No good movies to speak of. We did rent the animated (as if there could be a live action version of) Plague Dogs - but it was an old tape, sound was bad, and the Yorkshire accents make you feel like you should have prepped by watching 8 hours of "All Creatures Great and Small" ), and worse, the story is severely trunecated from the book. Of course, thanks to Peter Jackson, we can all appreciate the hardship created by trying to cram a heavily detailed novel (which the Plague Dogs is - much of it consumed by descriptions of places - crags, bogs, streams, mist, all of it to enhance the leading character's perspectives: being dogs, they primarily depend on their keen sense of smell above all else, and that translates into the descriptive ambiance of the novel) into an hour and a half (or is this case, 88 minutes). My disappointment though was with the grim ending that was tacked on the end of the movie. At any rate, the book is a hard, long read, full not only of enviornmental detail, but tough dialect, but well worth the time. Easily one of the best, yet saddest books I've ever read. If you own a dog, you must read the book. Insights into animal experimentation, the role of the media in society, the mindset of "simple farm folk" and above all, the sentiment that the world is a bad place for dogs - will resonate for weeks.
Yeah. So in a complete 180 from that, I picked up and finished "Shopgirl" by Steve Matrin (yeah, the wild and crazy guy one) this weekend - what a great novella. Nicely crafted, wonderful pacing, and above all: the man knows how to write an interesting paragraph. I love that I had to pick up a dictionary no less than 5 times while reading a 180-page book: better yet I surmised the meaning of all but one of the words (and on that, I was close, just unsure of it's usage), which means Martin used them appropriately (at least in my mind). I'm such a vocab geek that I actually respect that if a writer can use a word in passing without it standing out (that is as a noun) and I don't recognize it I like it.Anyway, a fine, bittersweet read balanced by witty prose and cutting humor. Will read his other book as well.