BOOKS: The Girl Who Played With Fire, Stieg Larsson (2006/US 2009)

Second in the Mikael Blomkvist/Lisbeth Salander series.

As in The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, Larsson seems to take pleasure in keeping his two protagonists as far apart as possible. As the new volume opens, Lisbeth has severed ties with Mikael for reasons that aren't entirely clear to him. He's too busy to worry much about that, though, back at work at his magazine, which is about to expose a sex-trafficking ring that will implicate several important members of Swedish society and government.

When the authors of that expose are murdered, however, Lisbeth once again takes center stage in Mikael's life (though still only from a distance); she is the principal suspect. He turns his investigative skills to proving her innocence, in which he seems to be the only believer. Meanwhile, Lisbeth is hiding from the law and trying to figure out how and why she's being set up; the two exchange occasional e-mails, but Mikael continues to be frustrated that she won't tell him anything that might help him solve the case.

Lisbeth's ties to the actual murderers turn out to be surprisingly close, and we learn a great deal about her past in this book. She continues to be a fascinating character, combining remarkable intelligence with intense misanthropy and lack of trust in the rest of humanity. (Not that she doesn't have reasons for that misanthropy, as we will learn.)

There's a fairly high amount of violence in this one, so it may not be for those who prefer their mysteries on the cozy side. But Lisbeth's backstory is compelling, and in light of the events here, it will be interesting to see how her relationship with Mikael changes in the third and final volume (due in the US in 2010).

BOOKS: No Such Creature, Giles Blunt (2009)

After a series of dark police procedurals set in northern Ontario, Blunt changes things up with a relatively light story set (mostly) in the southwestern US.

Owen Maxwell is 17, and has spent the last few summers traveling cross-country with his uncle Max in a nicely tricked-out RV. They are employed as "gentleman thieves," and they are partial to pulling off their robberies at Republican fundraisers; as Willie Sutton once said when asked why he robbed banks, "that's where the money is."

When Max and Owen's associates begin to disappear, it seems as if they may have caught the attention of the Subtractors, a particularly vicious gang of thieves who rob other thieves. Their cruelty is legendary, and Max insists that they are mere myth; "no such creature," he says. But someone is killing and maiming their friends, and if Max and Owen can't figure out who, they may be in deep trouble.

Max and Owen are marvelous characters. Former Shakespearean actor Max is constantly dropping lines from the Bard, and looks forward to each new "show" that he and Owen put on as a chance to try a new costume and accent. Owen is beginning to long for a more normal life, and worries about how to tell Max that he wants to retire and go to college.

There is, of course, a beautiful young woman who may be less trustworthy than she appears, a crazed ex who's chasing her, and several clever heists to be pulled. There are some terrific comic moments, but Blunt also does a fine job of building tension throughout. Great fun.

MOVIES: Julie & Julia (Nora Ephron, 2009)

What a godawful mess of a movie this is, with only a few decent supporting performances to take pleasure in.

It's really two, two, two movies in one. One story features Amy Adams as Julie Powell, a New York office drone who sets out to cook all 524 recipes in Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking in one year and blog about the experience; the other gives us Meryl Streep as Julia Child, living in Paris in the 1950s, and shows us how that famous cookbook came to be.

Let's start with the contemporary half of the story. The biggest problem is that Adams is horribly miscast. Her special gift is to play characters who radiate joy and innocence without making the audience want to wring their sunny little necks; while I'm always happy to see an actor try to stretch out of her comfort zone, Powell's disillusionment and ennui are a radical leap from Adams' usual characters, and she doesn't come close to pulling it off. Even if she had, I'm not sure it would help. Julie is so unlikable and whiny a woman that I don't think any actress could have made her sympathetic or interesting.

Then we have Streep as Julia Child. When Meryl is good, she can be amazing, but when she's bad, it's painful to watch, and I think she's very bad here. (I realize that this puts me in a very small minority.) She's so busy working on Julia's distinctive voice and physical presence -- and she does get those things right -- that there's no time left to work on creating a human being to go with them. It's one of those Streep performances that is only about the externals, and I was constantly aware that I was watching An Actress At Work.

By contrast, I was delighted by Jane Lynch's small performance as Julia's sister, Dorothy. In order to be convincing as her sister, Lynch is essentially doing her own version of Streep's version of Julia, but unlike Streep, Lynch disappears into the character; the voice and the physicality feel natural and organic instead of always feeling like conscious choices. It wasn't until the credits rolled, in fact, that I even realized that it was Jane Lynch playing the role.

We're meant to be inspired by the way that food and cooking give both women purpose and fulfillment in life, but all we get is a mound of gloppy sentiment built around one woman we don't like and one woman who never becomes anything more than a tedious acting exercise. A ghastly disappointment.

BOOKS: Get Real, Donald E. Westlake (2009)

The 14th -- and sadly, the final -- installment in the adventures of John Dortmunder and his ragtag gang of thieves.

This time around, John and the gang are approached by Doug Fairkeep, a reality TV producer who wants to build a show around the planning and pulling off of a theft. Dortmunder can't quite figure out how this is supposed to work; his objective is normally not to get caught, and having every moment of the heist on film would seem to be an insurmountable obstacle. But Doug convinces them that he can manage that part of things, and John and the gang agree to go along with the idea.

Naturally, they're almost immediately scheming to find a way to pull off their own real caper while pretending to go along with Fairkeep's TV heist. Westlake piles on the complications in his iminitable fashion, and his writing is as droll and lively as ever.

Some of the Dortmunder novels end with the gang in complete frustration, as one final obstacle keeps them from making any money at all. It doesn't spoil too much, I don't think, to say that there is a payday at the end of this one, and I think it's nice to have the series end on a happy note for John and friends.

Westlake was a master novelist, and his recent death was a great loss. Get Real is a fine farewell, and if you've never made the acquaintance of John Dortmunder, this is as good an introduction as any.

MOVIES: Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino, 2009)

There are all sorts of reasons that people will be infuriated by Inglourious Basterds. It's too long, it's too talky, it's too violent, it's too self-absorbed, it rewrites history. Ignore those people; this is a terrific movie, one of the year's best.

Inglourious Basterds is a delirious, giddy, and deadly serious movie about the power of the movies. Movies are a weapon in this movie, not only in the metaphorical sense -- a Nazi propaganda film is central to the plot -- but in the spectacular action climax of the movie, a literal weapon as well. (Remember that old silver nitrate film stock was extraordinarily flammable.)

There are three central characters in the movie, and their stories weave around one another, with the three coming together only at the end. Brad Pitt (who is not nearly as much the star of the movie as the advertising would suggest) is Lt. Aldo "The Apache" Raine, who assembles a team of Jewish-American soldiers -- the Inglourious Basterds -- to go into Nazi-occupied France and kill as many Nazis as possible; "we in the Nat-zee killin' bidness," says Pitt, drawling broadly and hamming it up in grand style. Mélanie Laurent is Emmanuelle Mimieux, the owner of a Paris cinema that is the setting for the movie's epic ending; Laurent is delightful as a woman out for revenge at any cost.

And the spectacular Christoph Waltz steals the movie as SS Col. Hans Landa, latest in a long line of suave movie Nazis, oozing equal parts of charm and menace (in four languages, no less). He's featured in two of the movie's best set pieces; an interrogation of a French dairy farmer is almost Hitchcockian in the way it maintains and builds tension, and a restaurant scene with Laurent's Emmanuelle balances dry wit and terror in unexpected ways.

In smaller roles, Daniel Brühl is excellent as a German soldier determined to ride his war-hero celebrity as far as it will take him, Diane Kruger shines as a German actress, and Michael Fassbender has some fine moments as (only in a Tarantino movie) a heroic film critic.

There are relatively few moments of violence in Inglourious Basterds, but those few moments are quite intense, and if you're like me, you may be wincing and covering your eyes at two or three points in the movie.

The less said about the plot of the movie, the better. The final 40 minutes or so are a brilliant sequence, a spectacularly good buildup to an ending that rewrites history in a way that takes great chutzpah; some, no doubt, will find it inappropriate to the point of being offensive. But the movies are another world, Tarantino tells us, and if you can't have a happy ending in the movies, then what's the point?

BOOKS: The Accidental Billionaires, Ben Mezrich (2009)

The story of the creation of Facebook. Sort of.

Mezrich calls this a "dramatic, narrative account," a phrase which he apparently thinks allows him to get away with all sorts of stuff that doesn't really fall under the usual definitions of nonfiction or journalism.

He acknowledges that he has "changed or imagined" the settings and descriptions of various scenes, changed details about some of the people in his narrative, and "re-created and compressed" dialogue. Mezrich was unable to interview Mark Zuckerberg, one of the central players in the story, but that does not stop him from writing entire chapters in which he describes Zuckerberg's actions and thoughts at times when no one else was present who might have given Mezrich such information. (Given Zuckerberg's refusal to be interviewed for this book, it is no surprise that he is made the villain, and that Eduardo Saverin, who was interviewed, is portrayed as Zuckerberg's victim.)

In short, Mezrich admits that he's making a lot of shit up.

The story of Facebook is probably an interesting one, based on what we can tell from Mezrich's creative imagining of events. But this version of the story is so clearly slanted, and so filled with Mezrich's fantasies about what might have happened, that it's useless to consider it as anything other than cheap fiction, and not very entertaining fiction at that.

BOOKS: The Devil's Company, David Liss (2009)

Third in Liss' series of historical/financial thrillers featuring Benjamin Weaver.

The setting is London in the 1720s, where Benjamin works as a "thief-taker," sort of a cross between a bounty hunter and a modern private eye. His reputation as a former champion boxer helps him get clients who might otherwise be reluctant to hire a Jew.

His client this time has hired him to pull off what should be a simple con game at the gambling tables, but things go very wrong, and Benjamin finds himself being blackmailed into taking part in a complicated scheme involving the East India Company. It becomes clear very quickly that there are many different hands pulling strings, and Benjamin is even less sure than usual who's on his side, or even what side he's supposed to be on.

There's a very large cast of scheming characters and victims here, and Liss does a superb job of handling them; each character is so crisply drawn that I was never confused about the current state of affairs (at least, no more so than Benjamin is at any given moment). Liss also handles very well the difficult task of depicting period social attitudes towards various minorities -- an Indian watchman, the denizens of a particularly unusual brothel -- without making us hate the characters who hold those attitudes; in part, he does this by making Benjamin and his friends a bit more tolerant than most men of the era.

The prose has enough flavor of the 18th century to be convincing, but not so much that you feel as if you're slogging through some deadly high-school classic. The clues to the mystery are fairly laid out, and the twists and turns of the story never feel arbitrary.

As with the earlier volumes in the series, Liss delights in exploring the early stages of institutions that we take for granted today. A Conspiracy of Paper was set against the backdrop of the earliest stock markets; A Spectacle of Corruption dealt with a nasty Parliamentary election. (The Coffee Trader, a spinoff of sorts from the series which features Benjamin's uncle as protagonist, deals with the birth of commodities trading.) This time, we get an inside look at the growth of the East India Company, a forerunner of today's corporations; there's a very contemporary feeling to conversations in which characters argue that the company's interests should take priority over the nation's interests (or in the extreme case, that the company's interests are the nation's interests).

Marvelous stuff, and highly recommended to fans of historical fiction, financial thrillers, and mysteries.

BOOKS: Sunnyside, Glen David Gold (2009)

As he did in his first novel, Carter Beats the Devil, Gold gives us a mix of historical figures and fictional characters, set in a story that's partly based on history and partly based in Gold's imagination. I find it frustrating that Gold is so disinclined to tell us which parts of the story are real and which are made up; his author's note at the end of the book is marginally less stingy with such details than he was with Carter, but not by much.

Our story this time is set just as America is about to enter World War I, and begins with a mass delusion that swept America -- Charlie Chaplin was sighted in over 800 locations across the country on the same day. (As farfetched as that sounds, it apparently does come from the historical side of the ledger and not the imaginative.) Our three central characters (Chaplin being one) are caught up in that event. Leland Wheeler is a lighthouse keeper with dreams of becoming an actor; he sees Chaplin drown in a whirlpool. Hugo Black is a railroad engineer assigned to crowd control in a small Texas town that's about to be visited by Chaplin.

Wheeler and Black are both historical figures. By the end of Sunnyside, Leland will have changed his name to Lee Duncan and be headed for a career in show business, though not in the way he'd hoped. Hugo is, I assume, the future Supreme Court justice, though I don't believe that Gold ever specifically identifies him as such; he's the right age, and enough of the details of his life are correct. (Some are very much not -- the real Hugo Black never saw combat -- but that's just Gold being Gold.)

My biggest problem with the novel is that the three stories of Charlie, Lee, and Hugo never come together in any cohesive way; that day of delusion that opens the novel is the closest the three men will ever come to having much in common, and their stories diverge from there. Lee and Hugo both end up in the military, Lee in France and Hugo in northern Russia; and Charlie continues to make movies, struggling to find his artistic voice. I found the Chaplin segments the most entertaining, and would have been much happier with them on their own.

There is much marvelous writing here, and Gold is often at his best in long set pieces -- Chaplin at a Hollywood party, Hugo's feast with three young Russian princesses (a meal which may or may not be nothing more than an absinthe-induced fantasy). Gold brings his historical characters to vivid life; I especially enjoyed the rivalry between Chaplin and Mary Pickford, who has all the success he longs for.

Sunnyside is a bit bloated, and feels more like three interwoven stories than a single novel. But when it's good, it's very good indeed, and though it's not entirely successful, I am happy to have read it.

MOVIES: a depressing day

After enduring a double feature of The Hangover and Funny People, I am officially declaring myself out of touch with American movie comedy. This was four hours of so-called comedy during which I laughed not once, a festival of men being insulting and abusive to one another, a cornucopia of homophobia and dick jokes. And these are men who are supposedly friends? One wonders how men who didn't like one another would behave.

There's only one significant female character in each movie. In The Hangover, she's a castrating shrew (Rachael Harris has done interesting things with similar characters in the past, but she's given nothing to work with here), and in Funny People, she's merely an object of desire with no personality of her own (Leslie Mann, wife of director Judd Apatow, reminding us why nepotism is a bad thing).

Humor feels so much meaner in the last decade. I think of TV shows like The Office (both versions) or Curb Your Enthusiasm, which ground most of their jokes in awkward humiliation and embarrassment, and now that movie comedy is dominated by Apatow and his imitators, that sort of cruel humor dominates the box office, too.

Maybe it's a generational thing, and maybe I'm just a cranky old curmudgeon, but I desperately hope this is just a phase. Surely it's still possible to make comedies in which the audience can like the characters, and in which the characters actually like one another.

BOOKS: The Believers, Zoe Heller (2009)

A New York lawyer has a stroke, and his family begins to crack under the strain. That's really all there is to Heller's novel, but the characters are so precisely drawn and the writing so viciously witty that we don't need much more.

The Litvinoff family matriarch, Audrey, is a nasty piece of work, cold and uncaring, with never a kind word for anyone, so it's not surprising that each of the three Litvinoff children is massively screwed up. Rosa has spent years drifting from one chic revolutionary cause to another, and has currently convinced herself that perhaps she should return to the family roots by becoming an Orthodox Jew. Karla finds herself increasingly attracted to a local newspaper stand operator, even as she and her husband embark upon the process of adopting a child. Lenny has the occasional period of responsibility, but his drug addiction means that they never last too long.

These four characters dealing with the stress of Joel's illness are all that Heller needs, and I wish she'd left out the silly soap-opera nonsense about the woman who reveals a Secret From Joel's Past (if you don't have the secret figured out by the end of the page on which she appears, then you haven't watched nearly enough bad movies); it's unnecessary clutter.

Still, The Believers is terrifically entertaining, a ruthless look at a family whose members seem incapable of growing up.

BOOKS: Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue, John McWhorter (2008)

Most histories of English, McWhorter says, are written from the perspective of vocabulary. Why did we see an influx of French words at this point in history, and Latin words at that point? In this short book, McWhorter looks at the history of the language through its grammar.

There is a strong case, McWhorter argues, that our language owes a larger debt than most linguists acknowledge to the Celtic languages, Welsh and Cornish in particular. So strong is the evidence, in fact, that McWhorter practically accuses his fellow linguists of willfully ignoring it and suppressing any research that would support it.

Why has it been so easy to overlook? Largely due to the differences between written and spoken English; in an era when written English meant formal English -- there were no Twitter or blogs to demonstrate more casual use -- some influences on the language were less likely to be documented than others.

Along the way, McWhorter explains why English has changed so much faster than other languages in the Germanic family, and offers a thorough demolition of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis -- the notion that our language shapes our perception of the world.

He closes with the suggestion that very early English may have been influenced by the now-dead Phoenician language. This, he acknowledges, is more speculative than his arguments on the Celtic influence, but he offers it as an area deserving of further study and research.

McWhorter's writing is lively and not too heavy; he's very skilled at presenting complex linguistic ideas so that they are accessible to the layman.

MOVIES:500 Days of Summer (a supplemental rant)

But there is one thing...

The gimmick of 500 Days of Summer has us bouncing back and forth through the 500 days of the central relationship, with each scene being introduced by a title card showing us which day this is -- day 17, day 483, day 129, day 6, and so on.

Three days during the movie are specifically identified as particular days of the week. Day 28 is a Friday; day 442 is a Thursday; day 500 is a Friday. If you do the math, you'll that those day-of-the-week assignments are mutually incompatible. That is, if day 28 is a Friday, then day 442 is actually a Saturday and day 500 a Monday. A minor thing, certainly, and one which most people won't even notice. But when your movie is built around one structural gimmick, surely you should pay attention to such details.

And how much effort was needed to fix the problem? Changing two title cards (days 28/31 to days 26/29) and one word of dialogue (Day 442's "It's Thursday" to "It's Monday") would have made the movie's numbering internally consistent.

It doesn't keep 500 Days of Summer from being a worthwhile movie, but it's a shame to see a movie that's otherwise so smartly written marred by such a lazy bit of sloppiness.

MOVIES: 500 Days of Summer (Marc Webb, 2009)

Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel star in a marvelous romantic comedy that leaps through time to show us the 500 days of a couple's relationship.

It's clear from the beginning that Tom and Summer are not fated for long-term happiness; she makes it clear that she's not looking for a serious relationship, but he's such a hopeless romantic that he either can't or won't hear what she says. But Gordon-Levitt and Deschanel are so charming, both individually and as a couple, that it's great fun watching them go through the familiar romantic comedy motions.

And there's no doubt that it is their movie; none of the supporting characters are particularly interesting or memorable. But the writing is sharp and lively, and the structural gimmick of leaping back and forth in time (though not nearly as original as the writers think it is) is cleverly used.

There are scenes in 500 Days of Summer that are standard romantic comedy scenes that have annoyed me immensely in lesser movies, but are handled with enough freshness and energy here to make them feel new. A happy walk that turns into a musical number with every stranger on the street joining in; the "what I expected vs. what happened" split screen; the embarassing drunken karaoke bar scene -- this movie gets away with all of them. Gordon-Levitt is saddled with a pre-teen sister who gives him romantic advice, and the writers miraculously make even that work.

An absolute charmer, and happily recommended.

MOVIES: Humpday (Lynn Shelton, 2009)

Ben and Andrew (Mark Duplass, Joshua Leonard) are old college pals who haven't seen one another for a few years when Andrew unexpectedly in town. The two are at a party, having had a bit too much to drink, when the subject of the upcoming amateur porn festival comes up. The guys decide that they should enter a film of themselves having sex; since they're both straight, the movie will be "beyond gay," and therefore an inherently profound artistic statement.

From this point on, Humpday becomes a game of emotional chicken. Neither Ben nor Andrew wants to be the one to back out of their project. Neither one can quite articulate why it seems so important, but it does seem to appeal to some vague, inchoate need for intimacy in both men.

There's an interesting story here, but unfortunately, the movie itself is mostly a mess. The acting isn't very good (Alycia Delmore comes off as Ben's wife, Anna); the shaky camerawork is hard to watch; even the music score is unattractive.

But the climactic scene, in which Ben and Andrew meet in a hotel room with a video camera, is remarkable. There's an intensity and emotional force that has been utterly missing from the rest of the movie, and genuine tension as they try to figure out what it means if they do (or don't) go through with their plan.

So there's the cinematic dilemma: Does one spectacular scene redeem an otherwise mediocre movie? Unless you have particular interest in the subject matter or the actors, I'd say no, at least not to the extent that you should pay full price to see it at the theater. Wait for the DVD instead.

BOOKS: Flashforward, Robert J. Sawyer (1999)

ABC will be turning this into a TV series this fall, so I wanted to re-read the book and get a sense of what's likely to be changed.

Quite a lot, I suspect. The basic premise will remain intact -- everyone in the world passes out for two minutes and has a vision of the future -- but that's about all. There's not nearly enough action in the book for TV, and the cast of characters will surely have to be Americanized, as Sawyer's three principals are Canadian, Japanese, and Greek scientists working in Switzerland.

The book is a fine piece of entertainment. As is usually the case with Sawyer, it's not so much about solving a "what happened?" mystery; we know the cause of the incident within the first few pages of the book. Sawyer's take on things is usually much more about "OK, that happened; now what?" And he's very good at imagining the consequences and ramifications of his unlikely event.

One rather remarkable bit of accidental prognostication (particularly amusing to find such in a book about visions of the future): Sawyer's novel was published in 1999, but it's set in 2009. There's a passing reference to the 2009 pope, whose name happens to be Benedict XVI. Nice call, that!

MOVIES: Whatever Works (2009, Woody Allen)

Even by Woody Allen standards, Boris is an unlikable protagonist. He's a grumpy misanthrope who's made it to the border of middle-aged and old without ever really caring about anyone, and he's convinced that he's the intellectual superior of everyone. And he's played here by Larry David, who doesn't have the talent to make Boris likable, or even tolerable. (Whatever Works was reportedly written in the 1970s as a vehicle for Zero Mostel, who could have made Boris a love-to-hate-him kinda guy.) Even if David had the talent to pull off the leading role, though, there are so many farfetched contrivances and unpleasant stereotypes in this movie that it wouldn't be worth watching.

The central relationship is between Boris and Melodie (Evan Rachel Wood), a runaway from Mississippi who Boris reluctantly takes into his home. In that instant, whatever credibility the movie had is shattered; the Boris we've met in the first ten minutes wouldn't take anyone into his home, reluctantly or otherwise.

Melodie, being a Southerner in a Woody Allen movie, is obliged to be a drawling dimwit; when we meet her parents (played by Patricia Clarkson and Ed Begley Jr.), they are, of course, fundamentalist Bible-thumping religious fanatics. And because they are Southern Christians in a Woody Allen movie, their religious beliefs are shallow, insincere, and transitory, easily tossed aside as they become sophisticated New Yorkers.

Clarkson's transformation from Southern belle to trendy artist might actually be interesting, but Allen's script doesn't allow her to show us that transformation. We're introduced to Marietta #1; Boris talks to the audience (a gimmick that rarely works, and really falls flat here) with a "can you believe it's been a year?" speech; and now Marietta #2 is on hand. Clarkson does a fine job with each Marietta, but since we don't get to see the transition, they feel like two separate performances instead of a single character.

There are a handful of funny lines scattered among the dreck, but not enough of them to make it worth sitting through the movie. Skip this one.

MOVIES: Moon (2009, Duncan Jones)

It's sometime in the not-too-distant future, and Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell) is nearing the end of his three-year stint as the sole human inhabitant of a mining base on the far side of the moon. Most of the operation is automated, but Sam is needed to occasionally repair broken machinery and to send the collected tubes of helium back to Earth.

It's clear that it's been a rough three years for Sam. His only human contact is with his wife and daughter, and due to a satellite malfunction, even that is restricted to video messages instead of live conversation. Sam is on the verge of a physical and mental breakdown, and though he tries to get through the days by adopting a Zen-like calm, even he knows that his patience is mostly an act.

Sam is on a routine run out to one of the mining machines when his rover has an accident, and when he wakes up, he's back at the base, being tended to by GERTY, the ship's computer. And things have changed at the base when Sam wakes up. There's a rescue mission on the way to relieve him early, and his replacement isn't at all who Sam might have expected.

The movie is essentially a one-man show for Rockwell, who is in every scene of the movie, and who does a stellar job portraying the various sides of Sam's increasingly fractured personality. The only other actor with a significant presence is Kevin Spacey, who voices GERTY with a silken ambiguity that marks the computer as a cinematic descendant of 2001's HAL.

This is not a big-budget effects movie like most of the science fiction we get at the movies these days (though the effects we do get are impeccably done); it's a slower-paced, thoughtful movie that asks the audience to pay attention, as some of its key revelations come almost in passing, and aren't explicitly spelled out.

Imagine that -- a movie that actually trusts its audience to think. It's a refreshing change, and Moon raises some ethical issues that I find myself still mulling over a few days after seeing the movie.

BOOKS: Watching What We Eat, Kathleen Collins (2009)

For as long as there has been television, there have been television cooking shows, and Collins gives us an informative history of the genre.

For the most part, Collins takes a decade-by-decade approach, focusing in particular on one iconic figure from each decade -- Julia Child, Graham Kerr, and Jeff Smith represent the 60s, 70s, and 80s, for instance. Once she reaches the 90s and the birth of the Food Network -- what she calls the "modern era" of TV cookery -- that approach no longer works, as there are simply too many names to consider, and no single chef dominated those decades in quite the same way. (I think you could make a strong case for Emeril Lagasse as the TV chef of the 90s and Rachael Ray for the current decade.)

The great philosophical debate that has always dominated TV cooking has been education vs. entertainment. Is it better to demonstrate proper technique and elaborate recipes at the risk of intimidating the viewer, or to provide user-friendly convenience at the risk of dumbing down the recipes? That tension has been present since the beginning; in the 50s, the sides were represented by the very formal Dione Lucas and the more casual Poppy Cannon, who believed that a can opener was one of a cook's most important tools. Think of them as the Martha Stewart and the Sandra Lee of their era.

Collins' writing style is a bit on the stodgy and dry side, and I occasionally found myself wishing that she'd let herself have more fun with her material. It never descends into that pompous academic style that marks the dissertation-turned-book, though, and it's not difficult reading so much as it is bland. But it is a thorough and interesting history, and I'd recommend it to anyone with an interest in the topic.

BOOKS: Losing My Religion, William Lobdell (2009)

In his late 20s, during a period of difficulty in his life, Lobdell turned to religion, becoming a born-again Christian. He came to believe that his profession, journalism, did not do a very good job of covering and reporting on religion in America, and began seeking a job as a religion reporter.

In 1998, he got that job, and began writing about religion for the Los Angeles Times. At first, he found the experience immensely rewarding, and enjoyed having the opportunity to write interesting stories about people who had largely been ignored by the mainstream media. But over time, the increasing number of financial and sexual scandals in various religious organizations, in particular the horrific sexual abuse coverups by the Catholic Church, drove Lobdell to a crisis of faith. His final piece as the Times religion reporter was a long essay in which he discussed how and why his faith had collapsed; this book is, in part, an expansion on that essay.

It's tempting for me, as an atheist who has no use for the superstitions of the various Invisible Sky Bully cults, to snicker at Lobdell with a hearty "Told ya so!" But I can't be that callous; Lodbell's sincerity, and his genuine struggle with his dying faith, are deeply moving. More than mockery, I'm moved to sadness that he wasted so many years trying to find meaning where none exists (and for the countless millions who continue to waste time on that fool's quest).

By the end of his journey, Lobdell finds peace and happiness, and looks forward to facing the rest of his life with a newfound freedom and gratitude that he has finally been able to abandon what he calls the "placebo of faith." This is a profound and courageous book, and Lodbell's willingness to share the process of soul-searching that he's been through is commendable indeed.

BOOKS: The Family Man, Elinor Lipman (2009)

I'm always happy when a new Lipman novel hits the bookstores. I think she's one of our funniest novelists, with a great character for creating vivid characters and putting them in realistically comic situations.

Our hero this time around is Henry, a middle-aged gay Manhattanite who suddenly finds himself reunited with Thalia, his stepdaughter from a long-ago marriage. Thalia was only three or four when Henry was married to her mother, and they haven't kept in touch over the intervening twenty-five years, but both are delighted to have reconnected.

Henry has, to a large extent, withdrawn from the world; he's mostly retired, and doesn't date or socialize much. Thalia's social life is far more complicated; she's a would-be actress, currently posing as the girlfriend of a would-be horror movie mogul who needs to be seen with a hot girl on his arm.

It all sounds like the setup for some insufferably broad slapsticky comedy, but Lipman's characters are so well rounded that their every word, every decision, every gesture feels real. I had been mildly disappointed in Lipman's last two novels, but this is a return to top form. Highly recommended.