family carnage

The Descendants

01.02.2012 screen

My holiday movie marathon continues. I’ve had some varied experiences: a remake of a foreign thriller, a British period-piece/crime fighting buddy movie, and now, an Oscar front-running drama with a famous American actor. I won’t rank them or compare them, that wouldn’t be right. Okay, maybe I will. Suffice it to say, I’ve really enjoyed [...]

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Summer in Genoa

10.30.2011 screen

My wife says to me, “I record everything with Colin Firth in it.” That’s cool, I guess. She’s in charge of the DVR, what could I do? There are two striking moments early in this movie. One is in the opening scene, which struck me as one of the most horrifying and gut-wrenching death scenes [...]

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A Clash Of Kings

10.15.2011 books
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I’m hammering through this Game of Thrones quintuplet thing. It’s good stuff and I think I’ll stick with it, but I’ve had my fill for this year. After book one I was really anticipating this book. But my anticipation for the next book has waned a little. I kind of got stuck at times during [...]

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The Sportswriter

08.08.2011 books
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Up until this point, I haven’t read any so-called literature this year. When I say lit, I’m not necessarily talking about the classics or anything. I’m just talking about fiction that is a little more serious and thoughtful than my normal crime and thriller reading. Page through the stuff I’ve called lit and you’ll get [...]

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The Emperor of Ocean Park

11.24.2010 books

Stephen Carter has been on my radar ever since I read a review of New England White a few years ago; it sat on my Amazon wish list for a while mostly as a placeholder for Carter. So a few weeks ago I was looking for some new fiction (to me at least) and I [...]

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The Given Day

04.24.2009 books

Reading huge, epic novels has always been complicated for me. The best time to read them is on vacation, but hauling a huge book through airports and rental cars, along with other reading, is cumbersome. But not anymore now that I have a Kindle. I was out of town getting some R&R and the cumbersome [...]

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The Paperboy

04.03.2009 books

I’m not sure how I came about this book. I think my wife, Gail, picked it up at a library book sale knowing that I had already enjoyed Train. She may have remembered that Dexter was famous for his book Paris Trout. Or maybe she just knows me. I don’t think she’s read any books [...]

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The Pearl

07.08.2007 books

This was quite an emotional rollercoaster packed into a small book. Steinbeck crammed a lot of life into a mere 118 pages. I came across this book when I was at home a few weekends ago. The Pearl, in tattered old paperback form, was sitting on the family room coffee table. My mom was reading [...]

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Where Angels Fear to Tread

04.21.2007 books

In case you haven’t noticed, I’ve been consuming a lot of popular fiction so far this year. For balance, I grabbed some literature before heading out on vacation. This E.M. Forster fellow spins a good yarn and it made for some great vacation reading. Forster wrote Howard’s End, which I didn’t read, but I saw [...]

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American Pastoral

08.02.2006 books

I remember the day I purchased this book. I told the clerk at Borders, “I don’t need a bag,” and I just let the receipt hang out of the top so the security guard at the North Avenue store didn’t suspect me of thievery. I mean, when you have the “Winner of the Pulitzer Prize” [...]

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Washington Square

04.07.2006 books

I’ve had this book sitting in a stack of stuff to read for years now. I think I purchased it about three years ago, probably after seeing one of those Merchant/Ivory movies or something. I’ve never read anything by Henry James but I always see his novels in the racks of classic lit at the [...]

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Train

02.23.2006 books

I saw the movie Short Cuts about a decade ago. It was the first time I recall seeing a movie in that style…the ensemble cast, the handful of stories that were either implicitly or explicitly connected, the mixture of humor and sadness, sorrow and joy. Because of Short Cuts, I rented Grand Canyon, which is [...]

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