During my convalescence this past winter I watched a lot of movies. I've gotten busy making YouTube playlists of my favorite music and movies. I started one playlist privately just to collect some of my favorite concluding scenes from movies, and I threw in a few scenes from old movies that marked the Intermission break. … Continue reading Favorite movie endings
Tag: modern novels
Favorite books of 2021 (and 2020)
My blog is new, so I've never picked out favorite books for a year, but here we go. My ten faves for 2021, fiction and nonfiction, out of the 66 books I read: 1. New Testament -- the recent translation by David Bentley Hart 2. Notre Dame de Paris Translated by Alban Krailsheimer 3. Lonesome … Continue reading Favorite books of 2021 (and 2020)
The Fellowship of the Ring
"The Fellowship of the Ring" came out in theaters twenty years ago, almost to the day. Below is an essay that I wrote in the days after I saw it -- an essay that, besides being a bit of a time portal, covers a ton of subjects about books, movies, history, religion, dead white males, … Continue reading The Fellowship of the Ring
Makoons
"Makoons" is the last book written, thus far, in "The Birchbark House" series. (Spoilers ahead.) It's a deceptively simple story, which you think is just about the details of ordinary life, but then you realize how many deaths have taken place in the course of the story. Nokomis. Angeline and Fishtail. Two Strike's pet lamb … Continue reading Makoons
Chickadee
This has been my favorite of the "Birchbark House" series. Jacob asked me while I was in the middle of it to read it to him, so we read the last half together. The introduction of other tribes goes one step further in this book with the Metis people, who “are the sons and daughters … Continue reading Chickadee
The Birchbark House
During the first quarantine summer (2020), my family and I were binging heavily on the "Little House On the Prairie" television show and starting to read Laura Ingalls Wilder's "Little House" novels. My wife, who read all those novels as a child, suggested we look into a series of young adult novels told from the … Continue reading The Birchbark House
The Last Picture Show
I knew nothing about this story going in. I thought it was going to be some sober, artsy-fartsy thing. It’s actually filled with sex, much of it surprisingly explicit and even erotic. The sex is painted real, meaning it’s only occasionally a joyful thing and more often: sad, boring, painful, calculating, stolen, paid for, animalistic … Continue reading The Last Picture Show
Hero, meet your villain; or, never mind
It's a common trope in fiction: a final confrontation between the central hero of a story and its central villain. It's an important trope in Westerns, both on the page and screen -- Clint Eastwood's "Unforgiven" is just one famous example. And we see it in works of fiction that are too many to count: … Continue reading Hero, meet your villain; or, never mind
Comanche Moon
I almost skipped reading "Comanche Moon" because of some critical reviews – and it does have a lot of flaws, which I’ll get into. In the end I decided to read it because it brings back Famous Shoes, the Kickapoo tracker who was practically the best single thing about “Streets of Laredo.” And there is … Continue reading Comanche Moon
Dead Man’s Walk
They say that “Streets of Laredo”, the sequel to "Lonesome Dove,: suffers from not having Gus McCrae, who didn't survive the first book. They also say that because fans wanted to see Gus again, Larry McMurtry wrote his prequels to “Lonesome Dove”, in which we get to see both Gus and Call in their youth: … Continue reading Dead Man’s Walk