Today we felt totally frisky, DR took this picture in the locker room at the gym early this morning, such rebels.
That’s right, two mornings in a row now. DR has a goal for losing a certain amount of weight before a certain date, and that’s all the kick in the ass I need to do the same.

Late last night, I finished the latest David Sedaris book When You Are Engulfed In Flames and I must admit that it is my favourite to date…

I remember reading Me Talk Pretty One Day and really laughing hard, thinking he couldn’t top himself, but I find with Flames he’s really done it, he comes off as a much more charming man this time around and whose life is still full of “crazy”. In fact here’s an excerpt so you can run and buy your own copy:

After visiting a medical examiner’s office 10 years ago, David’s list of “don’ts” grew to cover 3 pages and included such reminders as: never fall asleep in a Dumpster, never underestimate a bee, never drive a convertible behind a flatbed truck, never get old, never get drunk near a train, and never, under any circumstances, cut off your air supply while masturbating. This last one is a nationwide epidemic, and it’s surprising the number of men who do it while dressed in their wife’s clothing, most often while she is out of town. To anyone with similar inclinations, a word of warning: after you’re discovered, the police will take snapshots of your dead, costumed body, which will then be slid into photo albums and pored over by people like me, who can’t take the stench of an incoming decomp, so hole themselves up in the records room, moaning, “Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Oh, my God,” not sure if they’re referring to your plum-colored face or to the squash blossom necklace you’ve chosen to go with that blouse.

C’mon, that’s some funny stuff…

Mr. Sedaris is also coming to Toronto this week, DR and I, both being fans, will line up to meet with him.

By the way, didn’t I totally call the two Marias to go home last night??? On other Maria news, DR and I have been confirmed for the taping of the July 21 result show… awesome!

Child 44 is definitely one of the best book I’ve read.
Seriously.
Not only is it a very graphic murder mystery, it is also a non-stop – action – chase – get caught – escape – chase again – thriller as well.

This is Tom Rob Smith’s first novel and I can’t wait to see what he comes up with next. Let’s just hope it will not be like another favourite of mine, Scott Smith, who took 13 years to write The Ruins after his first novel A simple Plan, both excellent books, but I digress…

Child 44 came after the author read about and researched the true story of Andrei Chikatilo, a serial killer on a decade long killing spree that took place just before the fall of the Soviet Union in the early 90’s. He found the setting so great that he wanted to tell his own version of the story. He changed the timing from the 80’s to the 50’s, putting the hero in graver danger under the Stalin regime, and also dramatized the reasoning of the serial killer to act as he did.

One of the reason I thoroughly enjoyed this book is because TR Smith has the amazing ability to make you feel the absolute paranoia that must have been part of the daily life of the citizens of Soviet Union, how none of them could really trust anyone and had to continuously appear to live and act the way the State dictated they should. This paranoia also made you like a character one minute and then totally doubted that same person in the next chapter. It was amazing to never know if any of them were really good or bad. The story is violent, graphic, doesn’t hold any punches and is exciting. There is no time to rest, the action keeps on coming, and when you finally catch your breath, it’s starts all over again. I probably would’ve read that book in one or two days on a beach vacation, it was hard to put down after my lunch breaks (which is when I usually read these days).

Child 44 is now sold in at least 30 countries… but not in Russia… yet.

I have just found out that Tom Rob Smith has sold the rights to this book to one of my favourite director, Ridley Scott. He is set to direct (well, at this time anyway). Just like The Ruins, I will be at the movies the Friday it comes out.

READ THIS BOOK, GODDAMMIT!!!

If you ever feel like a novel about a gay guy marrying a straight girl he hates just for the gifts and money they will get from each other’s family, his being the New York mafia from his mother’s second marriage and hers from some fake dutchess living in England who should be paying for the wedding but since she is fictional, is played by some coked up drag queen brought in only to make outrageous excuses for the mafia family to actually pay and who really cannot function unless she is high on a mixture of coke and Ecstasy but once totally relaxed manages to charm the balls of this “one-foot-in-the-grave” mobster family don with a penchant for Harlequin like novels and who will kill the gay guy if he finds out the rumours about him being gay are true, making all this difficult because the gay guy being an ass has also enraged an older gay man by stealing his boyfriend 6 months prior to the big wedding plan and who in return is now in a position of blackmailing our main gay guy for money in exchange of dirty pictures he has obtain of this main gay guy and his best friend naked in bed in the middle of the act who was only there to try and help him out even if he couldn’t keep his pants on long enough to think of the consequences of their silly secret rekindled romance but who in returns finally enlist the help of his composer/partner/girl-friend with has an amazing knack for solutions to some tough problems, then you should read Blue Heaven by Joe Keenan.
That book is all that and much more…

Total fun I tell you!

I have also read Putting On The Ritz by the same author and it is an equal rollercoaster of laughter and comedy of errors, I swear, I really laughed out loud reading these books.. I’m so looking forward to My Lucky Star, his latest, but that will have to wait until aftre I’m done with the books my hubby gave me on my special day.

Ah, yeah, Joe Keenan is also responsible for the most amazing Frasier episodes, you will recognize his timing and style easily.

Happy reading.

Nineteen Minutes refers to the amount of time it took one teenager to get inside his high school with four guns and destroy the life of a town forever.

Don’t be fooled by the cover, the content is billions time better:

The strenght of this book really is how in 455 pages it manages to dig into the messed up hormonal lives of teenagers and show you how cruel they can be to each other. I kept thinking back of my days in high school and it is really easy to believe that such an event can happen.

I hated high school. Everything about it. I wasn’t part of the popular kids, but luckily, I wasn’t part of of the freaks either and I did have some muscular jock-like cousins who would have loved a reason to beat up some asshole making my life a misery, lucky little me. At school, I was too often a silent witness to some other kids not having such a charming time, I didn’t know how to act about it, I don’t know how many times I faked being sick to stay home instead for fear it could happen to me one day, I was almost held back one year. Let’s just say I’m very happy guns weren’t so easily accessible, but then again, I probably would’ve have been “sick” at home if something big would’ve happened like a bullied kid coming to school with a bag full of weapons. The one thing that changed it all for me was the arrival of New Wave music and fashion, it seemed like I finally had a place to fit after all. Thank you B-52’s and your friends, you made me make new ones.

But back to the book: I really enjoyed the pace of the author, going back and forth between the time prior to the killings and the time following as well. You will not fall out of your seats by the conclusion, I saw it coming a mile away, but it didn’t destroy the effect the rest of the story had on me. I would’ve preferred more time spent on the teenagers and a bit less on the adults, although the most touching moments did come from the parents reacting to the main event and the main character. One of the things we find out in the story is how one kid developed a video game taking place in high school where he goes from classroom to classroom, getting access to new weapon and killing the popular kids who bullied him. Sounded like a “cool” game… and then today at Best Buy I saw this:

see a review here

I strangely want to play it now…

The Terror, part 2

It’s somewhat ironic that I haven’t had a lot of time to read lately and yet I’ve had one of the most interesting book I’ve ever started in my hands. Things have been busy at work and I don’t always take my breaks as I should. Well, I made up for it this weekend. I still had approx 300 pages to go, and although very long this book was never boring.

It is a tad depressing as the story is about 125 sailors stuck in the arctic ice for 3 years while searching for the Northwest Passage. Not only plagued with extremely cold temperature, lack of daylight, disease, hunger and mutiny, they are also preyed upon by a presence so evil, it will kill and mutilate sailors and replace body parts knowing that the body will never have a proper burial with just one’s torso stuck on someone else legs, the rest of them eaten for food… that’s if they can dig some sort of grave in this desperate land. As depressing as it might sound, it is definitely one of the best book I have ever read. I couldn’t wait to make time and finally finish it. I read the last pages while watching the Oscars, which wasn’t too hard a deal. Although, Jon Stewart was cutting and totally funny when he was on.

If you have read it or are reading it, let me know your thoughts.

Today, I’m starting Twilight by William Gay, the other book that was at the top of Stephen King’s best of 2007

It’s kind of weird to want to review a book I haven’t yet finished… nor even gotten half way through, but it’s been a long time since I’ve felt this excited and taken away while reading a novel…

I have to say that it really took some patience to go through the first 50 pages, but then the story really took shape after the author got all the llllloooonnnnggggg descriptive of the ships out of the way, as well as the back story on certain characters that you’re told at the very beginning will die shortly anyway… but man, when it picks up, it really picks up… not an easy feast when the action takes place in a most desolate and cruel environment with absolutely no salvation nor help in sight.

I’m loving this book.

Let’s hope the ending doesn’t turn out to be a dissapointing one since I’m selling it to everyone who’ll listen to me go on about it. You’ll have my final word on it after I turn the final page.

Man, the iPod touch is a lot of work. It took me days to update my iTunes and download all the cd covers missing so I could have the pleasure of displaying them when choosing or listening to my music. Of course, being a moron, I took 2 evenings to download over 760 covers missing by copying thumbnails pictures from Amazon, and then was stunned to see how blurry every picture was once on iTunes. One half look from DR told me I was supposed to open the larger pictures first then download them, so there went another 2 evening and part of yesterday. Now that it’s all done and look really good, I can resume my time online.

In between all this misery, I also finished this amazing book:

Apparently, I was the last person on earth to have heard of this book. We were at a dinner talking about Christmas gift lists when a good friend mentioned that Lovely Bones was one of the best book she had ever read but didn’t own, so she has put in on her list for this year. The day after I found myself at World’s Biggest Bookstore and saw it on a display. I picked it up, curious, and read the description: A 14 year old girl gets raped and murdered and watches the aftermath from “her” heaven. Not the kind of chicklit she normally reads, so I decided to give it a try. The first few pages really drew me in and I was hooked. Alice Sebold is a gifted writer, she cleverly let’s us in her world.

I also was quite surprised to read of the author’s own personal history. Beaten, raped and almost killed in her late teens. A few years later, by pure chance, she sees the man that got away, reports his whereabouts, gets him arrested and tried. The man is found guilty of this crime as well as of other rapes and murders/dismemberments that had been left unsolved. She is now married to Glen David Gold, the author of Carter Beats The Devil, about illusionists at the turn of the century.

I’m glad I read this book. A good chunk of the story takes place in heaven, but not your regular God and Angels heaven which would’ve put me off, it’s more like a place where you can spend as much time as you need/want to understand what has happened, be mad, be angry, watch over your loved ones, try to guide them (in her case, she tries to guide them towards her murderer). As she is more ready and willing to accept her sad fate, little by little she gets to visit larger spaces of her heaven and discover other related people to visit with. There is a heartbreaking/heartwarming scene when she is given directions to a meeting through a field in the middle of her heaven she never thought of walking through before. Obvisously our heroine has never played Xbox games where you don’t leave any area unvisited, but then again, the action takes place in 1973, years before video games warped our minds.

Although dealing with teenage rape and murder and anger and revenge and the destruction of families, this book is surprisingly uplifting at times and is certainly full of hope. A difficult task when dealing with a subject better left to Stephen King.

It made me feel like I wasn’t alone thinking departed loved ones might be watching over me.

I first heard of this author and this book from a Top 10 Best of the Year list by Stephen King a couple of years back. I was definitely intrigued as he mentioned that it was so well written that he had to re-read it all over again when he finished. So I kept in on my list of books to buy everytime I found myself at the bookstore.

2 years later, I finally bought it… and read it.

I can’t say that I had the same enthusiasm as Stephen King, I didn’t have the need to jump back to the beginning and go at it all over again, but then again, I have NEVER re-read a novel twice. I’ve read Tintin books more than once, but never a novel. I’ve often seen movies more than once, but never had the need to do it with a book. Although, in 10 or 15 years, I might read the Shopoholic or the Harry Potter collection again.

Case Histories was like nothing I had ever read before. It takes 4 different crime stories, from different decades, in different parts of Cambridge and little by little bring them together by meshing a member of one family with one from another, and so on. All the stories are told through Jackson Brodie, a retired policeman, now a private investigator with a sordid past of his own. I can tell you there are not many happy moments in this novel, but it certainly never is boring. Case Histories is structurally similar to the movie CRASH, sometimes the main character in one storyline will make a cameo appearance in parts of another story.

I found this book to be an amazing study of how lives are destroyed by crimes left unsolved for years, for decades, mainly due to botched investigation, tiny little errors of judgement that could’ve put an end to the sorrow and misery of those left behind by finding the answer right there and then. And how, as humans, we have the need for closure, the need to know what has happened, who is guilty, where missing people have dissapeared to, and just how it consumes us.

The characters keep you interested, but it is really her writing style that captured my attention more. As I was reading, I kept trying to figure out how she did it and kept coming to the same solution everytime, that she must have written it backwards, starting with the end and then decomposing it into 4 different stories… I loved this book.

I just finished reading No Country For Old Men by Cormac McCarthy, and Wow! I have never read a book like this before where rules really don’t apply… there are good people, there are bad people, but at the end of the day, none of them matters. All the action, the gore, the reasoning behind the entire story ends anti-climacticly, but then again, perfectly, and we’re left with a grave american lesson. It didn’t bring me to tears or anything, on the contrary, I turned the last page and smiled, I was so happy I had had this reading experience.

From all the previews that I have seen on the upcoming movie by the Coen brothers, it looks like they have litterally taken the pages and turned them into images, there is nothing in the previews that is not in the book, I can’t wait to see it. I found so much pleasure in reading this novel, I really hope the film does it justice. But then again, it’s the Coen brothers, what could go wrong…

I moved to Toronto in 1993 and for some reason immediately stopped reading novels. Don’t know why, I just did. I read mostly magazines, especially Entertainment Weekly from cover to cover, but no novels per say. I read one here and there when I’d go on vacation but that was about it. I just got bored reading the same things from different authors I guess.

2 years ago, as I was reading Entertainment Weekly, the first 4 pages of the new Stephen King book: Cell, were printed as an excerpt. I was hooked right away. Unlike other books that took more than 100 pages to get going, Cell was all action from the get-go… I wasn’t bored anymore.

So here are, in reading order, the books I’ve read in the last 2 years:
Cell by Stephen King
Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris
The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown
Angels and Demons by Dan Brown
Wicked by Gregory Maguire (didn’t finish, got bored, but liked the musical)
Deception Point by Dan Brown
Digital Fortress by Dan Brown
White Shark by Peter Benchley (oh my… he was definitely drunk on that one)
The Devil Wears Prada by Lauren Weisberger
Dress Your Family In Corduroy And Denim by David Sedaris
Cat and Mouse by James Patterson
The Ruins by Scott Smith
The Night Listener by Armistead Maupin
Tales of the City by Armistead Maupin
More Tales of the City by Armistead Maupin
Further Tales of the City by Armistead Maupin
Babycakes by Armistead Maupin
Significant Others by Armistead Maupin
Sure Of You by Armistead Maupin
The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night-Time by Mark Haddon
Naked by David Sedaris
The Bitch Posse by Martha O’Connor
Holiday On Ice by David Sedaris
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone by JK Rowling
Harry Potter and the Chamber Of Secrets by JK Rowling
Harry Potter and the Prisoner Of Azkaban by JK Rowling
Harry Potter and the Goblet Of Fire by JK Rowling
Harry Potter and the Order Of The Phoenix by JK Rowling
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince by JK Rowling
The Nanny Diaries by Emma Mclaughlin and Nicola Kraus
The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon by Stephen King
Confessions of a Shopaholic by Sophie Kinsella
A Simple Plan by Scott Smitt
Shopaholic Takes Manhattan by Sophie Kinsella
Battle Royale by Koushun Takami (didn’t finish the book, badly translated, but loved the movie)
Shopaholic Ties The Knot by Sophie Kinsella
The Road by Cormac McCarthy
Shopaholic and Sister by Sophie Kinsella
Shopaholic and Baby by Sophie Kinsella
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by JK Rowling
Shark Trouble by Peter Benchley (spare time reading, interesting shark stories)
I’ve tried and given up on The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova but I’ll get back to this one again though, it does have a great premise.

And in between these novels, I also felt like reading the entire collection of Tintin by Hergé:
Tintin au Congo
Tintin en Amérique
Tintin et Les Cigars du Pharaon
Tintin et Le Lotus Bleu
Tintin et L’Oreille Cassée
Tintin et L’Ile Noire
Tintin et Le Sceptre d’Ottokar
Tintin et Le Crabe Aux Pinces D’Or
Tintin et L’Etoile Mystérieuse
Tintin et Le Secret De La Licorne
Tintin et Le Trésor De Rackham Le Rouge
Tintin et Les Sept Boules De Cristal
Tintin et Le Temple du Soleil
Tintin au Pays De L’Or Noir
Tintin et L’Objectif Lune
Tintin et On A Marché Sur La Lune
Tintin et L’Affaire Tournesol
Tintin et Coke En Stock
Tintin Au Tibet
Tintin et Les Bijoux De La Castaphiore
Tintin et le Vol 714 Pour Sydney
Tintin et Les Picaros
(I will attack the Asterix serie next)

I know, nothing too intellectual, a tad of chicklit thrown in for good measure as well, but these books have kept my interest, some were scary, some were sad, some were funny as hell, all I needed to make the lunch hour go fast at work. As you can notice, if I like a novel, I usually try to go through the author’s library. Also, I usually read new freshly bought books, I don’t like used copies, but will subject myself to them if it’s a title that’s out of print. There’s something good about being the only person to have turned the pages of a particular book, like the secrets are safe.

Tomorrow I will start The Golden Compass by Phillip Pullman, first in a serie of 3 novels. I’m not too sure about that one, it’s been “aggressively” recommended #20 by someone who said the serie was better than Harry Potter’s, but I’m afraid it might be too childish… I’ll let you know if it ends in the “not finished” pile.

Anything you guys can suggest or recommend?