Current Reading

I haven't had much luck lately in chosing books. I keep picking things up and putting them down once I reach the halfway point. Among the latest casualties, Andrea Anshworth's misery memoir Once in a House on Fire and Crocodile Soup, the debut novel by Julia Darling. They were both certainly well-written and, in theory at least, exactly the sort of book I love, but they just didn't grab my attention. So I decided to try something very different, a rambling novel written by an American male. I settled on Richard Russo's Nobody's Fool. So far, so good.

"You keep on rowin', and I'll keep on smilin'."

I've been on a bit of a Mike Leigh kick lately. In the past couple of weeks, I've watched Career Girls and his most recent, Another Year. Both were wonderful, though Career Girls did strain credulity a bit here and there...Some of the flashbacks seemed like scenes from a sketch comedy show. The Young Ones perhaps. Last weekend, I watched this:I was totally, utterly, unreservedly besotted. Sally Hawkins was absolutely marvelous as Poppy, a genuinely optimistic and cheery (yet emphatically not stupid) schoolteacher who enrolls in driving lessons after her bicycle is stolen. She reminded me of Rita Tushingham. Eddie Marsan turned in a startlingly good performance as Scott, Poppy's resolutely anti-happy-go-lucky driving instructor. I loved absolutely everything about this film, including what some might consider its glacial pace. Most of all, I loved this gloriously humane film's underlying seriousness.