September's list (written in October)

Phewh! What with all the excitement of the past month, I've forgotten about my monthly list. Not that anyone would miss it, but I like to do it for completeness sake.

This month, I've been listening to:

1. Twelve Stops and Home (Album) - THE FEELING. I bought the album initially because there two songs on it that I liked plus it was on sale, but wasn't too enamoured with the album as a whole. Now, two months after I've bought this album, it has grown on me and I can put it on daily. It's happy, summery, guitar music and still well worth putting on even if summer's on its way out.
2. America - RAZORLIGHT. Quiet, subtle music that seeps into your consciousness. Nice.
3. Empire - KASABIAN. I'm ok with the odd Kasabian single but this one I really like. Plus if you have a bloke in your English band called Serge Pizzorno, you gotta be cool.
4. Pump It - BLACK EYED PEAS. Yes, sirree, I will.
5. El Matador - LOS FABULOSES CADILLACS. I heard this song from the Grosse Point Blank movie, which is one of my favourite movies. Infectious stuff - I'm going round the house singing, "Matadoooor! Matadoooor!"
6. No One Knows - QUEENS OF THE STONE AGE.
7. Let Go - FROU FROU. Another song discovered from a movie soundtrack. Mellow, chilled and haunting.

I've also watched:

1. Severance. The tagline says 'Another bloody office outing' which is a genius description of what you will see on screen as well as describing the general thoughts of the characters as they go on their 'bloody office outing'. It's a British film, in the vein of Dog Soldiers, falling into both the comedy and horror genre. It's about the corporate executives of the sales division of an international defense company going on a teambuilding exercise in the forests of Eastern Europe, where they meet with a worse horror than the weapons they sell. When the first few minutes of the film started, I regretted coming because I realised that I actually don't like horror movies. But regrets were soon forgotten once the movie got underway properly. One minute I was screaming in horror and crouching behind my jumper and the next I was screaming with laughter. I had a good time at the cinema and I could tell so did everyone else in the packed theatre. One of the few movies I enjoyed from beginning to end.
2. Little Miss Sunshine. This one's completely different from the one above but still a movie which kept me hooked frpm start to finish. It's basically a road movie, of a family trying to get little Abigail Breslin to a kid's beauty contest. On the trip is the suicidal gay uncle, the coke-snorting grandfather, the speechless brother, the loser dad and the harrassed mother trying to keep the family together in a yellow Volkswagen van that won't go into first gear. Yes, there are a lot of family arguments but this is a family that clearly cares for each other, despite whatever issues they've got. A must-see.
3. Flightplan. Yup, it's the Jodie Foster one where she loses her kid on a massive double decker plane. It's interesting enough initially but there's something so cold about Jodie Foster's character that I couldn't really sympathise with her. Mysteries are always scarier when you don't know who the baddie is. It starts to disappoint when you find the baddie is only human. Same with this movie.
4. Persuasion. Ahem, yes, period dramas are my weakness. I'm sorry, I can't help it - must be all those skirts and pent-up frustration. This movie is based on Jane Austen's last finished novel. It's a BBC production, with less excitement than the 4 hour Pride and Prejudice mini-series, Persuasion clocks in at under 2 hours. It's a more muted affair, dealing not with youth's first love, but with disappointment, regret and the aftermath of a broken relationship. Still, Austen was her day's Mills and Boon, so things do have a happy ending. Not a movie for everybody (my youngest sister would rather have her eyeballs gouged out) but good for a quiet night in with mug of hot chocolate. No nachos though.

I read:

1. Panic - JEFF ABBOTT. Fast-paced, easy to read, popcorn thriller about freelance spies and what happens when your grown up son doesn't know that mummy and daddy are James Bond.
2. Life Support - TESS GERRITSEN. My mum loves Tess Gerritsen, I bought this book mainly for her. Not my usual cup of tea, but I enjoyed it. Reads like the book above but this one's about strangely young-looking old folks dying in mysterious circumstances.
3. Emotionally Weird - KATE ATKINSON. I loved Atkinson's Case Histories which I read a while back so I got one of her older novels to read. This book is set out with the heroine, Effie, and her mother, Nora, telling each other stories of their life. It's rather meandering and some sequences are rather hallucinogenic, and half the time I don't know where the author is going. Not totally unpleasant but not engrossing either.
4. The Lighthouse - P.D. JAMES. Maybe I've been reading too many 'fast-paced thrillers' but this book was plodding. The mystery that Commander Adam Dalgliesh of Scotland Yard has to investigate is riveting enough but it's all the wondering and pondering of the central characters about their private lives that left me impatient. It's a bit of an old-fashioned mystery like Agatha Christie where a murder occurs in an isolated environment (in this case, an island off the coast of Cornwall) where the murderer has to be someone among the 15 people trapped on the island. Not a bad book, but it took me 4 days to finish it. That is very long for me, especially when you factor in the fact that I'm not working.
5. The Truth, With Jokes - AL FRANKEN. One of three non-fiction books that I've been reading for the past month, written by Saturday Night Live veteran Al Franken. Yes, it's another book about one of the world's favourite sports, George W. Bush-bashing. Not that a lot of people dislike Bush -actually, yes, they do- but the simple-faced, pre-school brain Bush does and says a lot of things which make people want to hit him repeatedly over the head with a heavy encyclopaedia. This book doesn't detail all the idiotic things that Bush says - there are other books for that - but instead describes the machinations that goes on behind American elections and brings to light the twisted, pustulant supporting cast of megalomaniacs that prop up the Bush establishement.
6. Diplomatic Baggage: The Adventures of a Trailing Spouse - BRIGID KEENAN. My only experience of diplomats and expatriates are the ones I run into in Bangsar and the Secretary's wife at the embassy my sister used to work at (Hello, we kiss like this, ok? It is the French way), so I really had little expectations. Keenan is nothing what I imagined a diplomat's wife would be. She is deathly afraid of social dinners, quite frequently puts her foot in her mouth and doesn't shy away from protraying unheroic aspects of herself. In a society where a woman tailing after her husband for the sake of his career is increasingly seen as a backward step for women, Keenan candidly details her reasons and the angst and letting go her own career aspirations. This is a warm, funny, honest book which I enjoyed immensely.
7. Aspirin: The Remarkable Story of A Wonder Drug - DIARMUID JEFFREYS. It's medical history so I can't help but be fascinated by it. I know it's about a drug you can buy for 30pence but it's a drug that I prescribe nearly every day and it's amazing how much history it has tied to it. A drug that was first marketed as treatment against pain and fever, the world now ingests more than 200 billion of these pills for a variety of reasons from an acute heart attack to stroke prevention. It's a well-written book, never dry, with sympathetic and colourful characterisations of the people involved in the making of aspirin.