Movie: Jane Eyre

Before the brooding Edward from Twilight, there was the original, Mr. Rochester. I read Jane Eyre eons ago, but there's a new movie adaptation out this weekend, and I love a good period piece. The lovely Mia Wasikowska (from Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland) plays Jane and Michael Fassbender plays the mysterious Rochester. 

And here's the trailer: 

The Distant Hours

By Kate Morton

 

I couldn't finish it. I just couldn't. Such a disappointment. I've loved Morton's other two novels and was so excited when I found out she had a new one coming out. It was just overdone and over-written. 

Hopefully she'll get it together for the next one. 

Check out her first two novels, The House at Riverton and The Forgotten Garden if you're looking for a good read. 

Good News/Bad News

The Bad

A certain national chain of bookstores is near bankruptcy, and many of their retail stores are shutting down.

The Good

I got some pretty great deals the other day on my lunch break. Most of the fiction was picked over, but most people seemed to forget about the biography section. Here's a list of the books I managed to score:

• Queen Isabella by Alison Weir
• The Snowball: Warren Buffet and the Business of Life by Alice Schroeder
• Marie Antoinette by Antonia Fraser
• Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood by Marjane Satrapi

I'm most excited about the graphic novel Persepolis. I've never read a graphic novel, much less one about a young girl's memories regarding the Iranian Islamic Revolution. 

                         

A Perfect Spy

By John Le Carré

"Sometimes, Tom, we have to do a thing in order to find out the reason for it. Sometimes our actions are questions, not answers. "


This is my second John Le Carré novel (the first was reviewed here) and according to reviews it ranks among his all-time best. I've attempted to read A Perfect Spy twice before, both times enjoying the dense prose, but getting sidetracked after the first few chapters. This time I pushed through, and was thoroughly rewarded - I couldn't put the book down until the very end (which is impressive for a five hundred page novel). 


Set during the Cold War, this epic book centers around Magnus Pym, a British spy and traitor, who has spent decades as a high ranking operative with British Intelligence, while simultaneously trading information with Czechoslovakia . The details of how Magnus manages to fool everyone around him are explored, but it is the slow building of his psychological profile around which the book turns. The reader delves into Pym's psyche: his ticks, ever-present ghosts, and his moral guideposts. 


Like my recent read, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, the book is partly an epistle. Shocked by a personal loss, Pym disappears from his family and work, holes up in a quiet boarding house, and writes a letter to his son Tom, attempting to explain his life and why he choose to spy on his own country. His letter gradually exposes his childhood and early years as a spy, as well as his conflicted relationship with his con artist father Rick. (In the Introduction Le Carré admits that Rick is based largely on his own father). Interspersed between Pym's admissions, Le Carré depicts the desperate attempts to track him down by his wife Mary, his long-time mentor Jack Brotherhood, the U.S. intelligence community and his Czech contact.  


Like Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, Le Carré is the master of describing the twisted art of spycraft, bringing it to life with his masculine yet lyrical writing style.  

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

By Mary Ann Shaffer & Annie Barrows

I read this book about three weeks ago for a book club, but it's the perfect post for Valentine's Day. The title may be long-winded and a bit confusing, but luckily this lovely book is not. The novel unfolds as a series of letters and journal entries (an epistolary novel for you English majors) between a London writer and a book group located on one of England's Channel Islands after the end of World War II.

The book is one of those rare treasures that is lovely and romantic, but is saved from overt cheesiness by being well-written. It also manages to work in historical details on the German occupied Channel Islands without making the story too dry or weighed down by data.

Workspaces of Creative People

From Flavorwire. Not all writers, but still fun. 

Roald Dahl

Woody Allen

Yves Saint Laurent

Writer's Rooms

My last post got me interested in writer's workspaces, and luckily one of my favorite websites has a whole collection of such images (originally published from 2007 to 2009). A few of my favorites:

Jane Austen

Located at Chawton Cottage, Jane wrote at this small desk next to the front door. From this 12-sided walnut table she wrote, Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Emma, Mansfield Park, and Persuasion.

Charles Darwin

This is the study, located in a village in Kent, where Darwin wrote his On the Origin of Species. It was also here he researched and wrote 10 books. Apparently only the most select guests were ever allowed inside.

Virginia Woolf

This room was created for Woolf's writing in a wooden toolshed next to her house in Sussex. Though it had beautiful large windows she often had to retreat indoors during the winter because it was so cold. Other times she wrote under a chestnut tree on a board on her lap. She wrote parts of all her major novels here, and it was here that she wrote a farewell letter to her husband Leonard on Friday March 28, 1941 before drowning herself in the River Ouse.

Sarah Waters

Waters, one of my 2010 favorites, admits she wants to create an amazing workspace, but all she really needs to write "is a flat surface, a computer, and a closable door." She says the world map is to improve her sense of geography and that she also has a map of London, which is used while writing The Night Watch.

Antonia Fraser

Fraser, the writer of Marie Antoinette: The Journey, The Wives of Henry VIII, and one of my favorites, The Warrior Queens, works in this study on the fourth floor of her house. It used to be her children's nursery, but once they moved out she installed the bookcases. She decorated the room like "an old-fashioned country house bedroom, blue bows, chintz and roses...It's all rather untidy, but that gives me a sense of security. I want my mind to be the only orderly thing in the room."