Reading in 2009

I've read 52 books to date, which puts me well below my goal of 75 for 2009.

C'est la vie.

But, as I was updating my book log, I was looking at my grade for The Lost Symbol, and it got me thinking about that stupid book all over again. (With the effort I have put into thinking about and talking about this book, I probably could have easily read the 13 books I need to meet my goal.)

I graded it a D. You may think this is an unfair grade, but as you'll recall, the book put me in a coma. I actually think it may be against the law to rate a book that put you in a coma higher than a D. But I'm not sure; I haven't read the healthcare reform bill yet.

Wocka, wocka, wocka.

Anyway. (Spoilers, ahoy!) The reason I started thinking about it was how awesome would it have been if Dan Brown had actually killed Robert Langdon when you thought he killed Robert Langdon? That would have been an upgrade to a solid C+. When I read that scene, I said out loud, "YESSS!"

But I wonder if I'm the only person who thinks it would have been balls-out wild for Dan Brown to have killed Robert Langdon. Because dude's a freaking professor, okay? And not an Indiana Jones kind of professor, either. He's a professor who drinks cat-poop coffee. (I assume.) He is not schooled in beating the crap out of bad guys, like Dr. Jones. (You know that Robert Langdon would accidentally whip himself if he had a whip, and then blame it on his crippling claustrophobia.) He could maybe race a bad guy in the Harvard swimming pool, but that's about it.

What I'm saying is that Robert Langdon cannot defend himself. At all. And yet he survives intrigue after intrigue, bad guy after bad guy. So it follows that eventually the guy's luck is going to run out.

I can only hope I'm there to see it when it happens.

Mua ha ha.

The Lost Symbol

I read The Lost Symbol this weekend.

1. I helped Dan Brown make all the money in the world. Yes, I bought this book on Dan Brown day, aka Tuesday, September 15. I went out on my lunch, and I was pleasantly surprised to see how many people were buying books at lunchtime on a Tuesday. Sure, most were there for The Lost Symbol, but I also noticed plenty of people picking up other books in addition. Anything that gets people to buy books is fine by me. I left the bookstore happier for it.
   
   
2. Turning points? I don't need no stinking turning points. I started the book on Friday, after Mr. H and I had enjoyed our typical summer Friday burger dinner. Mr. H was watching television in the living room, so I retreated to the bedroom to read. Around page 140, at 7:30, I fell asleep. And I stayed asleep until 7 am the next morning, at which point I was terrified to continue reading. It was obvious to me that I had suffered from a Dan Brown-induced coma of some sort.
   
   But seriously, I fell asleep because the plot was still being set up at page 140. How is that even possible? I'm not the biggest fan of Dan Brown's writing, but I never felt he had pacing problems before. The beginning of this book was, in my case at least, exhausting.
   
   
3. Robert Langdon is a snob. No seriously, he's a big snob. I'll let the evidence speak for itself.
   
   My note for this line read, "Robert Langdon is SUCH a snob."
   

   When Langdon arrived home around six, he began his morning ritual of hand-grinding Sumatra coffee beans and savoring the exotic scent that filled his kitchen.

   My note for this line read, "See?! Snobby snob snob."
   

   "Awesome!" somebody shouted.
   Langdon rolled his eyes, wishing someone would ban that word.

   Later on, I had a note over a separate line that read, "I would say this is AWESOME, but Robert Langdon would roll his eyes at me."
   
   
4. It's all mind over matter, right? Robert Langdon's defining characteristic is that he's claustrophobic, and yet no one can blame you if you forget this fact. The majority of the action in The Lost Symbol takes place in basements and the like, and yet Langdon's supposedly crippling disability only seems to come up with there's nothing else of interest to note. Seriously. The narrative would be moving (albeit slowly) along without a single thought spared to the setting. Then everyone would run out of data to spew at one another, and Langdon would suddenly realize, "Oh shit. I'm claustrophobic."
   
   
5. Information overload. Also known as infodump. Also known as a major issue I also had with The DaVinci Code. Also known as "STFU, characters. I don't care anymore." At least by me. Obviously, Brown's book rely on data and information, and obviously he needs to share that information with his readers. But it goes on, and on, and on, and on... Literally, pages and pages of information that I eventually started skimming, without detriment to my understanding of the plot as a whole.
   
   I mentioned this to Mr. H, and he thinks that people like this aspect of Dan Brown's books. That the common reader finds this interesting. Perhaps this is true, but I find it hard to believe that anyone out there wouldn't like to see the sheer amount of knowledge better woven into the narrative.
   

Overall, it was interesting, as I've found Dan Brown's books to be. However, The Lost Symbol is at it's core supposed to be a thriller, and above all, thrillers should be tightly written and paced. The Lost Symbol is not.

Gossip Girl: Daddy Can You Hear Me?

Reason number 8,448 that I am a terrible blogger: I like to let things marinate before I ruminate. I'm still thinking about Catching Fire, and I finished that book nearly two weeks ago.

But, television is a fickle beast, one that reinvents itself every week. So if I want to talk about television, it's imperative that I do so immediately. Bah humbug.

1. So now that Lily and Rufus are engaged (FOR REALS THIS TIME), Dan and Jenny are living the high-class life. For Dan, this means a designer wallet filled with hundreds, a limo at his disposal, and three-thousand-dollar suits. All of which, of course, he must lie to Vanessa about, because no self-respecting Brooklyn teen who wants to knock on Normal Mailer's formerly owned door could admit that, hey! Having a limo at my disposal is awesome!
   
   Vanessa gets angry that Dan is lying to her, and goes to a polo match to confront him. (I will never get enough of the social events in Gossip Girl. Polo? Seriously? Okay, I'm in.) But then she gets all righteous and tells him to go back to being Brooklyn!Dan, the Dan who was her friend. Which is not even what she was mad about in the first place. Lying is an acceptable thing to be upset about; Dan riding in a limo because it's offered to him is not.
   
   
2. Blair and Chuck, meanwhile, are playing games to keep their love life spicy. I have to admit that the original incarnation of this game--Chuck picks up a girl, and Blair plays the bitchy and shrill scorned girlfriend--amused the pants off of me. Blair and Chuck are the game-playing type, and it makes sense to me that they would do this. But then it all went to hell. Blair becomes convinced that Chuck is cheating on her--yawn--and becomes so insecure it was painful to watch. When Blair is insecure, she is supposed to be evil and conniving, not whiny. That is how her character has developed, and I don't really care for a whiny Blair. (And I don't think Chuck would either.)
   
   
3. I love Joanna Garcia so much that I want to squeeze her. I was so nervous that she was going to go back to being a blonde after Privileged was canceled, but luckily my prayers to the pop culture gods have been rewarded. Still a redhead! And a gorgeous one at that.
   
   Joanna is playing Bree Buckley, Nate's new love interest who apparently comes from a rival politico family. They spent an amazing, whirlwind, romantic summer traveling throughout Europe, never once learning each other's last name until they notice that she's a Buckley and he's an Archibald, thanks to those handy-dandy signs that are all the rage amongst chauffeurs these days. Bree and Nate immediately snipe at one another about all the awful things they did to one another as children. Now, I can suspend a lot of disbelief, but this is stupid. You meet a gorgeous redhead named Bree with seemingly unlimited funds since she's hanging with your van der Bilt ass full of money in Europe, and it never occurs to you she might be the same Bree you knew as a kid? Exactly how many Brees are there in the upper echelons of society? I can't believe it is a particularly popular name; I mean, who names their princess daughter after cheese?
   
   Later on, Bree divulges her secret: Her family has cut her off. Someone explain to me how this girl has ANY money to gallivanting around Europe, let alone attend Columbia grad school. (Because remember, student loans do not exist on Gossip Girl.)
   
   
4. Serena spent the summer partying it up in Europe, getting her photos splashed across every single tabloid that exists because her daddy wouldn't acknowledge her when she went to go see him. No, seriously. That's why. Home from Europe, though, the paps are following her everywhere, and she obliges them with show after show. She unties her top, she rides off on a horse at a polo match, she does Carter Beizen in the forest. (Does poison ivy negate herpes?)
   
   Carter's the only person who knows that Keith Vee Dee Dubs denied Serena, and he's been following her around trying to get her to talk about it. Because Carter is a semi-nice guy now. Serena wants to continue avoiding the obvious--like all of us do, really--and instead tells Dan that Carter is stalking her.
   
   Crazy, n'er-do-well Serena is my favorite character on the show (remember when she pulled off Blair's headband at Yale? Swoon.), which is a travesty since crazy-eye Serena is often stifled by stupid-face Dan. So I'm just going to roll with the whole, "I'm bad because Daddy doesn't love me," storyline, especially if it gives us more opportunities for Blake Lively to deadpan, "Oh, right. Because you're stalking me."
   
   
5. I've saved the best, the creepiest, the weirdest for last. Scott, aka Rufus and Lily's son, who shall henceforth be known by me as Dufus because he is Rufus's son and keeps making the stupidest faces I've ever seen.
   
   Dufus has spent the summer cozying up to Vanessa, because stalkers stick together. He persuades her to take him as her date to the polo match, which she does because she is oblivious. And also, because she is Vanessa and inviting some random along for the hell of it is right up her alley. So while Vanessa is busy being mad at Dan for the wrong reason, Dufus chats up his secret daddy. When Rufus and Dufus stand near one another, it's like the hair product scions weep with pleasure. It's also like they're twins, but not just because they look alike. No, because they're both idiots. Rufus offers up his guitar-plucking fingers for Dufus to shake, but Dufus just stares at him. It is the creepiest thing that has ever happened on a single episode of Gossip Girl, including the 18.5 million times Chuck tried to rape someone.
   
   So then Dufus apologizes for his creepiness by fangirling all over Rufus, claiming to just adore Lincoln Hawk. Which Rufus believes, because he is Rufus and can't imagine a world in which a 20-year-old presumably born in 1989 wouldn't be the biggest fan ever of Rufus's stupid band that existed at some mythical point where the 80s and 90s convened and had a baby known as the 890s. For all I know, the 890s happened last year, which would explain how Dufus has even heard of Rufus's stupid band. Actually, that would also explain Rufus's tour last year. Whoa! I just solved the Gossip Girl time-space-continuity paradox. WIN!

Conclusion: Everyone has daddy issues, though Gossip Girl calls this "transition." Riiiiiight.

XOXO

The Vampire Diaries

The Vampire Diaries premieres in two minutes on The CW.

I'll be watching, if only for the nostalgia. The Vampire Diaries was my shit when I was a pre-teen.

Glee: Showmance

I'm not quite sure how I feel about the GLEEK campaign. On one hand, I like clever wordplay. On the other, I'm pretty sure that geeks pursue academic studies and dorks obsess over pop culture phenomenons.

So really, we should all be Glorks.

Four of my five are lines from the episode last night. Jane Lynch is so hysterically perfect as Sue, the Cheerios' coach, it's not even fair to other supporting actresses in comedies this year. Yeah, it's September and I just said that. Straight up.

1. Jane Lynch: It is my strong recommendation that both of these students be hobbled.
   
2. Jane Lynch: I'm not sure there's anyone else who's going to swim over to your island of misfit toys.
3. Jane Lynch: Threatening you? Oh no, no, no. Presenting you with an opportunity to compromise yourself? You betcha.
   
4. Jane Lynch: That was the most offensive thing I've seen in twenty years of teaching, and that includes an elementary school production of Hair.
5. I was grinning like a fool through the "Gold Digger" scene. I could watch it OVER and OVER and OVER.w It was so cheesy, but I LOVE the cheese. Mr. H, who happens to be pop culturally lactose intolerant, was not so impressed by the musical interludes. But his heart has grown three times larger since we watched Lars and the Real Girl, so there's hope for him to become a Glork yet.

You can watch the full episode here. And I highly recommend that you do. Even if you were a little so-so after the pilot episode last spring (and I'll be honest here, I was a little), Glee has far exceeded my expectations.