Book and Movie thoughts

Any new book suggestions from anybody? I could use another one! [Update 5:50pm]: I came across "Night Train to Lisbon" after returning "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" and wandering the aisles at the Capitol Hill branch of the Seattle public library. While I'm afraid it may be a little more "heavy" than what I had in mind, I was meaning to read this a while back. Plus, it sounds a bit like "The Alchemist" in its message of letting yourself be inspired by life and changing your life when you want to, so it should be pretty good. I was going to read this book with my black eyed peas & cheese stuffed poblano pepper that I'm baking in the toaster oven right now and I was going to have those little nugget corn dogs along with it (forgive my junk food fix) but I think Ian threw them away :(. It's probably for the better and I'll end up thanking him for doing so, but as of this second I am definitely not a happy camper ... I wanted my junk food while I read my book!!


[Update 1:57am]: So I read the first couple chapters of "Night Train to Lisbon" and it's actually very accessible. Although I'm sure eventually the themes will develop quite profoundly (it is categorized as a "philosophical novel" after all), it reads like any other fictional novel and catches my interest in foreign language ... looks like this one is a pretty good keeper! I'll have to read on. Apparently 2 million copies of this book sold worldwide, so we'll see... Oh, and Ian DID throw away my mini corn dogs I found out. They weren't even in the kitchen trash can, but thrown out of the apartment completely. I'm kinda glad I guess ... should've just made a fancy salad for a healthier snack instead.

Just yesterday I actually finished a book! Can you believe it? I really can't remember the last time I 1) sat down and actually picked a book to read for pleasure, and 2) finished it. There seem to be many more instances of the former than the latter.

En tout cas, I just finished "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" by Steig Larsson (the first book in the three-part Millennium series). Without going into detail, I'll just briefly say that I guess I was left a little underwhelmed. The buildup of the story was so tremendous and had so many intricate details, but the climax seemed a little weak in proportion to the huge plot development, and then I thought the conclusion was even weaker. Don't get me wrong, it wasn't horrible at all ... after all, I did finish the book because it kept me interested. So I guess at the end of the day, it was a fun story to read and pass the time this winter break. I have to keep in mind that I picked that book not for any particularly "deep", mind-opening, thought-provoking reason ... instead, it was just entertainment (like a TV show, but much more engaging) and it did very well at that. I also have to say that me having watched "The Girl Who Played With Fire" on DVD (the second book) before reading this first book may have dampened my excitement since I had a basic idea of Lisbeth Salander's skillset and Mikael Blomkvist's general dilemma. All in all it was a wonderfully satisfying feeling to finish a book this break. I really need to continue doing this. Thank you public libraries! :)

Last night I also watched "Inception" finally since it was available at the grocery store's Redbox machine. Wow ... what an interesting movie - I thought it was really cool. What I liked most about the film was how it played off of every viewer's real-life experiences with how it seems like you can go through an entire day's worth of events in a dream when we were actually only sleeping for, say, 30 minutes. The movie's idea that "if dream-time is much longer than real-time therefore if you have a dream within a dream, time at that level would be even further compounded" was so interesting, and I really think that they did a great job of showing the different characters at different "levels" of dream states while still holding the whole piece together quite clearly. I also loved how the movie played on the idea that the mind can create for itself given a real-life experience (for example, something that happened to us earlier in the day), and create a whole world of its own. And I definitely enjoyed the idea that the characters would "wake up" from their sleep state when they felt the falling sensation (the "kick" in the movie) or if they were killed in the dream since that always seems to happen in our own dreams ... we wake up suddenly from either of those two, but rarely something else. But then, what was even more fascinating was the idea that in the movie, if you were killed when you were too deep into the subconscious, you would not wake up but rather fall into a coma. Finally, the movie ended with the hint that while everybody came back out of the dream, the Japanese businessman could quite possibly start questioning the reality of his own "real" life, think it's a dream, and try to end it.

It all reminds me of the process of anaesthesia in medicine ... how we induce a coma, and depending on what we need, we can induce different "levels" of sensory block. Just a local anaesthetic for killing the pain in a wound? Or general anaesthesia for surgery so we don't feel pain and don't remember what happened .... and how far do we go? General anaesthesia can go as far as to stop even subconscious brain function like breathing .... it's absolutely fascinating.

Anyhow, I must go return the Redbox dvd, mail off some packages, and finish going through this new semester's syllabi and writing deadlines into my planner all while helping Ian finish the crossword puzzle via email (haha don't ask :-p). My classes seem very easy this semester so hopefully all runs smoothly, and it's decided that San Francisco is for sure in the plans ... hopefully by early March!

Best of luck in the new semester to all!