In reverse chronological order:
Super Bowl XLV (2011) made me very happy, because I am descended of Packers fans and grew up watching a bunch of terrible Packers teams stink up the league, interwoven among which were the Super Bowl XXXI winners and Super Bowl XXXII losers. This winning team also contains SJSU alum James Jones at wide-out.
True Grit (2010) was delightful. Everyone in it did yeoman work.
Heavenly Intrigue (2004), is a non-fiction book that posits that Tycho Brahe’s murderer was none other than Johannes Kepler. Every argument is circumstantial and they take a Discovery Channel like approach of speculating wildly based on very little scientific evidence, but there is at least some reason to believe that Brahe may have died of Mercury poisoning, and the excerpts from Kepler’s diaries paint him as at least an asshole, and possibly a crazy person. Still, the book was neither particularly convincing nor particularly entertaining, so I’d give it a miss.
The Chronicles of Narnia (1950’s) is very well known, and all I want to say here is that I read the books so that I would be caught up for the Dawn Treader movie, and was a little underwhelmed. There’s much more to say and I may indulge that impulse soon, but for now, I will remind young readers that it is foolish to lock yourself in a wardrobe, or I guess to shut yourself inside a fridge or the trunk of a car, if you live in present day America and don’t have a lot of heavy wooden wardrobes lying around. Maybe don’t shut yourself in one of those wardrobe boxes you get from the moving company.
Moby-Dick (1851) Starts strong and moves along pretty fast for the first 30 chapters or so, but gets into some weird digressions and becomes somewhat… overwrought towards the end. Everyone knows it as a story about a man who wants revenge against the uncaring forces of nature, and it is that, but what actually makes Ahab unlikable isn’t his mania, it’s his grandiose speech. That said, there is not a hint of whale dick in the book, which I found refreshing. I kept expecting it lurking around every corner. I’m sure that says more about me than anything, but since no one but spam-bots ever see this page, I’ll let it slide unedited.