Room (The Book Trailer)

Because this was an evening of Little League baseball, I'm running very late on posting today.  (My grandson's All Star team was eliminated tonight, 14-13, but my younger grandson is just starting summer league, so this will go on for a while longer - and I love it.)

What I want to share tonight is this book trailer for Room by Emma Donoghue.  This is a book I know absolutely nothing about except for what I learned from the trailer today - and now I can't wait to get my hands on a copy.  This proves to me just how effective a book trailer can be when done properly.  There's nothing fancy about this one, for instance, but that little voice really makes it memorable.

Take a look:



If any of you have read the book, I'd love to hear your thoughts - about the book and the trailer.

Called Out of Darkness: A Spiritual Confession

Anne Rice seemed to come out of nowhere in 1976 when she struck publishing gold with Interview with the Vampire, the novel that opened the door for the countless vampire novels and movies that have followed it.  Rice had been published before under the name Anne Rampling, and had even published some erotica as A.N. Roquelaure, but with the help of Vampire Lestat, she became a star in the publishing world.  Her huge success with the first novel would lead to some fifteen novels on vampires and witches.

By the time Rice wrote Interview with the Vampire, she had lost her faith in Catholicism and was an atheist.  Anne Rice was, in fact, an atheist for 38 years of her life despite the unusually strong ties she and her family have with the Catholic Church.  It was only in the late nineties that she felt that her “faith in atheism was cracking,” and that she needed to return to her Christianity.  Rice’s conversion did not take place in some magical flash of insight, or even in a matter of days or weeks.  It was a gradual process, and as she puts it, “It wasn’t until the summer of 2002 that my commitment to Jesus Christ became complete.”

Called Out of Darkness: A Spiritual Confession is Anne Rice’s story.  It begins with her upbringing in New Orleans deep in the heart of a neighborhood in which everyone she knew or ran across was Catholic.  Rice was so dedicated to a religious life that, as a young girl, she decided that she wanted to be a Catholic priest.  She attended Catholic schools, went to church several times a week, and was so ready to spend her life in the service of the Church that she did not even consider settling for a position as a nun - and was shocked to learn that spending her life as a Catholic priest would be impossible.

Rice would finally be exposed to a wider world when she moved to Denton, Texas, to study at Texas Woman’s University.  There Rice found herself surrounded by students who had a much better sense of contemporary literature and who discussed topics that had never concerned her.  She would begin to lose her faith almost immediately, but it was a well-meaning Catholic priest who, upon learning of her childhood background, pushed her over the edge toward atheism by strongly advising her that she could “never be happy outside the Catholic Church.  You’ll find nothing but misery outside the Catholic Church.  For a Catholic like you, there is no life outside the Catholic Church.”  Something in the 18-year old student revolted at those words, and “when she left the room,” Anne Rice was no longer a Catholic – nor would she be for the next 38 years.

Called Out of Darkness is a remarkable memoir, one in which its author shares the intimate details of her upbringing, including the tragedy of her alcoholic mother, her tremendous problems with learning to read effectively, her marriage, the death of her young daughter and her husband, and her deep relationship with the city of New Orleans and its architecture. 

Anne Rice has lived a fascinating life, one of which most of her longtime fans have only been vaguely aware up to now.  This memoir explains her rather jarring transition, one that startled her readers, from writing novels about vampires and witches to writing fiction dedicated to telling the story of Christianity (Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt, Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana and Angel Time: The Song of the Seraphim, Book 1).  Anne Rice fans will find this memoir particularly interesting, but her story is so unusual that even those who have not read her novels will be fascinated by what she has to say.

Rated at: 4.0

My iPad and Alice Ozma's The Reading Promise

I made my usual Sunday morning stop at one of the Barnes & Noble stores in my area - I generally alternate between two B&Ns because I live pretty much equidistance between the two.  I looked all over the store for a book I remembered seeing a week or so ago in an email I received from B&N but could not remember the author or title of the book.  I remembered the cover in a vague sort of way and did know that it was nonfiction and what it was about.  I couldn't find it anywhere, however, and after finishing my other weekly book shopping, I chose a lucky salesclerk to ask for help.  (I felt a bit sorry for her since I could give her nothing firm to go on.)

We retraced some of my previous steps around the store before the woman noticed I was carrying my iPad under my right arm.  She suggested that I log onto the Barnes & Noble website to do a "key word search" for the book.  Sure enough, I typed in the words father daughter read and the number one choice was the book I wanted to find.  A quick double-click on the book icon gave us its ISBN number, after which we plugged that number into a B&N store computer to find its location in the store: the Biography section.

The clerk got to talking about reading e-books on the iPad since she owns one and her husband reads them from a Kindle.  She got a big kick out of finding the book with "Apple's help," a first for her, she said.  She will, of course, remain anonymous despite her extra effort to help me because she did not at all mind admitting that she is not a fan of the B&N Nook, much preferring the other two readers.

Now, let me tell you a little about this "hard-to-find" book.  It's a memoir (so why did I fail to look in the bio section?)  called The Reading Promise.  It was written by Alice Ozma, a young woman whose father read aloud to her every single night of her life from the time she was in the fourth grade until she left for college.  The original challenge was to make it through 100 consecutive nights; the reality was that they made it through 3,218 nightly readings.  I have to find out how they managed this seemingly impossible feat.

I'm going to cheat a little and start The Reading Promise relatively high up in my TBR stack instead of placing it at the very bottom where new books normally go - keep your fingers crossed that I'm not building my expectations up so high that no book could live up to them (a bad habit of mine).

Literary Movies and Other Movies Meant for an Adult Audience

Let me begin by saying that this is not a Netflix commercial.


But have you noticed how wonderful Netflix is if you are into "small movies," the type of movies whose main characters are not into fart and barf jokes (and all the other repulsive and simpleton film jokes that pass as humor these days)?  You know...movies made by adults for an adult audience over the age of 29.

I offer as a perfect example a movie that I watched beginning at 5:30 this morning when my eyes suddenly popped open and refused to close again even if it is Saturday.  Based on what I've been watching on Netflix for the past few months, the service suggested that I would enjoy a movie called Starting Out in the Evening, starring Frank Langella, Lauren Ambrose and Lili Taylor.

Now, Netflix is not always correct in its assumptions of what I will enjoy, but it nailed it this time.  This is the official movie description, as copied from Netflix:

Starting Out in the Evening
2007 PG-13 110 minutes
With aims to revive the faded career of aging author Leonard Schiller (Frank Langella), enterprising graduate student Heather Wolfe (Lauren Ambrose) makes his novels the topic of her master's thesis and raises his hopes for a literary comeback. All the while, Leonard's middle-aged daughter (Lili Taylor) remains dubious -- both of Heather's motivations and her own prospects for long-term happiness.


Cast:Frank Langella, Lauren Ambrose, Lili Taylor, Joel West, Jessica Hecht, Adrian Lester, Sean T. Krishnan Director:Andrew Wagner Genres:Independent, Indie Dramas, Dramas Based on Contemporary Literature, Dramas Based on the Book This movie is:Emotional, Heartfelt, Sentimental, Understated

Can you believe it? A literary movie...who knew they still made these things?  So tell me, guys, what else have I been missing?  Frankly, I have been so fed up with Hollywood for at least the past 15 years that I have paid very little attention to what's coming out of that hotbed of sensationalism and immaturity.  But (and I promise that this is not meant as a free commercial), I have seen some really great foreign films, art house films, and other "small" movies since I signed up to Netflix a few months ago.  Any suggestions?

What Is That Woman's Face Doing on My Book Jacket?

Caroline Leavitt

Think about it, fellow book bloggers and book lovers.

I have to believe that almost every one of us has dreamed, to one degree or another (realistically, or not), how cool it would be to see the our name on the cover of one of those books we have on our shelves.  What is not to like about being a published author, after all?  Well, one published author with eight books under her belt wants you to know that it feels much better when the publisher does not put someone else's picture on the back flap instead of yours.

As Caroline Leavitt says over at Salon.com, the fun started when she received a few copies of the Chinese version of her latest novel.  She loved everything about the book, even wishing she could read the Chinese translation, until her husband alerted her to the "author picture" on the book's back flap.

Not Caroline Leavitt

There, on my book, over my name in English, is a big color photograph of a complete and absolute stranger. The woman in the photograph is beautiful. She has straight, shortish hair where mine is curly and long, She wears glasses where I do not. She's beaming where I always try to look mysterious in my photos. The only thing we have in common is we're both women and both white.

[...]

...the mystery is solved. I know it could have been worse. What if the edition had been in America, where I know people and they know me? No one in China will ever know it's a mistake. And I tell myself an author photo is just window dressing. What matters is my novel, my writing -- that's what's important, isn't it?

To find out who the mysterious stranger is, how her picture ended up on the book jacket, and how her identity was discovered, please read the whole Salon article.  You'll get a kick out of the "other woman's" reaction.

Spycatcher: A Novel

Spycatcher: A Novel is very different from what I expected it to be.  This modern day spy thriller was written by Matthew Dunn, himself a veteran of Britain’s MI6, so I expected that the novel would be more realistic than most others of this genre.  I was only partially right in that assumption.  Dunn’s rendering of the relationship between the various intelligence agencies (American and British, primarily) and the way that complicated missions are so precisely coordinated rings true for the most part.  Realism, however, does not appear to have been Dunn’s chief objective for Spycatcher.

MI6 agent Will Cochrane is more superhero than human being.  This man apparently heals faster, and is able to tolerate more pain, than anyone else on the face of the Earth.  Within hours of taking three bullets to the stomach (and resigning himself to fact of his impending death), Cochrane is traveling back to the U.K. on a new mission for the American and British governments.  This new mission will take its own physical toll on Cochrane but he will again walk away from injuries (and tolerate unbearable levels of pain) that would kill, or at least disable anyone else for days, if not for weeks.

Surprisingly, however, this combination of realism and traditional James Bond style heroism works pretty well.  Cochrane is charged with capturing an Iranian terrorist before the man can trigger a major event in either the U.K. or the United States.  He does not know the terrorist’s name, his whereabouts, or any specifics of the man’s plan; he does not even know in which of two countries the attack will occur.  Watching Cochrane pull together a team to track down the terrorist is fascinating because the man they are trying to find is every bit as clever as anyone on the team searching for him.  The search, in fact, becomes a game of cat and mouse in which the roles of the two men are sometimes reversed as the terrorist begins to manipulate Cochrane’s efforts to locate him.

I enjoyed Spycatcher largely because Cochrane has more personal depth than a James Bond type character.  He is a man filled with personal conflicts that go back to his childhood and early teen years, years during which both his parents were shockingly snatched from him.  Now, he is dedicated to protecting those unable to protect themselves, leaving him no time for personal relationships.  His job with MI6 is his whole world.

My only complaint about the novel concerns its climax – a complaint that I will not attempt to detail because, to do so, would require me to spoil the ending for those who have not yet read the book.  I will simply say that a key decision made by one of the book’s main characters at the very end is so farfetched that it taints my overall impression of the book.  I am willing to suspend my disbelief in order to enjoy all the thriller aspects of Spycatcher, but this one scene is just too much to overlook.

That said, if you enjoy spy thrillers, and are looking for a new author and a new superspy, Spycatcher is for you.

Rated at: 3.5

(Review Copy provided by Publisher)