Apparently only two of us have consumed this – and the other guy left it at Wishy Washy. I don’t know if I love this cd or if it has lodged itself in my brain and I can’t get it out, but I can’t stop listening to it. I haven’t done this with a cd or an album since I was a teenager. Or maybe I have, but not to this extent. Except for M.I.A.’s Kala. Oh, and I also got kind of repetitious with George Winston’s December. And Rosanne Cash’s Black Cadillac. And this really cool recording of Mozart. And Norah Jones. And … OK – maybe I have gotten this obsessed with other cds.

Sigh! I need some new music…

I almost did not finish this. There is a scene near the end where a man falls head-first down a shaft and is stuck. Can’t get up, can’t get out. EEEEEK. I felt claustrophobic and I was only reading about it. Scary book and probably a lot truer than the government (any government) lets on.

It would probably help my appreciation and understanding of this book immensely if I am or ever was a junky, but somehow cannot convince myself heroin addiction is a reasonable sacrifice in order to enhance my comprehension of these 189 pages.

Without that opium-driven fixation, I fear I merely stumble through this book, wondering what the hell Burroughs was thinking and why I should care.

This book doesn’t have characters; it has caricatures—interesting, often eccentric, but not quite believable.

The author describes writing as her passion, which could be good, if it results in a great book, or it could be bad as, in this case, it means she is frenzied about writing and could only get snatches of her thoughts on paper. The book has glimmers of good ideas in it, but I get the feeling it was written by someone who was so agitated to get it all down - or had such a short attention span - that she could not be bothered to fill in the details necessary to communicate her ideas clearly and understandably. I frequently wondered just what the hell was going on and was even left with that feeling at the end.

Unless you like Ingmar Bergman films, give this book a pass.

I never actually watched this on HBO, only in syndication, so it was quite eye-opening to realize how much livelier this show is in its uncut version. It is also interesting to discover what Big’s real name is—a detail that was cut from the final episode in syndication, I might add.

I enjoyed the series ending (Carrie in Paris) the first time I saw it, but this time around, having seen the entire series first, I am fairly annoyed with how she passes herself off as some sort of sophisticated New York woman, yet when she gets to Paris, complains about there being “nothing to do” even after only a week when she complains that she has “been to every museum”. I doubt anyone even has time to drive past every museum in Paris within one weeks’ time, much less spend any significant amount of time in every one of them. Just the Louvre alone can consume a week, so she comes off as much more provincial than she pretends she is.

This book is so easy to read and so compelling, I was on page 403 before I bothered to check how many pages it has. Becky Sharp is Victorian England’s precursor to (and probably the inspiration for) Margaret Mitchell’s Scarlett O’Hara. What is most painful about the book, and perhaps was Thackery’s point in creating the character of Becky, is how perfect and morally incorrupt they expected women to be in that day and age without giving them the power or the means to maintain their perfection and incorruptibility except through reliance upon men and how blind they were to the dearth of alternatives women had when those same men let them down.

That and the character of Amelia, whom I frequently wanted to slap for her vacuity and stupidity.

It was funny in places, but otherwise kind of pointless. The kind of thing you would expect when Hollywood starts making fun of itself and takes itself a little too seriously in the process.

This is a seriously creepy book. Where does this woman get her ideas from?

OK. Not one of her best. I liked The Surgeon and The Mephisto Club much better.

There’s only one tiny thing that bugged me about this book: Lehane has a Texan house painter in here who called Patrick Kenzie “y’all.” I understand that Lehane was raised in Boston and writes about mainly Boston types, so for that and because his writing really rocks in most other ways, I can cut him some slack.

I don’t know why, but “y’all” seems to be a difficult concept for northern writers to grasp and they seem to think it is mainly a word they can throw in at random as a signal to everyone that this particular character hails from below the Mason-Dixon line. Southerners never throw in “y’all” at random; the guideline for its use is simple. With first- and third-person pronouns, we have both singular and plural forms in English. We used to have singular and plural forms of the second-person pronouns as well, until “thee” fell out of favor sometime in the past 100 years or so (except apparently with the Amish and southern-revival preachers) and the second-person plural “you” came to be used for both singular and plural, except for the south, where “y’all” - a contraction of “you all” - fills in the void of the second-person plural.

So any northern writers out there—don’t y’all be distressing your southern readers by misusing “y’all”, OK?