Oh boy, oh boy! It's the first of a new series of posts on my blog, a chronicle of the books I've read and the movies I've watched as the year progresses. It's also a new way for me to flex some writer's muscles. I've been wanting to write more, about more varied subjects, on my blog but I wasn't so sure about the venue.
I'm going to hide them under a jump, so you don't have to slog through too much writing if you're just here for the pretty pictures. If you want to read on, please do!
More Baths, Less Talking by Nick Hornby
British author Nick Hornby’s column about reading for the Believer, compiled into a book. Each month Hornby starts the column with the books he bought and the books he read, then gets into his reads with hilarious detail. A quick and inspiring read for anyone who wants to read more (I’ve added quite a few of his selections to my own list) and perfectly poignant for my fifty/fifty goal!
The Round House by Louise Erdrich
Winner of the National Book Award, 2012
A more difficult read than most of Erdrich’s previous books for me but totally rewarding. Told by Joe, a Native American teenager living on a fictional North Dakota Ojibwe reservation (where Erdrich sets most of her novels), the Round House is a coming of age story of sorts as Joe struggles with finding both justice and reason for the violent rape of his mother. I always love how Louise Erdrich weaves the real-life struggles of Native Americans living on reservations with the mystical and this book is no different a we quickly learn that the crime was committed on the scared ground of the Round House. The Round House, created when Indians were not allowed to practice their religion is something of a no man’s land for the American Court system, regulated only by the tribe, so the moral question of the book is how does the criminal get prosecuted? Through the court system or by vigalantism?
I’m used to Erdrich’s books telling a story for the perpective of multiple narrators, a device that I’m partial to in general in my novel-reading so that's my minor criticism. Otherwise it is an amazing, arresting tale.
I Remember Nothing by Nora Ephron
If I’m going to get through fifty books in a year, there are going to have to be a few more "I Remember Nothings" to balance out the "Round Houses".
This book of short essays by Nora Ephron is a great quick read: funny, insightful, fluffy but not drivel. My favorite essay is “Journalism, a Love Story”, Ephron’s memories of her early days as a journalist and the institutionalized sexism in her field in the '60s. At her first job, a Newsweek, women are never hired as journalists. Instead, their highest position is “researcher”, the person charged with filling in the “tk” (journalists’ shorthand for “to come”) in a sentence like: “There are tk light bulbs in the chandelier in the chamber of the House of Representatives.” Like so many of us, Ephron moved to NY with a dream that doesn't end up exactly the way she'd imagined.
Watched:
I started the year off right with two depressing stories, as far from each other possible: one a melodramatic musical blockbuster and the other a quiet Chinese documentary on the struggle of migrant workers.
Les Miserables, directed by Tom Hooper, watched in the theater
Not everyone knows this but I am a huge musical theater nerd. In junior high, I not only acted in musicals but I was a member of the Theater Club, a (very small) group of girls and our (very gay) Assistant Principal. We didn’t act in or read plays; nay, we read reviews of plays in the New York Times, scoured Al Hirschfeld illustrations for hidden Ninas and sometimes we actually saw some musicals. During this time I became obsessed with Les Mis, so much that I saw the play 6 times, its' histrionics a good match for my adolescent angst.
Years later, I met my now-husband Adam and found something very interesting beneath his all-black outfits and crust punk exterior: he knew all the words to Les Mis. He came to the play in a very didfferent way-raised in an evangelical family, Adam wasn’t allowed to listen to any secular music. Except for musicals. Musicals that, I might add, have just as much sex and violence as any heavy metal song ever could.
Clearly, the movie had a lot to live up to. And it mostly did. Only a few actors really belted out their songs the way I wanted them to but then they don’t have to project like they would in a theater. When you go to see Les Mis on Broadway, you want to hear songs sung well. At the movies, you’re willing to make more sacrifices for the story and the emotion. Except for one thing: I'm not making any excuses for Russel Crowe. Oh Russel Crowe, why? You looked flummoxed the whole time, like you walked onto the wrong set by accident. Javert is not an easy part, he’s a complicated conflicted character and he should have an amazing commanding voice. He's not a throw-away part dang-it. Paul Rudd would have been a better choice.
Anyway, I had a hard time controlling myself in the theater, finding myself mouthing along to all the songs when I wanted to jump up and sing so I’m sure I’ll buy the movie and do just that.
Last Train Home directed by Lixin
Fan, watched on Netflix streaming
“Hey, I have to watch a really depressing movie for school about Chinese
migrant workers. Want to watch it with me?” says Adam.
Normally I would say no and retreat back to our bedroom to watch reruns of Law &
Order on my laptop (this is my safe place), but hey, I have to watch 50 new
movies this year so I’m game for anything.
The last Train Home is beautiful, sad and quiet. Fan and his crew followed one
family for three years: Changhua and Sugin Zhang work work in a factory, returning home to their farmland
home only once a year on Chinese New Year to visit their two children. It’s
heartbreaking to watch them try to connect to their kids: all they want is for
their kids’ lives to be better than their own but their constant emphasis on
doing well in school comes off as meddling and hypocritical rather than loving.
Their older child Qin just wants some money of her own and she’s sick of her
parents telling her what to do, so she goes to do exactly what her parents don’t
want: she leaves to work in a factory too.
I expected to be hit over the head with the plight of the migrant worker but
instead, the sadness creeps into you. It’s not all human rights violations and
abuse. Instead it’s monotony of factory work, the separation from family, the
pain of leaving children just to make money to improve their lives that really
got to me. The most arresting visual in the film is the crush of the crowd of
factory workers, struggling to get on a train to get back home for the holiday.
130 million migrant workers journey to their home villages for the New Year's
holiday, the world’s largest human migration. It’s
hard for the American individualist in me to understand a life lived just for a
few short days.
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