So, speaking of booksÂ… (mopsa’s romance novels don’t count) Â…after watching The School of Rock, Jason, Tom and I stopped by the bookstore. There were about fifty books I hadn’t seen before and now (of course) have to own or read. Of course I ran home and added them to my amazon wishlist.
I’ll just list the four big ones: First, I’d read about this, but hadn’t ever actually seen it–Orson Scott Card wrote a novel called Robota that was published in a large format with illustrations by Doug Chiang (who won some awards for his CG test / trailer for the movie–who knows when that’ll come out). The book looks damn cool, and I go in for that sci-fi illustration stuff, so this is a MUST OWN for me.
Second book: Steve Martin has a new one called The Pleasure of My Company. I didn’t look at this one as much as the others, so I don’t know if it’ll be good, but I’ll read it because I’ve liked everything I’ve read by Steve Martin quite a bit so far.
Then there was Bringing Down the House : The Inside Story of Six MIT Students Who Took Vegas for Millions I probably wouldn’t have even looked twice at this, except I was there with a guy who works one night a week at Barnes & Noble (Tom), and he said it was greatÂ… I picked it up to read some random pages in the first chapterÂ… ten minutes later I’d read the first chapter, and was onto the second. Seems quite interesting, and a compelling read!
Finally the book that we looked at first in the storeÂ… Al Franken’s Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right. Tidbit from Tom: I guess when the lawsuit was announced, the book went from being WAY low on the list of top books selling on amazon to #1 in less than a day. Anyway, I picked it up, and basically found it hysterical.
School of Rock was also hysterical, by the way. Way better than I’d expected, and I even expected it to be pretty good. (I don’t know why, given Jack Black’s so-so track record.) It had just the right balance of over-the-top trademark Jack Black humor, and feel-good movie ending. You’ll understand when you see it, but more people (I’d say 98 % of the audience) stayed to watch the credits in this movie than in any other movie I’ve seen in quite a while.