Public Library Used Book Sale

For a year (or more) now, Andrew and I have been saying that we can’t buy any more books. He has three large bookshelves full, each 6 feet tall, and totaling at least ten feet across. Though most of the books on his shelves have already been read. I have three and a half smaller bookshelves full, but most of mine have not been read. (I read much, much more slowly than he does.)

But, who can resist a used book sale at the local public library? Not only that, but we went the first night…within the first 20 minutes of the sale. We certainly couldn’t have waited until Saturday when the stock would have been picked over. No sir-ie-bob.

I walked out with a dozen books, including a American Museum of Natural History book on “man’s” exploration of the Universe from the 1960s. Also a smattering of sci-fi and a couple plain fiction books. Oh, and I got John Gribbin’s In Search of Schrodinger’s Cat — it might be a bit dated (1984), but I like Gribbin’s style, and maybe, just maybe I’ll start to understand quantum physics…. (after two undergrad and a graduate class in quantum physics, I realize that this is unlikely…)

The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants

by Ann Brashares

What can I say? I’m a sucker for stories about girl friends. They remind me of the wonderful friendships I have formed over the years, and long to have my “girls” closer.

Carmen, Tibby, Bridget, and Lena have been friends practically since before they were born. Their mothers had met in an exercise class for pregnant women — they were the Septembers, those due in September. While the Septembers grew apart through the years, the girls have not. Now, for the first time in their 15 years, the girls will be spending the summer apart — Carmen will be with her Dad out of state, Lena will be in Greece with her grandparents, Bridget will be in Mexico at soccer camp, and Tibby will be staying home, working at a discount department store.

Shortly before their good-byes, the girls discover that a pair of jeans Carmen bought on a whim at a thrift shop (without even trying them on) are magic. Not only do the pants fit all of the girls with their different figures, but the pants make them all look great.

The girls make a pact to share the pants over the summer — they will spend 1-2 weeks with each girl and then be sent on. At the end of the summer they will get together and record their experiences in the pants.

This book is sort of a Ya-Ya Sisterhood for a younger crowd. It’s touching and funny. I’m looking forward to reading the second book, The Second Summer of the Sisterhood (though I will wait for paperback).

Princess Diaries

3/5 stars

I picked this one just for a fun little distraction. And that’s exactly what I got.

Spellbound

3/5 stars

Another of Hitchcock’s movies. Andrew and I are going through them all (unless we get bored). The last couple that we’ve watched, Notorious and Saboteur, were kind of dull. I enjoyed this one more than Andrew did. I think it was partly because of Ingrid Bergman’s character. She is a psychiatrist helping a man suffering from amnesia and a guilt complex who posed as the new head of the institution (played by Gregory Peck). In some ways her character is a fairly strong female role model, especially for the time the movie was made. However, her lapse into puppy-dog-in-love woman got a bit annoying (and unbelievable).

Also, the closing scene was very familiar. I can’t think of where I’d seen it before, since I’ve never seen this film before. It’s the scene where a man’s hand holding a gun are seen in the foreground as the gun follows Ingrid Bergman’s character out of the gun-holder’s office. Then the hand turns the gun around so that it is facing the camera, and pulls the trigger. A flash of red, and the screen goes blank. This is going to bug me.

Cradle of Saturn

by James P. Hogan

Hogan is one of my favorite sci-fi writers. He is very good at making believable science in whatever worlds he creates. In Cradle of Saturn, he creates a world where the controversial ideas of Immanuel Velikovsky are actually true. Velikovsky, in the 1950s, proposed that Venus may not have formed billions of years ago with the other planets, but was instead ejected from Jupiter as a comet a mere 3500 years ago. These ideas have been shown to be implausible by many astronomers, including Carl Sagan. However, once I decided to just accept the science as a writer’s creation, I was able to enjoy the novel.

Years before the novel takes place, a group of open-minded humans, tired with the status quo decide to colonize a moon of Saturn. Free from the economic restraints of Earth, this group, called Kronians, were able to do science as it was intended to be done. In contrast, on Earth, the scientists have become locked into current ideas, unwilling to propose anything remotely controversial, since those ideas don’t get funding.

Then Jupiter spits out another comet. Athena.

Astronomers on Earth still refuse to believe it is something that happened before. They also refuse to believe that it will have much of an impact on Earth. The Kronians, some of whom were at Earth for talks aimed to smooth the rocky Earth-Kronian relations, know better, but no one will listen to them. This novel follows Landan Keene, an engineer and friend of the Kronians, from just after Athena is ejected, to just before it’s close encounter with Earth.

Overall it was quite a good book. I did get a bit tired by the end of all the problems that were thrown at Keene and his group. I realize that Athena was causing mass destruction on an Earth-wide scale, but it’s a novel, so we could be shielded/spared some of that.

Cube 2: Hypercube

2.5/5 stars

I watched the original Cube when it first aired (in 1998?). I’d enjoyed it, and when I saw that there was a sequel, I knew I had to watch. (My main complaint about Cube was Nicole de Boer, who played Ezri Dax on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. While she did a good job in Cube, I did not like her portrayal of the Dax character, so I had a hard time getting past that.)

Hypercube was equally well done. The characters climb from room to room trying to figure out where they are and how to get out. Some rooms are booby trapped, others have a time-differential. A cool twist was that, since they were in a hypercube, quantum-mechanical weirdness allowed for multiple realities. So we run into characters whose fate is different that we’d first seen. Unlike Cube, there seems to be a connection between the characters, but I still didn’t entirely understand the ending. I think I liked the open ending of Cube better.

Hell House

3/5 stars

This was a documentary on the “Hell House” done each year by the Trinity Church in Texas. The hell house is like a haunted house, but they portray people going to hell because of suicide, aborting a child, living as a homosexual, using drugs, or being part of the occult. The last two rooms of the hell house show heaven’s gate, where the few privileged who took Jesus as their savior (or called out to Jesus on their death beds) go through. The rest are chased away by figures in black. In the final room, we see hell itself. People are tied up to the wall being tortured, and there is a plexiglass cut out of the floor where people are seen trying to escape the burning fires.

More than once, the people running the hell house claim that they are not using “scare tactics” to get people to believe. Hmmm. The people they bring to God do not see the loving God of the New Testament. They are swayed into believing because they see a wrathful God out for vengeance against those who don’t believe. These new “believers” believe only to keep themselves out of hell. They believe just-in-case. They gave numbers of how many people had committed or re-committed their lives to Christ as a result of the hell house — they did not, however, say how many of those are still committed to Christ. My guess is that the numbers are much, much lower.

<RANT>
Speaking in tongues is when the holy spirit moves a person to speak in a language not understood by the speaker. However, if it is truly “speaking in tongues”, there will also be someone moved by the holy spirit present who can interpret for those around.

The minister of the Trinity Church encouraged his people to speak in their “love language” to the holy spirit, which everyone seemed to assume was the same as speaking in tongues. IT IS NOT! If you babble conversation to God in some unintelligible tongue, unless someone else is interpreting, you’re just babbling.
</RANT>

But I’m a Cheerleader

4/5 stars

I looked into this movie, because a friend from New Mexico had a picture of it in his weblog. Now, some of the movies he likes are funny, and some are just plain scary. Fortunately, this one was funny. The basic premise is that Megan, a cheerleader, is sent to a lesbian “rehab.” Rehab is very pink (for the girls) and very blue (for the boys), and give everyone an opportunity to rediscover their “proper” gender roles. The girls bone up on housekeeping and primping, while the boys attempt to do manly things like chopping wood and tossing around a football. Quite funny.

Several of the actors were vaguely familiar, which bugged me throughout the film. The lead actress, Natasha Lyonne, was in Slums of Beverly Hills. One of the lesbians, Melanie Lynskey, had played a stepsister in Ever After. Another of the lesbians, Clea DuVall, had been in Girl, Interrupted and had made a couple guest appearances on ER. For some reason, I recognized Dante Basco immediately as playing the new “Pan” in Hook. Weird.

The Nanny Diaries

by Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus

This book chronicles just one of Nan’s many years as a nanny. She literally runs into 4-year-old Grayer X in the park, and within a week becomes his primary caregiver.

Part of me wants to think people like the Xs don’t exist, but after working for five years at Southdale Mall in Edina, MN — an affluent suburb of Minneapolis — I realize that they are out there.

Recommended book. It’s an interesting, yet in some ways disturbing, glimpse into the lives of the rich, clueless “upper-crust” of society.

The Wedding Planner

2.5/5 stars

Ugh. I’d already seen this. Now I can’t remember if I’d rented it or actually gone to see it in the theater.

Not bad for a romantic comedy. Though J-Lo is still no Meg Ryan or Sandra Bullock. I think I enjoyed it more the first time around. Matthew McConaughey, of course, is very fine to look at and does a great job in an average film.