Currently reading, listening, & watching…

Currently reading:
Simon Garfield’s Just My Type: A Book About Fonts. I dig fonts – if they’re good ones. Fascinating how it’s something we have so much control over in our lives nowadays.

Last watched:
PJ20 – very well done documentary on the first 20 years of Pearl Jam

The Muppets – Fozzie Fozzie Bear!!! YAYAY!!!

Currently Listening to:
-Lots of The National, following their stellar Nov 29 Concert.
-The Airborne Toxic Event

Recently finished reading:

I went back to some McCarthy with Blood Meridian or the Evening Redness in the West. Some claim it to be his best work, and considering I am a fairly big fan, I really got into it. It appeared on TIME magazine’s top 100 English novels from 1923-2005 (entertainment.time.com/2005/10/16/all-time-100-novels). Turns out the judge made NPR’s list of top 100 literary characters since 1900: http://www.npr.org/programs/totn/features/2002/mar/020319.characters.html.

The Hunger Games  – by Suzanne Collins

I finally finished Cormac McCarthy’s Cities of The Plain, and thus have completed the entire Border Trilogy. The Epilogue of this last book, and ultimately the entire series is rather challenging. Then, Cormac completes it all with placing the dedication – as you know usually to be found at the opening of a book or series – on the final page. The story is only beginning

-M G Vassanji’s The In-Between World of Vikram Lall. Being in Kenya, and being from Canada, this book seemed a natural fit. It was very good. I just may be finally warming up to Canadian fiction.

Finished a long long while ago (but can’t bring myself to delete them from here yet):
-Imagination in Teaching and Education – Kieran Egan
…. and whooooole lotta other stuff…
-Nel Noddings’ The Courage to Care.
-Thomas King’s Medicine River.
Kieran Egan’s latest thoughts in The Future of Education: Reimagining Our Schools from the Ground Up
-John Dewey’s Democracy and Education
-Spencer, Arnold, Huxley, and other dudes as we swung from Romanticism into the Industrial Revolution.
-Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women.
-J. M. Itard’s 1802 account of The Wild Boy of Aveyron
-Emile or On Education by that romantic himself, Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
-Some Thoughts Concerning Education by John Locke.
-Plato’s The Republic. Maybe you’ve heard of this dude.
-I was browsing in a used book store when I picked up Crossing the Water, Daniel Robb’s account of a year and half out of the three he spent on an island working with troubled boys. I picked up this book before fate threw a question at me. That question remains to be answered, although I am currently struck by the oddity of the coincidence.

Recently watched:

-Liberia ’77 – I am not necessarily a reliable source when it comes to this film as I am friends with the brothers featured in this documentary. However, I’d like to think that I’m a fairly objective fellow – and this took an uneasy subject, or a few uneasy subjects rather, and did an excellent job. It will be playing on the Knowledge Network on Tuesday Nov. 15 at 9pm.Three documentaries at the VIFF. Somewhere Between followed five teen-age Chinese-American girls who had been adopted as infants, from China. Sushi: The Global Catch was an excellent film about the pressures that have been placed upon the Blue-Fin Tuna. The Price of Sex examined human trafficking for prostitution, and was a very well done piece of work that was clearly a great deal of work, dedication and caring on the part of the filmmaker, Mimi Chakarova. Link to the film’s website: priceofsex.org.

-Win-Win on the plane to London. It was better than all the hollywood type selections being offered.

-Beginners with Ewan McGregor, Christopher Plummer, Melanie Laurent, and dog named Arthur are all fantastic. I recommendt his one very much.