Reader's Advisory

After watching Waltz With Bashir last night, I was happy to see the graphic novel version of this Oscar-nominated film just arrived.  As with the movie, the graphic novel is hard to categorize: Is it a biography?  A war story?  Creative non-fiction?  Regardless, it is a magnificant work.  Check out Waltz With Bashir: A Lebanon War Story by Ari Folman, especially if you're a fan of Persepolis and Maus.

With a new portrait of Shakespeare announced this month, check out these modern versions of some of the Bard's masterpieces.  For a new take on Hamlet, try Dead Father's Club by Matt Haig, Oprah's Book Club selection The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, or Updike's Gertrude and Claudius.  Christopher Moore's latest, Fool, is a re-worked King Lear and Terry Pratchett's Lords and Ladies will remind you of A Midsummer Night's Dream.  And for the classic love story of Romeo and Juliet, try The Flamingo Rising by Larry Baker or Julie & Romeo by Jeanne Ray.  

It's been about a year since I read Mark Haddon's novel, which was a bestseller.  My mother recently read it, and it reminded me how much I enjoyed this novel.

Part of what makes this novel so enjoyable is that it is different from your average novel.  The novel's narrator and protogonist is an autistic boy living through the break-up of his parents' marraige.  Although he's autistic, he's quite bright in some ways.  He's very good at math, for instance.  And he's very self-aware, although not perceptive about the emotional tensions carrying on among the adults in his life.  That makes some things mysterious to him that would not be mysterious to us.

And, I think another thing that helped to make this novel so popular was that it's really written as a mystery.  The "curious incident" of the title is not explained until the end of the book, and I was quite surprised when I found out who was responsible. 

New DVDS

In addition to these two fun and classic titles, My Best Friend's Wedding and Four Weddings and a Funeral, we 've got DVDs of the TV series "Rawhide" and "Hogan's Heroes."

If you're a fan of Julia Roberts, other titles in our collection you might enjoy include Charlie Wilson's War and Pretty Woman.  She also performed one of the character's voices in the animated Charlotte's Web.

If you're a Dermot Mulroney fan, you might also enjoy Flash of Genius, also starring Greg Kinnear and Lauren Graham, or The Memory Keeper's Daughter, adapted from the popular novel by Kim Edwards about a family coping with a child with Downs' Syndrome.  Other recent films he's appeared in, in our collection, include About Schmidt and Zodiac.

If you enjoy Hugh Grant, you might also enjoy Sense and Sensibility, Love Actually, Two Weeks Notice, and About a Boy.

If you like Andie McDowell, you'll probably also enjoy Groundhog Day, in which she appears opposite Bill Murray.

  Matilda Goodnight is a good person.  She adopts a very sweet dachshund out of a neglectful home; she works hard painting murals to help support her family. 

But Tilda has a secret, in a family full of secrets and lots of drama.  After all, it was Tilda's mother, Gwen Goodnight, who said:  "If you can't be a good example, you'll just have to be a terrible warning." 

And her secret is really messing with her love life.  Until she meets Davy Dempsey (what sort of name is "Davy" for a grown person, anyway?) in a closet, of all places. 

What were they doing in a closet?  Well, that's a long story that has to do with Davy's ex-girlfriend, and some favors Tilda did for her father when her father was running the Goodnight Gallery. 

This book is cute, funny, improbable, optimistic, and charming.  The Boston Globe said, "'Faking It' is an unabashed homage to such classics as the Philadelphia Story and His Girl Friday.  The dialogue, which is peppered with movie references, is arch and smart-alecky, and moves the story at a rattling pace."

Golden Globe Awards

Looking for a good Christmas story to fill you with the holiday spirit?  Check out these great holiday themed reads:

•  The Stupidest Angel by Christopher Moore
• A Redbird Christmas  by Fannie Flag
• Skipping Christmas by John Grisham
• Holidays on Ice by David Sedaris

Over Thanksgiving, the New York Times published its annual list of notable books. Some of these might be books you've overlooked or that you've been meaning to get to.

 

Some of the suggestions on the list include: 

The American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld -

The story of a First Lady not unlike Laura Bush and her journey of discovery.

The English Major by Jim Harrison

After getting unceremoniously dumped by his wife, a retired English teacher goes on a cross-country journey looking for a new place to roost.

A Most Wanted Man by John LeCarre

A spy novel for our time.  Agents obsessed with preventing another 9/11 style attack thread their way among shifting and divided loyalties in an ever more complicated geopolitical landscape.

Netherland by Joseph O'Neill

Set in post 9/11 New York, an Dutch expatriate separated from his family and his home in Tribeca by the events of that September day, slowly finds in his footing in his love of cricket, played by immigrants in the outer ('nether') boroughs.

Have you read any of the titles on the list? Post a comment and let us know.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/07/books/review/100Notable-t.html?em

If you love James Bond and you also enjoy non-fiction, you might enjoy:

The Irregulars: Roald Dahl and the British Spy Ring in Wartime Washington by Jennet Conant.

Described by the publisher as an "extraordinary tale of deceit, double-dealing, and moral ambiguity," The Irregular is is journalist Conant's account of the "spytime" of Roald Dahl, beloved if acerbic author of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory who was sent to Washington to undertake a sometimes comical mission to promote the British cause among Americans, befriending the Roosevelts and prominent journalists such as Drew Pearson, Walter Lippmann and Walter Winchell. Conant shows Dahl's progression from rank amateur to smooth operator, as he and compatriots Ian Fleming and David Ogilvy pursued the "charm offensive," around Washington -- cultivating Washington hostesses but also attempting to sabotage American corporations that did business with the Third Reich.
(Dahl's connection to Fleming continued throughout his life: he wrote the screenplays for You Only Live Twice and Fleming's Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.)