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stones clicking underwater We're a week into the new year and it still doesn't seem real to me. Maybe that has something to do with the quiet way that I marked the event. There was no party and very little drinking. I was with one person and that was all that I needed. ... Before sunrise this morning, I finished reading Nicholas Christopher's book Veronica and I can honestly say that it was a good read. It was the second book that he had written and in an odd coincidence it was also the second book of his that I've read. Having read A Trip to the Stars, his third book, before this one, I was able to see some of the same motifs used in that later book being used to a lesser extent in this earlier one. For example, astronomy must be something that interests Christopher, because the moon is prominent in both novels. Protagonists in both books had associations with the moon to some degree or another. In writing Veronica, Christopher borrowed heavily from Tibetan culture and beliefs, which was new to me. However, most of the references were lost of me and I may need to read a translation of The Tibetan Book of the Dead to get a better understanding of what they mean. Christopher must have known this would happen, because there is over a page worth of books that he referenced at the end of the novel. ... For Christmas I'd been given a Doctor Who episode from the Patrick Troughton era on DVD. I'd seen a handful of Troughton era episodes on public television, but I asked for this one without having seen it. Something about a young Victorian woman joining an extraterrestrial and a Scotsman as they travel through space and time appealed to me. Now having seen it, I can't say that I was disappointed by my choice. Watching nearly forty year old science fiction made for a great way to spend the afternoon. ... Leaving behind the flashy world of the grift in Confidence, I ended my day by watching the Jean Renoir film classic The Grand Illusion. The summary said that this movie was the first great prison camp escape movie and that is certainly true. Everything that I saw in The Great Escape with Steve McQueen was being done by French prisoners of war in this pre World War II film. I wonder how many redneck Americans would be offended to learn that the escape techniques that they used during World War II were done by the French a generation earlier. |