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Year: 2013

The Books I Read (Belated 2012 Edition)

January 17, 2013 • • Leave a comment

I read a lot this year, but mostly magazines or to my son. To carry on tradition, if a few weeks late, here’s the list of what I read last year. I wrote about the first one and so it’s linked.

  1. Dark and Like a Web: Brief Notes On and To the Divine – NS (reread)
  2. The Swerve: How the World Became Modern – Stephen Greenblatt
  3. Invisible Cities – Italo Calvino (reread)
  4. One Stick Song – Sherman Alexie
  5. The Hobbit – JRR Tolkein (reread)
  6. Sailing Alone Around the Room – Billy Collins
  7. The Magic of Mechanics – Lawrence J Clark
  8. Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq – Stephen Kinzer
  9. Ancient Lights – Dick Jones
  10. The Happiest Baby Guide to Great Sleep – Harvey Karp, MD
  11. The Most Beautiful Thing – Fiona Robyn

I also read Good Night Moon, The Going to Bed Book, Little Blue Truck, The Book of Sleep, Kittens, Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? and Baby Bear, Baby Bear, What Do You See?, and a few others hundreds of times each. Those were, of course, the most wonderful reading experiences of 2012.

And did you know that in Good Night, Moon, the young mouse is on nearly every full room page and always in a different place? This is why I like rereading.

One More Post about LOST

January 16, 2013 • • 2 Comments

LOST ended a little over 3 years ago and with it much fodder for this blog and my personal reading lists. It was unique in television, I think, because the producers negotiated a fixed end date for the series, which allowed it to have a true story arc. Their intention was to create the TV equivalent of a Dickens novel, an author whose work they referenced more than once on the show.

So why this post? The past few months R and I have been re-watching the series and finding that it holds up well over time. As with rereading a favorite novel, the early seasons resonate more with the knowledge of how things end and the later seasons are more satisfying as well with the earlier episodes fresh in memory. It was a great show, and a good one for revisiting. We got to “The End” the other night and I realized it has one of my favorite endings ever, up there with Watership Down, another book referenced several times on the show.

The most exciting thing, though, was the epilogue “The New Man in Charge” included as a bonus item on the last disc of Season 6. It resolves just a few more island mysteries and completes Walt’s character arc, one of the few big unresolved issues on the show. It was also a real treat to find just a bit more LOST 3 years after it ended.

I don’t have anything wise or profound to say about it now that it’s all over and the mysteries resolved and island dust settled other than Damn, it was a good show. I don’t watch much TV anymore, a side effect of parenthood, but I do still watch The Office and Modern Family. Great shows, both, but it’s hard to get too excited about shows without smoke monsters.

Any LOST fans out there? Have you re-watched the series? How does it hold up for you?