Two books I have not finished

I am so far behind on my book reviews that I have no idea how I will ever catch up again, if I don’t get a few days off anytime soon. anyway, here are 2 books I definitely DIDN’T enjoy:

So far I was quite lucky with the books I have read this year. Out of almost 30 there were only two I didn’t finish:

Will Self’s “The Book of Dave” and Susanna Clarke’s “Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell”.

Both of them promised so much and delivered so little. If I had a 50-pages-rule, neither one would have passed it, but since I am an eternal optimist when it comes to books I plodded on, in the case of Jonathan Strange for another 200 pages. But it just wasn’t any good.

To compare Jonathan Strange to Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings - as some reviewer did (and of course they had to put that line on the cover) - is just plain preposterous. The only thing the two books have in common is the occurence of wizards in the story, although to call either Strange or Norrell a real wizard is quite a stretch. Apart from that I can see no reason to even put them in the same broad category in terms of storyline or subject, much less so in terms of quality. Susanna Clarke’s writing is miles, no leagues away from Tolkien’s. This book was abysmally boring and pointless.

My opinion of Will Self’s writing is marginally better. Quite a while ago I have read his book “How The Dead Live”, which I enjoyed, even though it was slow going and took me ages to finish. So I came to “The Book of Dave” with some amount of expectation, which is almost never a good thing. Mainly I expected to like it, because the blurb made it sound like a dystopian fiction, which is my favorite genre at the moment, and also like a dig at religion - and how could I pass it up in that case? Sadly, in my eyes it delivered on none of those promises. The story took a long while to get into gear and then just dragged on and on interminably - until I gave up around halfway through. So now I will never learn how Dave’s demented ramblings went on to spark an equally demented religion in a dark and distant future. But you know what? I think I can live with that.

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After reading and enjoying “Basket Case” by Carl Hiaasen recently, I received 3 more of his books through Bookmooch a while back:

• “Skinny Dip”
• “Sick Puppy” and
• “Lucky You” (which I am reading just now)

A few days ago I realized I had quite a few points collected on Bookmooch again, so I requested 6 more:

• “Stormy Weather”
• “Skin Tight”
• “Nature Girl”
• “Hoot”
• “Strip Tease” and
• “Native Tongue”.

And, with the exception of Hoot, the mooches have all been accepted already and the books will be on the way to me shortly. Yay!
I don’t know how many others he has written, but I guess nine books by the same author should be enough to occupy me for a while. I’ll get the other ones later - if I shouldn’t have enough of him by then.

Since Janet from FondofSnape has posted pictures of her bookshelves a couple of days ago, which I always find very interesting, I decided to follow suit with some photos of my own shelves.
(In case you want to actually check out the titles of the books I have linked to bigger versions of all the pictures. You can also find all of them on my flickr page.)

There are more shelves and a couple of boxes of books elsewhere in the house, but these are my main collection. I tend not to hold on to many books nowadays. Most I won’t bother to re-read anyway, so I rather exchange them for new ones either on Bookmooch or Bookcrossing. And as you can see here, I have been a very good girl lately (or, rather, a very broke one) and have aquired very few new books, so my Mt. TBR has shrunk considerably.

If you wanna play along, go ahead and post some pictures of your own book collection. Leave a link in the comments so I can come over and have a look.

It took me a long time, but this weekend I finally got around to watching Brokeback Mountain.

I have never been all too interested in seeing it in the first place, but since I am still kinda sad that Heath Ledger passed away recently, I thought I should watch it just to see him once again. Especially since it looks like this film is gonna be his legacy (together with the new Batman, of course).

And I’m gonna say something quite sacrilegous now, so cover your eyes if you love the movie: I thought it was the most boring movie I have seen in ages.

I was in turns so completely bored with it and annoyed by some things that I couldn’t even bring myself to watch it all the way through. After I felt myself drifting off repeatedly I gave up after some 90 minutes or so. Now probably everybody is going to tell me that the most important and poignant moments came only after that. Well, I honestly don’t care.

I know that for some people, especially Americans (sorry, folks, but it’s true) the depiction of a gay relationship in a major Hollywood blockbuster is a very shocking and surprising and exciting thing and therefore the movie was lauded for its bravery and forwardness and all that. But, to be honest, that fact is more telling about the bigotry of our society today than of any special quality of the movie.

So, you have these 2 guys who fall in love and have an affair for pretty much all their lives, even though they are both married. Wohoo, big fucking deal.

Maybe if people would manage to get the hell over themselves and finally accept that homosexuality is just a fact of life, in itself not more remarkable or special than being blond or having green eyes or whatever, this movie would be seen as what it is: just another love story, and not a very interesting one at that. Maybe it’s because I live in Germany and here being gay is really not all that noteworthy nowadays - hell, even the mayor of Berlin is openly gay and nobody bats any eyelid over it.

So, apart from the “gay cowboys” thing I really don’t get what was supposed to be so extraordinary about this movie. Of course, it’s tragic that Ennis and Jack couldn’t openly show their love and live together, because of the prejudiced times they lived in. I don’t think that’s an excuse for their behaviour, but be that as it may.

My main problem with the movie was that I didn’t engage with any of the characters. And that had nothing to do with the fact that Jack and Ennis were gay. They were just plain boring. (Oh, and Michelle Williams was also extremely annoying - every time I see her face I just get the urge to punch her, but that’s a personal thing).

One other thing that majorly annoyed me was the way they talked, especially Heath. Was that supposed to be some Midwestern accent or something? Whatever it was, it was godawful. It not only made him sound slightly retarded, but I also had to really struggle to actually understand a word he said. I have seen most of Heath Ledger’s other movies, so I know the boy could enunciate and talk properly. This mumbling and muttering did not exactly add to my (already barely existing) enjoyment of the movie.

The only good thing were the nice nature shots in the first part of the movie, when they were actually still up on that mountain.

On the whole, I am clearly not impressed with the movie. I will strike this one from my mental list of Heath Ledger’s films and go on remembering him as the boy from 10 Things I Hate About You and A Knight’s Tale. And I keep hoping for The Dark Knight to be worth the wait.

I had to go to a scientific conference today. Sounds fancy? It isn’t, really.

But then again, what do I know, this was only the second one I have been to in my life. The first one was back when I was still a student and I have quite fond memories of it, because my friends and me were involved in the organization of it, which was a lot of fun. The workshops and presentations themselves I don’t remember at all anymore.

Now this one I was more or less forced to go to. And not only today, tomorrow as well. Because our professor told us to do a write-up of one of the presentations. Which wouldn’t be all that bad, if it wasn’t for the fact that the topic of this particular conference is “cytomics and immunology”. And yes, that is exactly as incomprehensible and, in fact, a lot more boring than it sounds. The, what I thought before, only redeeming fact of it all is that the presentations are held in english instead of german.

Oh boy, was I wrong to look forward to that! I think, there is not one native english speaker among the whole bunch of scientists at this thing. Most of them are german, one woman is scottish (an accent I usually love, but she was mumbling so bad I couldn’t make out a damn word she said), others are spanish, portuguese or god knows what else. There was a very young czech guy, who was so nervous and was talking in fits and bursts, that not only wasn’t I able to catch what in hell he was talking about, but I also was afraid all the time that he would just collapse any moment. (And, honestly, that was the most excitement I had all day.)

But the worst, the absolute unbelievably gruesome rock-bottom awful ones were the germans. They literally made my ears bleed with their wretched pronounciation and this dreadful german accent. *blech* Not funny. (And I pray to all the gods I don’t believe in that I don’t sound anything like this when I talk english!)

Besides all that it was absolutely boring, because I haven’t got the faintest idea what they were talking about in the first place. My knowledge of immunology is rudimentary, to say the least, and my interest in it is even less well developed. And those presentations are from specialists for other specialists. They are so detailed and specialized that they could have talked chinese for all I cared.

One good thing, though: the food was pretty good.

On the other hand: today was my birthday and this crap completely ruined it.

You’ve been wondering why I have been so quiet again recently? It’s not that I don’t want to blog anymore.
I just don’t have time right now, because I have developed a huge and completely unreasonable crush on actor William Fichtner. (You know the guy, even though you probably never heard his name before.)
The result of that is that I have spent the last 4 weeks watching every movie or tv show he ever appeared in that I could get my hands on. In the last 2 weeks that has been mainly Prison Break - Season 2 and 3, which I have watched backwards and forwards - every which way but sideways.

It’s really typical for me to be able to watch a show with so many really attractive guys in it and fall for the one that not only plays not exactly a good guy, but who also should be completely outshone by the pretty boys.

I am aware that 99% of the fans of the show seem to be hopped up on Wentworth Miller. And while I agree that he looks exceptionally pretty (although he might wanna do something about his nose, really), that is kind of the problem for me. He looks gorgeous, but apart from his eye-candy quality, as an actor he seems just average. But I can’t really say, because his looks totally get in the way of an objective assessment of his acting abilities. But anyway, he is a good 15 years too young to be of any interest to me personally.

William, on the other hand, is not only in the right age group for my taste, he is an outstanding actor, who is greatly underrated, because he is mostly going for the smaller, but more interesting roles on the sidelines. Accordingly, his character Alex Mahone is much more interesting than Goody-Twoshoes Michael Scofield. I will always take the tortured soul over the pretty boy.
So now you know. I’ll come back on here as soon as I’m over that phase. Shouldn’t take too long. I get bored so very easily these days.