Hi, X.
"Wonderfully exciting" doesn't ring a bell. Sigh.
I have seen some good movies (videos) too. But the only one I can remember is Best In Show. And the others I can remember aren't good enough to recommend, really. Well, Insomnia, a Swedish movie, I liked. I saw Almost Famous and thought it was boring.
I did read, ie listen to, some good books on tape. I especially liked Milun Kundera's Identity; Edith Wharton's Glimpses of the Moon, which gave me a respect for her I hadn't had before; Arundati Roy's The God of Small Things; Alice McDermott's Charming Billy; Isaac Bashevis Singer's Shadows on the Hudson....
I've just recently discovered books on tape. A wonderful discovery. Especially for the car or when you have to clean up or do the dishes. Maybe I talked about this online before. Sometimes I don't know whether i've said something in email or on SI.
Some books are much better than others for listening to. The God of Small Things is a wonderful book, but for audio, there are too many characters and too many time shifts and the many characters have names that, to a non-Indian, are hard to hold in your memory. You need the physical book.
I listened all the way to the end of Doris Lessing's The Fifth Child, but thought it was pretty much just well-written sci fi schlock with pretence to deep meaning that wasn't there.
I think Charming Billy is very good, but learned from it that who the reader is makes a LOT of difference. There are good readers and brilliant readers and the occasional reader who ruins the book for you. There was something about the voice of the reader of this book, the pitch or something, that prevented me from listening to the whole book though.
I adored the I.B. Singer, Shadows on the Hudson. Very long. Brilliant readers, three of them. But the most fascinating thing is that I'm listening now to David Guterson's Snow Falling on Cedars (it's not fine writing, but the blurb captured me, and it's an absorbing story) and I would bet anything that his main influence was Singer. I'll bet he read and read and read Singer before he started to write. His writing is to Singer's what a knock off dress is to a couturier gown, but he tells a good story well and I admire him for having the smarts to choose a genius to emulate and to do it so intelligently.
Of course I can never prove he's doing Singer, but I am sooo positive!
And that discovery is my idea of an exciting thing. Pathos emergency! Call 911!
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