Barometer Rising

Oh lord, this is awful. A historical romance set around the Halifax explosion sounds like a terrible concept, and the execution is equally bad. The setting feels forced; McLennan is very focused on making it authentic, at the expense of the storyline and general readability. The characters are, on the whole, extremely unlikeable, especially the "hero". And McLenna's prose is unbelievably melodramatic; he adores his adjectives, which is, honestly, an awful way to write. When the description of a tragedy as powerful as the Halifax explosion has me rolling my eyes at how even a tragedy is overwrought, that is an awful sign.

1/5

Death at a Funeral

If this was a Hollywood film, it would be awful. The script is certainly not the strong point. What is, is the British sensibility that permeates the film. There are some very strong performances, Alan Tudyk's springing to mind, but really, at its heart, this is just a slightly dark, very British comedy.

3/5

Waking Life

Apparently, Waking Life was very well received. I really don't understand it. Waking Life is a mess of extremely pretentious monologues, seemingly only held together by the filmmaker's desire to show off. Obstensibly, it's held together by rhetoric involving dreams, but really, it only hangs together in the loosest sense, and bores the shit out of the audience before finally reaching its point. Masturbatory cinema at its worst.

1/5

Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures

Within the first twenty pages I was going to give this collection up. It got better, and I'm glad it did, but the writing style certainly leaves something to be desired. Luckily, Lam has some very interesting ideas, so the stories did keep me immersed, however, I am unsure why this got so much praise from literary circles. These are interesting stories, but this is not literature.

3/5

Pygmy

I am officially finished with Chuck Palahniuk. I loved him at fourteen, liked him at seventeen, but at nineteen, I'm finished. Snuff was absolutely awful, but I still picked up Pygmy, hoping I could return to loving Palahniuk, a trait that I'm increasingly starting to believe was a sign of immaturity in my reading habits. Instead, I gave up after twenty pages of broken English, anti-American litanies that could horrify a Canadian (and that is saying something), and one graphic rape scene. Goodbye, Chuck. Goodbye forever.

1/5

Birds of America

I have a special place in my heart for short story collections, and Moore's brilliant collection epitomizes why. Each story deals with different sorts of helplessness and unhappiness in gently different ways, and the tenuous threads of other themes--feminism in particular--are exposed over the course of the collection. I'm very, very excited to read more of Moore's works (no pun intended).

4/5

The Things They Carried

Tim O'Brien brilliantly brings the Vietnam war to life with a book that blurs the line between novel, collection of short stories, and memoir. I have read a great deal of war novels, and watched a great deal of war films, and O'Brien's work is one of the best, if not the best, lenses into the unimaginable horrors, comedy, tragedy, and boredom of the front. Each note is struck with the particular skill of a man who has lived through a war, and who inserts reality into fiction in a way that carefully blurs the realities of war in a very interesting way.

4/5