Category Archives: Book and film reviews

I finished Against a Dark Background earlier this week. A basic adventure space opera with a sympathetic android and a fairly obvious bad guy who is slowly revealed.  It moves quickly and occasionally the settings are interesting but quite often … Continue reading →

On the Air France flight I enjoyed (the standard on a 10 hour flight is low, but they were all better than Deadpool 2) several films (that incidentally I has never heard of): Les derniers Parisiens: A low-budget film about … Continue reading →

Read this on the flight to Burkina Faso and then over a few days. Entertaining and occasionally compelling but the writing was just not edited enough to really shine. I appreciated the central idea, but the execution left me unsatisfied. … Continue reading →

The Hydrogen Sonata, a science fiction novel by Iain M. Banks, was a long but good read. Infused with Banks’ theme (in all the novels of his I have read so far) of loneliness and, well I have to say … Continue reading →

This book was circulating in the house so I started reading. Reading and skipping. What is there to say? I mean, did someone challenge Cline? “Hey, bet you can’t write a sci fi dystopia where female characters function only as … Continue reading →

One of my favorite science fiction authors is Robert Reed. His “great ship” series of novellas and stories I found fantastic, and he has lots of other good stuff. But Sister Alice was a mess, at times virtually unreadable.  I’d … Continue reading →

After panning her most recent novel I decided to give an author another chance, and boy did she ever! “The Painted Drum” by Louise Erdrich came out in 2005. The novel has two main parts, and then returns and integrates. … Continue reading →

I have always enjoyed reading Louise Erdrich and when I saw she had a dystopia quasi-scifi novel I thought that might be a good reading experience. So I checked it out from the library and started reading. After fifty pages … Continue reading →

From Wikipedia Smoke & Mirrors (Spanish: El hombre de las mil caras) is a 2016 Spanish thriller film directed by Alberto Rodríguez based on the non-fiction book Paesa, el espía de las mil caras by Manuel Cerdán. The film stars … Continue reading →

I still think Chocolat (not the one with Juliette Binoche) is her best film though it is quite flawed. That seems to be a recurring theme with Denis, amazing parts of films, mixed in with occasional cringy scenes or acting.  … Continue reading →

Well, possibly it does not, but Ha Jin’s War Trash is one very good war novel. Apparently based on the experiences of his father in the Korean War (and it is fascinating to search for the real historical events described … Continue reading →

I was flummoxed by Camille Bordas short story “The State of Nature” in April 9 2018 The New Yorker. It is clearly a very formal exercise. There is something about the syntax or the paragraph construction that could be understood … Continue reading →

Wait, I thought, the broken wine glass! Or could it be a water glass? At any rate, it is one of the movie’s more famous riddles. The moment is so deliberate and messy and startling — the hotel sequence is … Continue reading →

La Tabla Esmeralda, by Carla Montero. I wanted to read a big fat novel in Spanish, and this one certainly did the trick.  A rehash of Possession. Vie et ensignement de Tierno Bokar, by Amadou Hampate Ba. Tremendously interesting short … Continue reading →

This movie was so intimate and painful to watch finally I gave up and turned it off. Despite a career spanning nearly three decades, Yukiko Mishima hasn’t appeared on many lists of up-and-coming Japanese female directors, mine included. One reason: … Continue reading →

Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie is a fantastic sprawling sci-fi story, set in the far future, with an AI as the central character. The character development is superb, and I especially appreciated the spot-on nuance about how AI might operate. … Continue reading →

I picked up a copy of Contes du jour et de la nuit at our local San Jose second-hand bookstore, Recycle Books, and have been enjoying reading one of the early masters of the short story form. In some ways … Continue reading →

Actually gone skiing, in the miserable snow of Bear Valley… what’s that you said about global climate change Donald Trump? C’est faux! And anyway, gone fishing? I’m a vegetarian. So not likely.  But it is just an expression. And I … Continue reading →