In the summer of 2004, I found myself at home on maternity leave with a newborn baby and a lot of sleepless nights. After I went through my entire Tivo’d cache of The Issac Mizrahi Show (seriously, the best talk show ever. I mourn it every day.), I was dying for new TV to watch. And I was rescued by my friend Amy, a tv critic, who had a pile of DVD screeners for the upcoming fall TV season that she was finished with. I […]
Can you ever be just whelmed?
So this year, I’m not doing the whole Booker Prize Longlist. After last year’s epic slog and some disappointments of a very large magnitude, I approached this year’s list with a more discerning eye. I immediately discounted three of the titles, while noting with varying degrees of smuggery that I owned another two of the list and had already readone of them. A fourth title, this one, was also sitting on one of the bookshelves in the flat, but it didn’t belong to me. It […]
Raging Egos would be more accurate
I have a film degree and yet it took a friend buying me this book for my birthday to get me to read it. Shameful. What’s even more shameful, is I haven’t seen quite a few films that are discussed here, but the films are really secondary to the tales of how they were made and the changes they wrought on the film industry. If you’re even remotely interested in how some of the modern classics made it from page to screen and exactly what […]
A smart and amusing look at the close ties between sibling love and rivalry, longlisted for the Man Booker.
We first meet our narrator Rose as she is arrested in the 1990’s while studying at university. She’s met a fellow student called Harlow who announces her appearance on the scene with a whirlwind explosion of noise and anarchy. Dragging Rose into her escapades, she seems to neatly fit a hole in Rose’s life left by long disappeared sister, Fern. Rose and Fern were brought up by their parents as a sort of home experiment by their psychologist father, and the repercussions of that experimentation […]