of activity, etc. From the OED.

Here is a word we don't see often enough. Or really at all.

So, I finished reading Life in the Cul-de-Sac. An introspective work with very well-realized characters. By that I mean, they thought like real people and not like characters in a book. They were very human. The book is composed of a series of chapters, each centering on a family member in a little side street in suburban Tokyo. The households are at different stages in life but they are all experiencing a disintegration, a lack of omphalos. Each person drifts in their own world, brushing lightly against each other. This lends the moments of real connection more weight, while the characters own thoughts keep the perspective just a little unfocused. I find this rather true to life. we are all of us thinking not just of the present but of the past and future and of events that we want or fear will happen and never will. People experience the same thing differently because of the associations and preconceptions we carry with us. It's also an interesting look at a change perceived in modern Japanese life in the '80's. I have no idea how relevant it is today but it's a good read.

And now, on to The Redbreast by Jo Nesbo. I'm going to paste the long, long summary I wrote after finishing it. Everything is laid out including the ending. Just as a warning.

So! The book starts off with an assassination attempt during a presidential visit to Norway and our main character, Harry Hole, shoots the man with the Uzi in the back! But it turns out to be just a secret service agent. So Harry is promoted because nobody wants the public to know just how much both sides goofed up. He discovers someone in Norway recently bought a smuggled in super rifle and he guesses it must be for use in an assassination. Oh, and he has a partner named Ellen who, due to his promotion is no longer his partner but she’s still totally his BFF. And then we start having flashbacks to WWII and some Norwegians fighting the Russians. And we have to keep track of these people because one of them is the one who bought the rifle from the neo-nazi (there are neo-nazis in this but don’t worry they don’t actually have anything to do with the plot). He’s going to kill someone. In the present I mean.

So five guys are there but one gets shot in the head and another runs to the Russians and the others get hit by a grenade although they all survive. One of them, who's identity is hidden by pronouns, (it’s Gudbrand) ends up in an Austrian hospital and falls in love with a nurse who gets blackmailed into marrying a doctor. Anyhow, back to the present. Someone is going to die and Harry kind of acts like a dick though he’s usually just boring and he does a lot of investigating. He figures out that he’s looking for a Norwegian man who fought on the Eastern front in WWII and there were only those five from the flashback left. Well, four. Daniel the super awesome soldier dies because his liquor bottle reflected too much light and a sniper got him. And he spends not nearly enough time trying to track down the one elusive member, Gudbrand. Okay he spends no time trying to track down the one element that’s in the wind and therefore is most suspicious. Harry, not Daniel, Daniel’s dead. It’s important to remember that because the perspective of the old man who bought the gun is very close to Daniel as is the soldier who fell in love with the nurse in Austria, and Gudbrand was Daniel's bestest friend. So…the real question is not who it is but where he is. I don’t know if we’re supposed to know that though.

Harry talks to Juul, a resistance fighter, who knows a lot about these old men. Then he meets a girl! And she’s the daughter of the guy who went over to the Russians, Sindre Faulke! And they both take to each other immediately which gets rid of the pesky and tiring need for character exploration. Oh and an ex-soldier named Dale is killed but we don’t care because at that point we have no idea who the fuck he is. Oh no! Ellen has discovered that her new partner, Waller, who is a racist sexist pig, is the neo-nazi gun-smuggling connection in the super rifle case! She’s completely floored! But she understands her role in this and immediately does everything she can to get murdered horribly while not leaving any clues that could point to what happened. This is so unfortunate because she has fallen in love for the first time in her life and was really happy.

So Harry starts drinking. And Rakel, the girl he likes, is very nice to him and eventually he stops drinking and starts investigating Ellen’s case. But Waaler is ahead of them the crafty bastard. He goes to Olsen, the neo-nazi he got to kill Ellen, and kills him while making it look like a shoot-out. He’s so smart. See this could have been avoided if he didn’t have his skinhead clients calling him on his personal cell phone and ordering highly illegal weapons but the mistake was so easy to clean up why bother paying for two phones. It only took two bodies. Olsen is hard to feel sorry for since he’s a murdering asshole but it’s unfortunate for him because he was thinking of turning his life around and becoming an electrician.

Oh no! Some asshat named Brandhaug that we’ve occasionally had chapters based around has decided that he has to “have” Rakel! So he blackmails her and sends Harry to Sweden. That totally parallels the thing that happened with the nurse in Austria in 1944, complete with references to Daniel and Bathsheba! Then Brandhaug gets killed by the old man with the super rifle and it’s all good again. Harry comes back to investigate that and starts talking to the old soldiers again and eventually goes to Austria where he learns about Gudbrand and the nurse and how Gudbrand murdered the doctor before fleeing the country. So he is still alive and psychotic and conceivably out there somewhere! And now Juul the resistance fighter's wife, who had originally been the fiancée of Daniel the super soldier, is kidnapped and executed with the super rifle. Harry thinks Oh my God Juul has MPD and when they get there he’s committed suicide. Phew! So that’s over.

But what’s this? There’s a photograph of Rakel’s mom and it’s the Austrian nurse from 1944! And she was married to Fauke! Who is actually Gudbrand! He’s the one with multiple personality disorder! Good Fucking Hell you have got to be kidding me what is this shit. MPD I don’t even…Except it’s more like voices of dead people in his head and suddenly he’s an expert marksman like his dead soldier friend Daniel. So Harry takes way too long to read the memoirs Gudbrand left in his apartment which means we have to read them too and because Harry is a dick and kind of short sighted he dismisses Weber the forensics guy, who helped him verify the Gudbrand/Faulke connection, even though Weber offered to call in reinforcements. But Harry, being the smart cookie that he is, decides to take the gun he requested from Weber and sit in the apartment carefully reading the memoirs. But oh shit! Gudbrand is going to enact a last execution for what he saw as the great betrayal of the Norwegian Eastern front soldiers! He’s going to kill the previous crown prince’s son! Who I assume is an adult I don’t know much about the Norwegian royal family! And it’s on this exact day, May 17, Liberation day at the parade that’s taking place right now! Boy, it would have been useful to have colleagues standing by or maybe to have his cell phone. Wait, he does have his cell phone he just used it.

But there’s no time! So he hops in his crappy old Escort and floors it going down the wrong lane with his hand on the horn and he scrapes alongside a train and he’s swerving and skidding and there is a group of children in his way so he quickly goes up onto the grass and drives to Palace Square. He flashes his badge and finds his new partner but wait! Because of a dead tree there’s a direct line of sight from the SAS hotel to the balcony. He runs around screaming “Fuck! Fuck!” a number of times so you know this is serious business that only he can deal with and he gets to the hotel and gets to the room Gudbrand is in, brandishing his gun along the way. And the old man is there and he’s very sad and dying of cancer and Harry talks him out of shooting by using the name of Gudbrand’s grandson, Oleg. Later Gudbrand dies in the hospital from his illness but nobody outside the security department knows what almost happened. Harry’s boss tells him that they have to keep the incident hush-hush and Harry gets all cynical about politics and has me wondering what’s wrong with the knobhead and whether he wants all of Norway to know that his girlfriend’s dad is a crazy, murdering asshole. And then Harry and Rakel and Oleg live happily ever after. Until the next book I’m sure.

Remember, if you don't laugh at yourself, somebody else will do it for you

I just finished The Winter Queen. Holy fucking shit on a biscuit hell. So the ending was unexpected. That hard edge I said was running under the surface broke through at the end to rise off the page in an attempt to skewer the reader. It doesn't quite manage it because the romance is woefully underdeveloped but while that lessens the impact it doesn't entirely do away with it. It does make me want to get the next book out of the library to see what happens so well done, Akunin! Your ploy plot worked! It was a fun read, truly.

I finished watching a Korean vampire movie called Thirst. Woo the cinematography was quite stunning and the actors were impressive. A priest is infected with a vampire like virus when he volunteers as a test subject for a new vaccine. He tries to remain good in spite of his body's need for blood but finds it harder and harder as he also falls for and gets involved with an old friend's wife. Like Let the Right One in this movie gets back to vampire basics, showing them as parasites with an uncontrollable need. It could be disgusting at times and it really could have been edited down but there were a number of very intense and captivating scenes. I've got to check out some of this directors other stuff.

I'm also watching Antibodies, a German thriller. It's good although not great. The directing and acting are very nice but the story kind of meanders. Oh it has a specific purpose; the village cop wants to find out if the serial killer recently captured is the murderer of a local girl, but it sort of wanders away at points. It's also about this farmer/cop's own descent into darkness. The only problem I have is I don't understand where his problem is stemming from. Has he always had a dark side that just never came to his attention because there were no opportunities? Is the "big city" a corrupting influence? Is his own naivety working against him, leaving him unprepared to face and deal with real evil? I can understand that his eyes have been opened to new things and that the case has had an adverse effect on him. Plus the real killer is totally his son. I haven't even finished the movie yet and I can already tell you that. It's been obvious since the halfway point if not earlier. Well. I have like the way Michael (the cop) has dealt so far with the serial killer. He doesn't give much ground and only grudgingly. So it's a pretty decent movie.

Okay I just finished watching it. Okay, that was a nice twist. And hooray for the ending. The acting at the end was moving. My impressions would probably less disjointed if I actually watched movies through in one sitting but I get so antsy.

And I just finished watching Christian Bale in The Machinist. It was good at first and then it got really slow, and then it picked up and then it just became sort of disappointing. This guy hasn't slept in a year. Bale lost weight for the role and good God he looks unhealthy. He looks like a walking skeleton. And nobody attributes his abnormal behavior to this. Nor do I really understand the whole thing with the fish. Okay, maybe I do but it was very anticlimactic. The whole thing was. We start out watching him rolling a body into the water and it never delivers on that promise. Anyway, I suppose my response is, eh.

I don't think I have anything to say

Today was boring. Morning was cold, that cold that turns your hands red and makes them hurt (mainly because I was too optimistic or maybe stupid to wear gloves) and everything was wet. I don't even think I ever saw it rain but everything was damp when I went to work (before the sun rose) and everything was damp when I went home.

I read quite a bit more of Life in the Cul-de-Sac by Kuroi. An interesting examination of the lives of about four households and the problems they contain. I like it but I have to admit that some of the characters are really weird. One woman insists on moving into a shed on the corner of her family's property because her husband's parents will be coming to live with them. The parents are old and not very mobile and they'll build their own cottage but she acts like a child throwing a temper tantrum. Some of the motivations and actions don't make much sense to me and I can't tell if it's because the book is from another culture or if it would be weird in its home country as well. I'm still enjoying it though. The writing is good and the character studies are fun even if I do sometimes find them a bit odd.

Almost done with The Winter Queen by Akunin as well. This has been a fun book. Many twists and turns, intrigue and plots, good characters and it doesn't succumb to the temptation to become too serious and full of itself. Light reading and a new series to look forward to.

I am tired. On nights before I have to wake up early for work I wake up several times. It's as if my brain is not fully convinced that the alarm clock will do the trick. I woke up 3-4 times in a seven hour period last night. Well, hopefully I'll get a full night of uninterrupted sleep tonight.