Better late than never, right? It’s been a little more than a week since Terry asked me and Carrie to supply the names of 10 movies released since fall 2005 that we most enjoyed. Carrie weighed in with five of hers here, with impressive annotation to boot. I’m offering mine in a straight-out list, sans commentary, but with the caveat that I’m not entirely sure I’m remembering everything. In no particular order, the top ten are:
1. Friends with Money
2. The Descent*
3. Half Nelson
4. Casino Royale ( great minds)
5. Serenity (ditto)
6. The Lives of Others
7. Once
8. Ratatouille
9. Killer of Sheep
10. No Country for Old Men
I asterisked The Descent because I know Terry won’t like it: it’s a bloody, terrifying horror movie that I happened to like enough to put on this list. Not Terry’s cup of cocoa at all. Some honorable mentions that provided solid entertainment or better are Fracture, Dan in Real Life, Michael Clayton, Sunshine, and The Family Stone. And tomorrow you’ll probably hear about the half dozen movies that I forgot!
Here are ten from that same stretch of time that I want to see:
1. The New World
2. Tristram Shandy
3. Brick
4. Clean
5. United 93
6. The Devil Wears Prada
7. The Science of Sleep
8. The Last King of Scotland
9. The Fountain
10. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
Like Terry, I’ll be pretty much dark for the extended Christmas. So until next time, happy holidays, one and all.

It was a cold, wet, nasty weekend in Chicago last weekend, so for the most part I stayed in. However, I was lured out from under several blankets on Saturday night by the Lyric Opera’s production of Richard Strauss’s Die Frau ohne Schatten (The Woman Without a Shadow).
I love going to the opera but, to be honest, still can feel daunted on encountering an art form for which I lack any kind of competent critical apprehension or vocabulary. It’s not as if I actually believe that aesthetic appreciation depends on the capacity to interpret or assess the work before one–but the habits you pick up during several long years in humanities graduate school do tend to breed a little anxiety on this count.
Plus I’m out of practice lately, not having been to an opera in two or three years. So the four-hour running time attached to a work I knew nothing about gave me a tiny bit of pause–just the most fleeting question as to my own staying power and capacity to appreciate what I saw and heard.
Well, this is the Lyric Opera, and I needn’t have worried. While the story of Frau is an ornate fairy tale centered on procreation that seemed to me more than a little nuts (though reading Magda Krance’s well-informed précis here after the show was a great help in sorting it out), the sheer beauty of the music and the singing made me forget myself, as well as forgetting any anxiety I might have had about appreciating it properly. Deborah Voigt in the lead, a character who is transformed over the course of the opera, was most affecting, particularly in the joy she conveys with real power and yet with tremendous delicacy after she’s experienced her sea change. The whole thing, from the great voices assembled on one stage to the achingly beautiful orchestration to the fantastical set and choreography, was enough to make this reluctant operagoer embrace pure, unschooled aesthetic enjoyment again. (And if that isn’t enough to convince you, the genuine opera buff who accompanied me found it just as wonderful as I did.)
There are still a few performances of Frau on Lyric’s calendar, including one tonight. I’m told it’s seldom staged, and even less frequently with an orchestra as fine as the Lyric’s–so go to it, Chicago types. Find tickets here.

“No themes are so human as those that reflect for us, out of the confusion of life, the close connection of bliss and bale, of the things that help with the things that hurt, so dangling before us for ever that bright hard metal, of so strange an alloy, one face of which is somebody’s right and ease and the other somebody’s pain and wrong.”
Henry James, Preface to What Maisie Knew

I’m nearly to the end of Kate Christensen’s latest, The Great Man, having last summer devoured her novels In the Drink and The Epicure’s Lament. This one is good, too, and has me particularly impressed by Christensen’s range with characters. In The Great Man these include the seventy- and eighty-something wife, mistress, and sister of Oscar Feldman, a recently deceased painter whose biographers have started in. It’s hardly original to note that women of a certain age don’t get a lot of nuanced or lively representation in fiction, but it’s true. In Christensen’s novel, each of them is fascinating company: Maxine, the headstrong sister whose art can give Oscar’s a run for its money; Teddy, the proud mistress; and Abigail, the homebound wife who may not have suffered as much as you’d think in the face of her husband’s infidelities. That goes for Teddy’s best friend Lila, too. For those of us who aspire to be interesting old women someday, the novel is awfully reassuring.
The Great Man has also made me sit up and take notice of what, with this novel, no longer seems incidental in Christensen’s work: food. As you might surmise, it plays a substantial role in The Epicure’s Lament, whose title character Hugo is an able and exacting cook. In this novel sumptuous meals are everywhere, unattached to any particular character, and hungrily described. Teddy cooks, but Maxine and Abigail find themselves at a dinner party and restaurant, respectively, where the food is both prepared and described meticulously. It’s almost enough to make me press the book on the Gurgling Cod, who does in fact have a birthday coming up.
Here’s a taste: a dinner party scene that put me in mind of Tom Wolfe’s famous satirical take on 1980s haute cuisine in Bonfire of the Vanities.

The soup bowls were whisked away and plates of summery salad replaced them: a Japanese woodcut sea of curly pale green frisee lettuce on which floated almond slice rafts, each holding a tiny, near-translucent poached baby shrimp as pink and naked as a newborn. Crisp blanched haricots verts darted through the sea like needle-nosed fish. Cerise-rimmed radish slices bobbed here and there like sea foam. The dressing was a briny green lime juice and olive oil emulsion. Maxine stared at the thing, trying to imagine the person who had so painstakingly made it. It would be demolished in three bites.

Just because it’s absurd doesn’t mean it wouldn’t be delicious.

In October I’ll be host
To witches, goblins, and a ghost.
I’ll serve them chicken soup on toast.
Spooky once! Spooky twice!
Spooky chicken soup with rice!
Maurice Sendak, Chicken Soup with Rice
(Typed from memory, I’ll have you know.)

Last week I posed a question about reading children’s books as an adult:

What children’s classics did you first discover as an adult (Harry Potter doesn’t count), and how did it make you feel–old? young again?

CAAF obliged me here (in a post with a title I loved), Mr. Teachout here (not too shabby on the title front himself). Over at Shaken & Stirred, the lovely Gwenda weighed in with two titles, one of which, I Capture the Castle, is a favorite of my friend Margot and on my to-do list. One reader submitted Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy. Another reader wrote as follows:

I’ve been reading mostly mid-20th-century kid lit to my kids for the last few years, and though I’ll happily recite our favorites–Roald Dahl (especially Charlie, James and the BFG), Walter Brooks’s Freddy the Pig series, Sid Fleischman’s Americana tales like By the Great Horn Spoon!, and so on– I wouldn’t say many of them have been striking literary experiences for me. I’ve enjoyed their enjoyment of them, more so than the books themselves.
One exception– though I have to admit we’re still in the process of reading it– is Johnny Tremain. It really is a well-written and psychologically acute portrait of a young man’s progress, and I can tell my sons are pretty transfixed by the hardness of life in Revolutionary War era Boston, by Johnny’s wavering on the edge of bad habits and criminality, and by the way his search for a place for himself parallels America’s need to escape England’s control and take charge of its own destiny. (Okay, maybe they don’t get that yet, but Dad sees it coming.) I’d rank it among the better novels I’ve read (or read half of) lately, irrespective of genre.

I’ve never read Johnny Tremain, but the Roald Dahl reference strikes a chord. The book of his I really cottoned to was none of those mentioned by my correspondent but The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More. Wonderful indeed. I can remember how this book felt in my hands. The title story may have been my first conscious experience of reading a story within a story. I still feel a shiver remembering my dismay and delight at being returned from the nested story, about an Indian yogi who cultivated the power to see through opaque things, to the story proper, about Henry Sugar, who was inspired by the yogi’s story to develop such powers himself. When I first read the story, I became absorbed in the embedded history of the yogi to the point of forgetting about Henry Sugar entirely. Coming back to his story–being treated to more story, even after the yogi’s had ended–was deliciously satisfying; I hadn’t known that stories could be quite so sly and rich.
Thanks to all who wrote. And don’t forget to visit Chicken Spaghetti for kids’ books blogging. (Which reminds me of another personal all-time favorite: Chicken Soup with Rice.)

I’ve been a fickle reader these past months, skipping around from book to book, only occasionally seeing one through. I did finish two by Kate Christensen, The Epicure’s Lament and In the Drink, as well as A Buyer’s Market (the second installment of Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time) and the strictly confectionary Mergers and Acquisitions. I also swallowed a couple of Reginald Hill mysteries practically whole, but that’s just par for the course (until I run out of them, an eventuality I prefer not to contemplate). Otherwise, though, it’s been a few pages here, a chapter there, until a week or two ago, when I hit on just the thing that suits me just now. But more on that in a minute.

First, a word or two on In the Drink, Christensen’s first novel. It superficially resembles a certain kind of book wherein a hapless twenty-something, female, finds her hap. But Claudia, the protagonist of Christensen’s book, is less picturesquely hapless than your standard issue Bridget Jones type. Frequently drunk, sought by collection agents, and not above stealing from the dead, she’s actively self-destructive. She has a memorable foil in her employer, Jackie, whose socialite detective novels she ghostwrites for peanuts. And Christensen has an eye for a scene:

In the park, I sat on a wet bench. The river lay flat and sullen, a drenched, dark mineral gray-green. The banks of New Jersey hulked, beaten-down; the sky was several shades lighter than the water, but just as dense. The mastodonic roar of trucks along the West Side Highway was pierced by a bicycle bell on the path behind me, and the voices of children playing nearby on the paved walkway.

She’s especially good at capturing what things look like seen through a glaze of pain. Speaking of which, check out the unlikely loveliness of this description, from Henry Green, of an unpopular schoolboy’s fear of his classmates (I’m still dipping into and out of Green’s memoir Pack My Bag):

Until he went up to Cambridge I was sheltered and could always find sanctuary in [my brother’s] room which meant I had more time to read and that means literally, in the hunger for reading anything and everything which began about then, I had more time to give to what became a preoccupation. Also I was spared the terror I got to know afterwards when there was that thunder of feet down the corridor and one sat still as a rabbit wondering if they were coming for one. Later at Oxford, where I had rooms over cloisters paved in stone which echoed, they would tear screaming in by either of its entrances drunk like fiends about one in the morning and, unpopular as ever, I had again to face the fact they might be after me as five years previously they had been; different, desperate now, estranged.

As I wrote about this book before, it has an affecting urgency, apparently the result of Green’s conviction that World War II would be the end of him, and of his resulting desperation to get down in writing what life had felt like so far. Right now I’m in the middle of his chapter on discovering the opposite sex; on this fraught subject, especially, his candor and his commitment to capturing feeling and fleeting impressions are arresting.

But what I’m really reading at any given time, now that I am a commuter again, is what I’m reading on the train. And lately that’s not Green, which has been more of a living-room couch affair, to be picked up when I need a break from the burdens of work or television. Lately what I’m really reading is something most of you read as tykes, or perhaps had read to you: The Hobbit.

Nope, before this month I never read The Hobbit, or anything else by Tolkien. Now I’m about to finish it, and it’s held me rapt. More on that experience when I do finish it; in the meantime, what children’s classics did you first discover as an adult (Harry Potter doesn’t count), and how did it make you feel–old? young again? CAAF and Terry, consider yourselves asked, too.

Every now and then I like to check in and see what the English naturalist Gilbert White was noticing this time of year. So many of his journal entries, their language sparing and concise, amount to a sort of accidental poetry. Here are his reports on a stretch of September days in 1777:

Sept. 14. Black cluster-grapes begin to turn color. A tremendous & awful earthquake at Manchester, & the district round. The earthquake happened a little before eleven o’ the clock in the forenoon, when many of the inhabitants were assembled at their respective places of worship.
Sept. 17. The sky this evening, being what they call a mackerel sky, was most beautiful, & much admired in many parts of the country. Footnote. As the beautiful mackerel sky was remarked & admired at Ringmer, near Lewes, London, & Selborne at the same time; it is a plain proof that those fleecy clouds were very high in the atmosphere. These places lie in a triangle whose shortest base is more than 50 miles. Italian skies! Full moon. The creeping fogs in the pastures are very picturesque & amusing [interesting] & represent arms of the sea, rivers, & lakes.
Sept. 18. [Findon] Deep, wet fog. Sweet day.
Sept. 19. [Chilgrove] Ring-ousels on the downs on their autumnal visit. Lapwings about on the downs attended by starlings; few stone-curlews. Sweet Italian skies. The foliage of the beeches remarkably decayed & rusty.
Sept. 20. Some corn abroad: a vast burden of straw, & many ricks.
Sept. 24. The walks begin to be strewed with leaves. Vivid Northern Aurora.

I previously blogged White last August, here.