BigWords

I'm really looking forward to the Dr. Who special, but - having said that - I'll watch anything with Karen Gillan in it. Um. Yeah. Completely for her acting ability, of course...

Christie Malry's Own Double-Entry by B. S. Johnson fits with the theme of tabbing up the pros and cons of a person's life. It received a reprinting a short while ago, so it should be easy enough to find a copy.

Because the notion that Dan Brown does research has been breached in this thread, may I point you all to this list, and sincerely hope that the word "research" is not used in connection with any of his books again. Thank you.

@Poppyshake Guess I'm going to have to pick up a few more biographies of her. It was only because the book looked so much like the excellent Bogart biography (by A.M. Sperber & Eric Lax) that it caught my attention in the first place that I decided to buy it. I'm still on the outlook for more decent biographies - the myth-centric stuff is fun, but the truth behind the magic is much more interesting for me. As they deserve wider exposure, and people kinda overlook the medical advances made during the Second World War, The Guinea Pig Club deserves a mention here. There are a few decent histories and biographies about the emergence of plastic surgery, but the personal stories are much more effective than the dry texts about the manner in which the operations led to the wounded airmen getting restorative surgery. I suggest the names of all involved more than deserve to be on any list of heroes.

I've followed his career for a while, and it seems that his beliefs are overpowering his instinct as to what makes a good story. Being hit over the head with A Very Important Message is really annoying, and the worst instance (by far) has to be the not-really-an-alien-invasion nonsense (in the truest sense, in that it makes no sense whatsoever) of The Taking. I really do like it when he strips down the essence of the serial killer tropes, but recently he has disappointed with a string of books that serve to spread a message rather than entertain.

Star Wars, as nothing written by E.E. 'Doc' Smith is on the list and that is the closest.

Area 7 by Matthew Reilly. You won't be disappointed.

I've only recently picked up Audrey Hepburn by Barry Harris (a particularly shiny Orion paperback), and I'll get around to reading it before the year is out.

The first two Godfather films, Fight Club and Battle Royale manage to balance the adaptive requirements with a touch of class. Those films more than make up for all the thousands of horrible films which manage to mangle the source material and - in the case of Battle Royale - manage to raise the profile of the original text in the process. It really doesn't matter that a film adaptation is a complete waste of time and money, because nothing that film producers do has any effect on the novels. The worst film, in regards to the Stephen King films noted above, must be regarded as Running Man, which swapped out a dark, dystopian thriller for a camp, clumsy, embarrassing mess of bad 80s FX and cheesy one-liners. If you go back and read the original, it's actually a horrifically prescient tale which foreshadows the financial crisis, reality television, 9/11 and a host of social maladies which plague us. The film? It's basically Arnholt running around in a gaudy jumpsuit being spectacularly stupid.

Are short story collections allowed? I'm sure that the Ray Bradbury short story collection (the one that comes in in the cardboard slipcase with *all* of the short stories) would manage to guarantee a person fall in love with the written word. If short story collections are disallowed, then either The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy or something by Stephen Fry would be my next choices.