a review: alabama, books, skin

I thought in an effort to find a reason to post more often, I would review movies, books and music as I encounter them. Don't expect anything in-depth; I'm just going to say whether I liked it and not much more.

Sweet Home Alabama is fun movie. I confess I haven't seen a great many honest-to-goodness chick flicks, but I've only liked about half of the ones I've seen. This is a member of that happy club. It made me forget that I generally don't hit it off with rednecks. So, good show.

I'm in a Contemporary American Fiction class right now, so I'm reading a bunch of books I might not otherwise have read (I shop mostly in the SF/Fantasy section). The next several books are among them. I am the Cheese by Robert Cormier never actually made me really care. I'm not sure why, but I didn't. The last couple pages were an absolute mystery to me. In class, Prof. Card acknowledged that there might be people who got to the end of this book and had no idea what had just happened. He assured us (without asking for a show of hands, bless his soul) that we were not idiots. Yet the fact remains that I needed to be told what had happened to know.

David Lubar's Hidden Talents was way fun. Likeable characters (I almost typed lickable - Freudian slip?), a cool premise, and a happy ending. In addition to the copy I have, I bought a copy at Wal-Mart for my brother and another for the next kid that I decide should have one.

Laurie Halse Anderson's Speak is one of the best, most personal books I have read. High school was a rough time for me, and the books that helped me then are some of the most personally meaningful books for me. This book is meaningful enough to join them. Painful, but beautiful, and very good.

Bridge to Terebithia by Katherine Paterson was not for class, but Speak made me think of it. I had somehow got through childhood without reading it, and read it recently. It's beautiful and sad and wonderful and true. I rarely cry for books, but I cried when I read this.

John Irving's A Prayer for Owen Meany was not a book I disliked. But then, neither did I like it. It was slow as anything. I'd feel like I'd been reading forever and find myself thirty pages in. Somebody else in class said that she'd start reading this and suddenly realize, "Oh, y'know, I should go do dishes..." That seemed to be my class' concensus -- that it wasn't painful to read, just... not particularly gripping, and slow as molasses.

Richard Russo's Nobody's Fool was similar in that not much happened, and it wasn't terribly gripping, but I liked it far better. Reading it was like being with a friend. Not gripping -- when you say goodbye to a friend, you don't sit around biting your nails, counting the minutes 'til you can find out what's going to happen next! No, you're happy to see your friend, and you enjoy your time together, but then when one of you has to leave, that's okay too. That's this book -- friendly and comfortable and pretty darn likeable at an easygoing pace.

I feel silly reviewing an individual song, but I like it. I ran into Natalie Merchant's My Skin in a music video featuring Firefly/Serenity's River Tam on YouTube.com.