Kill Me review

I won't bore people by discussing this book in detail, as lareinemisere has already done so, and much better than I probably could.

Kill Me by Stephen White started out as the kind of book I find it very difficult to read properly.  That kind of book is a modern-day thriller, of the sort that is much more interested in plot than in style or character.  I generally find myself less than impressed by the writing, but hooked enough on the plot that I want to find out what happens without having to actually read the damn thing - which results in me skimming and coming away unsatisfied by the reading experience.

However, this one turned out to be a cut above those kinds of books, with quite a lot of psychological exploration of the main character's motivations, and not a bad narrative style to boot.  So, I read it properly and really rather enjoyed it.  There were a couple of inconsistencies that made the timeline a bit confusing, and I didn't ge the Jolie Borden joke (still don't - Google has failed me), but it was good enough for me also to be thinking about getting more by the same author.

Wall-E review

I do seem to have been to the cinema a lot lately, and have enjoyed all the films I've been to see - though none of them enormously.  Wall-E continues this trend - it was fun but not funny, sad but not heart-breaking, entertaining but not exciting, clever but not amazing.  As always with Pixar, the graphics and characterisation were wonderful, but it somehow left me relatively unmoved.

Maybe it's not recent cinema - maybe it's me.

Looking back over the entries for this year, though I've found three films I thought were excellent - two were old films I got on DVD (American History X and Driving Miss Daisy) but one was a new one - Charlie Wilson's War.  And there are several more, lighter films I've reported as "really enjoying" (eg Penelope, Definitely Maybe), so I don't think I should despair either of cinematic quality or my own