Books n stuff.

I guess it's again time to mention what I've been reading, watching, and listening to lately. And one thing I've listened to is Tom Clancy's latest, The Teeth of the Tiger. And I guess Tom Clancy books are good for listening to in the car, where you are more willing to put up with poor plotting and even worse characters. To me, the best part of the book was that a portion of it was set in Charlottesville, VA, where I lived for over 20 years. I always get some sort of vicarious enjoyment from books set someplace I'm familiar with (and movies: the day I saw Black Widow, I walked through a parking lot that showed up in the movie), so it was fun to track the characters as they moved through town. I don't mind location errors where they advance the plot - some of the action takes place in a mall on the north side of town, and at one point the heroes take the escalator up to the second floor of one of the anchor department stores, which in real life is all on one floor - or are tangential to it (the hotel where the bad guys stay is not one kilometer off of the Interstate, it's more like 4 miles up a U.S. highway; and while the Wal-Mart that's mentioned in the book is across the street from the mall where the action takes place, it's not directly across the street as the book describes - it's across the street and up the road a mile and a half), but sometimes the error is so blatant that it detracts from the story, and this book has a whopper. At one point, one of our heroes drives from Arlington, VA to "the farm" (a secret training complex, in the country near Charlottesville, but established elsewhere in the book as less than 10 minutes from the mall, so it's essentially in Charlottesville) - and he goes "directly" by taking I-95 to Richmond and then I-64 to Charlottesville. Everyone else in the world goes from Arlington to Charlottesville via I-66 and U.S. 29, which is (roughly) the hypotenuse of the right triangle formed by these two different routes, and about an hour shorter. A really odd mistake to make, as looking at a map - or a site like Mapquest - would have given the right answer, and given how accurate the description of Charlottesville is, you'd think that Clancy must have spent some time there, and surely would have known the right way to get there from the DC area.

But I digress. The book was an okay thriller with a very abrupt ending, and continues the Jack Ryan series into the next generation, which is either good or not, depending on your view of that series. (Although even if you like the Ryan books, it will strain your remaining credulity to accept the relationship that the particular protagonists of this book have with Ryan.)

A better book was High Country, the latest in Nevada Barr's Anna Pigeon series of mysteries set in National Parks; this one, in Yosemite National Park. In the Anna Pigeon stories, much of the fun is getting to see the operation of National Parks from the inside, and that's a bit missing in this book, as Anna goes undercover instead of keeping her usual role as a Park Ranger. While it's kind of fun to see a character you've gotten used to through the previous twelve books do something different, the park information, the secondary characters, and the plot itself all suffer a bit in comparison with the earlier books. If you're a fan of the series, this one is worth reading; if you haven't read this series before, I'd start with something else instead (perhaps Track of the Cat).

No Way to Treat a First Lady, by Christopher Buckley, is a very funny satire of the OJ trial, lawyers, politics, the entertainment industry, and the excesses of the Clinton White House, with entertaining courtroom drama thrown in. Worth reading, if you like that sort of thing, which it seems that I do.

I watched Heavenly Creatures, the 1994 Peter Jackson-directed and -written movie of a famed 1950's New Zealand matricide, and which was Kate Winslet's first movie. Two girls with an intense fantasy life - brought to life with claymation knights and princesses - and an extremely close friendship turn to murdering one's mother because she wants to keep them apart. In retrospect, you can see the glimmerings of a lot of scenes in the Lord of the Rings series. Well worth watching, so long as you understand that it ends up with a reasonably graphic murder.

And yes, I watched the Friends finale (and that was about all of the whole Friends love-in extravaganza I watched). I guess it was okay, as finales go: better than Seinfeld, not as good as Cheers or Mary Tyler Moore. For me, the best part was right at the very end, after the six have left their keys on the table, left the apartment and shut the door, and as the camera pans back to the view of the empty apartment, the guitar instrumental that's being played is by ... the Jefferson Airplane. A much classier piece of music than, say, the theme song.