rules of the reading & viewing lists

I just put those reading & viewing lists up for fun. Mostly for myself, because I do forget what I read if I don't write it down. It can be annoying, as when I've read a book all the way through, thinking all along, "I must have started this before, but I just can't remember the end." And then when I get to the end I realize I have indeed read the whole thing before. This even happens to me with good books. It happened, for example, with The Hours. I should be ashamed to admit that. In fact I am ashamed to admit it, but it's also true. I had read both of the Lois Lowry books I listed to the right earlier, a year or so ago at least, but forgot. In fact I was sure that I'd only read The Giver and Gathering Blue, and I wanted to read some more because I invited her to come to our campus and SHE SAID YES! (Yes, that was pretty exciting.) So anyway I thought I should prepare by reading some of her other well-known books. Turns out they were even well-known to me, I had just forgotten. Sigh.

So anyway I made those lists but then last night we watched Dr. Doolittle with Eddie Murphy. This, you might suspect, was Nick's choice, and you'd be right. It was really really awful. I like the original book by Hugh Lofting--I even bought Nick a copy of it last year (somewhat edited for pc reasons, but I thought it worked fine) and read him the whole thing. The Eddie Murphy vehicle has nothing, not one thing besides a doctor who can understand animals, in common with the Lofting novel. Now, that's ok, I guess--go ahead and make movies that take off from books if you want to. But the movie that they made was so incredibly lame--alleviated by the occasional fart joke but otherwise, totally boring. And the plot--such as it was--was so inappropriate for kids! It's all about being taken over by an HMO! Like any 6-year-old understands, or cares! I couldn't even have cared less, in this case. Oh, yeah, there's a little subplot--probably at one point it was the main plot, but it really got swallowed up by the HMO thing--about accepting yourself and accepting weirdness in others--but that was so obvious and Hallmark-y that it was just insulting, really.

So anyway Eddie Murphy is not going on my viewing list. I may not even like everything that I put up there, but if I watch it under duress AND I hate it I'm not putting it there.

And if you want to know what I think of any of the other things I've been reading or watching lately you can post comments and ask. I'll tell you. There's just not room over there in the sidebar. I thought about a rating system (stars? A-F grades?) but decided I have to do enough of that sort of thing in real life so I'm not going to do it here.

OK, that's enough about the reading & viewing lists.