Year: 2012

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So many books

I wish I had more time to read so I can make a dent in my stockpile of books under my bed. But then I was talking to a friend who made an interesting point that, given the finite number of hours we have, is it worthwhile to spend the time reading alone rather than hanging out with friends and family, etc.? So I don’t know, maybe I should just slow down my rate of book purchases.

I do kind of miss those winter breaks where I would just go home to San Diego and just spend hours a day reading. It’s satisfying being able to knock off around 5 books within two weeks. Maybe I can finish a couple during Thanksgiving break.

In the queue (under my bed):
Rabbit at Rest, John Updike (currently reading — almost done with the series!)
How to Create a Mind, Ray Kurzweil
Pas de Deux: A Textbook on Partnering, Nikolai Serebrennikov (this does not seem to help any)
Pas de Deux: The Art of Partnering, Anton Dolin (ditto)
How to Rap: The Art and Science of the Hip-Hop MC, Paul Edwards
Book of Rhymes: The Poetics of Hip Hop, Adam Bradley
The Bible (TNIV edition — still have about half of the Old Testament to go through)
Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell
Three Kingdoms: A Historical Novel, Part 1, Luo Guanzhong, trans. Moss Roberts
Meditations, Marcus Aurelius, trans. Gregory Hays
The Intelligent Investor, Benjamin Graham

There’s also a Kindle under there, as well as another one on my desk.

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Cloud Atlas

(possible spoiler alert per usual)

“What is any ocean but a multitude of drops?”

After reading the reviews and deciding that it would be worth a chance to see in theaters, I was very pleasantly surprised by the movie. Basically, Cloud Atlas is a more coherent version of The Fountain, and I mean that in the best possible sense. A very complicated film dealing with interweaving plotlines across time certainly isn’t unique, but it still takes an immense amount of courage and effort to pull something like Cloud Atlas off, even if it has its imperfections. And yes, I think the scope of the work here makes it a better film than Inception, even if Inception is a much more polished movie.

It’s true that each of the individual stories is not particularly deep or compelling: “The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish” is no One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, “An Orison of Sonmi~451” is no Matrix or Never Let Me Go, etc. And yes, the acting and chemistry is flat at times; and even the editing is inconsistent, at times jerky and hard to follow. The grandeur and sweeping nature of the story never gets lost though. I found it quite neat how the actors played different roles in each of the stories — unlike in The Fountain, where Hugh Jackman was the protagonist in all three narratives, Tom Hanks in Cloud Atlas is not always the good guy.

In a storyline this complex, it would be so easy to make enough missteps to cause the entire structure to topple, and yet it didn’t. What ultimately makes this movie successful, in my mind, is that it manages to connect the disparate stories together. Each narrative is a facet of the struggles and the joys of human life. The beauty of the film is not the individual stories themselves, but the strands that bind them together, the chords of humanity that resonate among them. It’s a treat to be reminded so wonderfully that the human spirit has persisted through adversity, tragedy, futility, the inevitability of time.

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Love this

Still putting off writing *the* post, so I’m just sharing that I had the most fun in a ballet class tonight because the substitute teacher (Annali Rose Clevenger) used oldies for class music. “In My Life” for tendus, “California Girls” for fondus, “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” for adagio, “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” for grand battements (amazing to have happy music here), “Can’t Help Falling in Love” for reverence. Seriously, why don’t more teachers use something besides piano mixes?  I couldn’t help smiling the entire time.